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Jewish Summer Camps MAKING MACHERS.
When skinny Alan Dershowitz was a waiter at the Orthodox Camp Eton, he and the other waiters felt they weren't being paid enough and decided to strike. "At five in the morning we went and stole every pair of tefillin in the camp and held them hostage until they gave in to our demands," recalls the now-famous Harvard law professor. "And this was on visitors' day. At camp, I learned hard-nosed negotiation."
"There are two kinds of people in this world," says Cheryl Magen, director of Camp Ramah in the Poconos. "Camp people and non-camp people." Most of today's Jewish leaders, across all denominations and professions, are camp people. The lengthy list of poets and pundits, educators and organizers who had formative experiences at Jewish summer camps testifies to the powerful tool that lurks behind campfires and bunk raids.
Throwing around phrases like "living laboratory" and "total environment," camp mavens agree that there is something in the combination of mountain air, participatory Judaism and relatively few adults that succeeds in instilling lasting Jewish values while many other experiences do not.
"I came to camp scared to death and I didn't know why I was there," Magen says. "I thought it was some awful trick of puberty my parents were playing on me." It didn't take long before she made lasting friendships and came away with two months that were "Jewishly eye-opening and rooting."
For both campers and staff members, Judaism is naturally infused into a camp experience through music, prayer - whether three times a day or once a week - arts, eating and blessing, and even through calling activities by their Hebrew names. Jewish culture is also less subtly imparted through animated Torah study and Hebrew classes. Camp Yavneh, in New Hampshir, runs the camp in Hebrew and by the end of the summer campers speak Hebrew amongst themselves. "They even hung a vocabulary list on the inside of the bathroom stall,' recalls Sara Reguer, chair of Judaic studies at Brooklyn College.
"We did Judaism at camp...