This article was produced as part of JTA’s Teen Journalism Fellowship, a program that works with Jewish teens around the world to report on issues that affect their lives.
This summer, I will be a counselor at the camp I’ve attended for the last eight years. It’s where I formed my Jewish identity and my love for the community that Jewish values foster. Camp is also where I became acquainted with different opinions on Israel, from Israelis, former IDF soldiers and Jewish day school attendees to American Jews who grew up without a Zionist perspective at the forefront of their education.
At Camp Yavneh in Northwood, New Hampshire, I am tasked with building a summer of joy, learning and communal growth for the campers (chanichim). This is especially important this year, the first camp season following the Oct. 7 tragedies. Some families sending children to camp remain without loved ones, with relatives deployed across Israel, and in communities divided by partisanism.
Given the war, it is inevitable that Israel will be a topic of some heavy conversation at camp. To inform how I approach discussion of Israel this summer, I spoke with camp-affiliated individuals about their concerns and strategies.
“Everyone is coming into camp a little on edge and raw because of what a hard year it has been,” said Camp Yavneh director, Jane-Rachel Schonbrun. Yavneh counselors are coming from fraught college campuses, active duty in the IDF, and tackling battles over Judaism and Zionism all across the world.
Schonbrun added a training to staff week that gives counselors practice having challenging discussions. With the support of professional facilitators and social workers, the team will talk through approaches to Israel-related conversations.
A bit farther north in Maine, Declan Rowles, 16, will be working at Center Day Camp with campers ages six to eight. Although his kids are young, he still sees potential for conflict in any expressions of extremism that they may display. “With little kids it [discourse] does happen, just in a different way,” he said. “They repeat a lot of what their parents say and they might do that with regards to Israel.”
The camp, about a half hour northwest of Portland, focuses on Jewish culture, Israeli games and songs with the help of Israeli counselors. The focus is less religious than other camps. Rowles said that training on healthy dialogue should be a top priority during staff orientation.
Over in Teaneck, New Jersey, Batsheva Perelis echoes my own fears: She worries about how to create a fun and energetic camp environment in a post-Oct. 7 world.
“It is another added challenge with all the other obligations that come with being a counselor,” Perelis said.
Perelis, 17, began going to Camp Stone, a Modern Orthodox camp in Pennsylvania, as a young child and thrived under the counselors’ ability to make practicing Judaism a positive and exciting experience for kids.
This summer, she will be returning to the camp as a staff member and will also work at Camp Lavi as a counselor within their Yachad program. Camp Stone embraces Israel as a critical facet of Judaism, more than a secular or pluralistic Jewish camp might, and Perelis supports the unconditional love of Israel that the camp inspires. However, she says that “there has to be space for respectful conversation — talk about the other side and talk about Palestinian suffering.” Camps need to take a nuanced approach, resist group-polarization, and encourage conscientiousness during their pre-summer staff training week, says Perelis.
In the counselor training Perelis received, organizers discussed how many campers have had a traumatizing year. Increased sensitivity and more widespread susceptibility to triggers among the kids makes the counselors’ use of effective therapeutic tools all the more important.
Education and mentorship plays a large part in the programming at Ramah Day Camp in Nyack, New York, where Jonathan Korinman, 17, will be working. As a fourth-year counselor to elementary aged campers, Korinman’s role is to “drive forward curriculum that is coming from the camp and make sure the kids are having fun,” he said. Nyack is a Conservative movement camp north of Manhattan that takes a strong positive attitude towards Israel in its shiurim (lessons) and events.
Outside of camp, Korinman attends the High School of American Studies at Lehman College, a public high school in the Bronx. When the conflict in Israel and Palestine comes up in classes or conversations in school, he learned that “If you present your opinions as respectfully as possible, the sense of vitriol and hatred sometimes found in conversations like that tends to dissipate and be replaced with mutual respect.”
Drawing from his experiences at camp and school, Korinman expects that camps should talk about Israel in some capacity. “If they are taking a position that is very strongly pro-Israel, they can’t lay that base and not justify it,” he said. Some context and explanation needs to be provided for the stance they are taking. But, Korinman says, while camp provides a strong opportunity for learning, “it’s not necessarily the responsibility of counselors to ‘arm’ children with the knowledge to defend the state of Israel.”
Conversation about Israel is often divisive, especially in an environment which fosters curiosity and values diversity, said Elisha Baker. He is a rising junior at Columbia University with expertise in fostering dialogue and promoting education about Israel. As a former camper and counselor at Camp Yavneh, Baker sees education as a crucial component of counselors’ and administrators’ roles at camp. They have an opportunity to bestow skills and knowledge on the next generation of Jewish leaders.
“It is the responsibility of the camp to foresee that and prepare the counselors to not just be listeners, but be active participants, moderators, and mediators,” Baker says. That role “has to start from a baseline of literacy.” According to Baker, counselors should prepare by gaining more content knowledge on Israel and camps should be providing resources and guidance to promote this learning.
Camp Yavneh’s Schonbrun agrees with Baker that preparation is key. “It is important that we approach it head on,” she said. “If not, it [Israel] is going to come up, and it is going to come up in a less productive and less healthy way.”
Speaking with people from across the camp world, I learned that modeling healthy dialogue between campers is a critical part of what I will bring to this summer. As counselors we can help build a habit of openness and willingness to listen by applying these values to everyday squabbles in the bunk along with deeper discussions. I personally struggle with the single sided approach that zionist camps sometimes take when teaching about Israel. My aim is to approach the topic with compassion and humility, focusing on tempering my own knee-jerk defensiveness that so often accompanies conversation about this fraught topic.
I hope campers and peers can follow this example. We all come to camp from different schools and backgrounds, with different levels of observance, and diverse attitudes about Israel. Given the diversity of our community, this summer may be exactly what Jewish youth need: time away from the secular world; to reunite as a community despite our differences, and to flourish in each other’s strength.
