Hebrew, Yiddish, and the Quest for Jewish "Authenticity" at American Jewish Summer Camps, 1945-1979

In the postwar period, American Jewish leaders anxiously debated how to preserve and produce “authentic” Jewish culture, fearful that suburbanization, upward mobility, newfound affluence and the aftermath of the Holocaust all threatened the viability and integrity of Jewish life in America. In line with broader American obsessions with children and teenagers in the fifties and sixties, Jewish leaders, educators, and philanthropists turned their attention towards American Jewish youth, who, having never experienced life in Jewish urban ghettos, the kibbutzim in Israel, or the shtetlekh of Eastern Europe, would not come to understand "real" Jewishness through their lives at home. In search of solutions, Jews from across the ideological spectrum looked towards the residential sleep-away camp.

While Zionist and Yiddishist summer camps of the postwar period attempted to produce “real,” “natural,” or “ideal” American Jewish children through several methods, including forms of performance, ritual, politics, and the careful organization of time, the most popular of all methods towards authenticity was intensive engagement with Jewish languages, specifically Hebrew and Yiddish. This paper considers why American Jews, who had overwhelmingly embraced a monolingual, English-speaking lifestyle in the early twentieth century, looked towards Hebrew and Yiddish education in the postwar period in huge numbers, believing that language had the transformative power needed to create so-called real Jews in the American countryside.