At a Jewish summer camp in upstate New York, they’re giving kids digital filmmaking classes and telling them to leave their Nintendo Game Boys at home. In Georgia, a camp is encouraging face time with video pen pals rather than time on iPods. In Wisconsin, a camp has traded snail mail for scanned mail. As…
‘Please can we go to this camp?” my older son asked me after a parlor meeting in my town with the director of an overnight camp. “I really want to go!” my younger son said. I wasn’t ready for this. Sure, one could argue that when you go to a parlor meeting about an overnight…
Eons ago, it seems, when Boychik was in elementary school and not the towering young man he is today, we went to a Camp Ramah parlor meeting to get a feel for the camp where we expected to send him for his first overnight summer experience. It seemed like an obvious fit. We belong to…
If there is one thing I regret on my journey to Jewish adulthood, it’s that I passed up the opportunity to go to sleep away camp. Why do I lament this more than forgetting to fast on Tisha B’av? More than not spending a year in a yeshiva? Because while I was taking ceramic classes…
In addition to the kosher canteens and morning prayers, there’s another activity unlisted in any brochure but no less synonymous with Jewish sleepaway camps: hooking up. Ask any alumnus of the dozens of non-Orthodox Jewish overnight camps in North America, and you’ll get stories straight from an episode of “Glee,” with softball fields and squash…
Several years ago I talked through this dilemma with my therapist: I couldn’t seamlessly switch back and forth between mommying and working. When I was on deadline and working from home, as I mostly do, and in the flow of writing a sentence or article, it would be terribly aggravating to have to stop to…
Earlier this week, Stuart Nadler blogged for the Jewish Book Council and My Jewish Learning‘s Author Blog about casting off one’s sins and the stories that didn’t make it. His posts are being featured this week on The Arty Semite courtesy of the Jewish Book Council and My Jewish Learning’s Author Blog Series. For more…
Some are doing it to answer the first lady’s call to fight childhood obesity. Others are doing it as a way of answering the Jewish call of shmirat haguf, or taking care of one’s body. Either way, Jewish summer camps of all sorts throughout the country are increasingly focusing on healthy eating and helping kids…
במשך פֿון זיבן יאָר האָט דזשעף לויִס אַוועקגעגעבן צען טויזנט שפּײַזקאַרטלעך.
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