#this speaks to an increasingly pervasive attitude among the community

[whumpfish]

Let's talk scars!

I see so many posts about unprompted scar kissing/touching by caretakers and like. Not to be contrary but pretty much all of my whumpees would anything between sidle away and not be comfortable around that person for a While to straight up deck a person for that.

Avedis is the latter. She'll lightly swat someone touching her battle scars deliberately without her permission, but touch her Seward scars and you're getting a right hook to the face. The only person she lets have contact with those is Sasha, in a medical setting, and even he got hit the first time. And he's avoided them when at all possible ever since, because they're friends and that means respecting boundaries, not softly and gently stepping over them because you just care so much.

Molly honestly would be freaked out and wonder why such a "caretaker" would be so attracted to something she didn't want to be given and had to suffer to end up with. Why is this person attracted to my pain? she would wonder. Why do they find the artefacts of my torture so specifically adorable? And she would never trust or feel comfortable around that person again. She has a lot of scars, and a lot of friends and the occasional partner. She's fairly physically affectionate and doesn't have her sister's Fight response to her scars from that particular whumper being touched because touch is bound to happen at some point with how she shows affection, but she would not think highly of anyone who singled them out for attention.

Sasha is probably the softest whumpee (though he hates being called that, thanks Dmitry) I have, and that would freak him the fuck out. Unprompted pairing of affection with marks of pain is a Dmitry thing. He thought it was sweet when they were dating as teenagers, now he recognizes it as a display of ownership and a tool of manipulation. Maybe, maybe from a partner, with permission, but out of the blue? Especially in response to him being in distress? Nope. Nope, taking the nope train to Fuckthatville. Uh-uh.

Pityr has let little kids touch his scars because they are tiny and curious, and if they want to touch, then they're not afraid of him, and it's rare for people to not be afraid of him. He will draw a knife on anyone over the age of 10 touching them. He will kick away anyone trying to kiss them, then draw a knife and maybe use it. Moira never even thought of attempting that kind of thing with him (or any of her rescuees,) and she was basically his mom for decades.

Leigh would be offended at the "I love you in spite of this" of it all. As far as s/he's concerned, if you have to qualify it, it isn't love or care in the first place. Leigh values respect above everything when it comes to meaningful relationships, I mean hell, s/he knows Pityr's basically a serial killer and they're not friends anyway, they're friends because Leigh respects that part of him. If anything s/he has stuck by him because of it, not in spite of it. S/he also respects his trauma. Leigh often ends up caretaker to Pityr and the only time s/he touches him without permission is when he's unconscious and can't give it and needs to be moved.

Valor, bless his heart, is a card carrying member of the Straight Up Deck People Club. He whumpees like an injured predator. Probably due to the whole being a dragon thing. Neither of the girls would girls would take kindly to it, either. Not react quite that severely, but definitely be a bit dubious. Lily would mostly just demand an explanation, and Donna... honestly make fun of the person bc she has that dry sense of humor, too, but it would still be strange.

Even the canon characters from my fandoms with major scarring would not respond well to that.

I am begging y'all to think critically about how you write your aftercare. This is another one of those things where all the focus is on how much the caretaker adores and cares for the whumpee in spite of the ugly evidence of their trauma, and no thought is given to how somebody--especially somebody who is recently traumatized resulting in those scars--would realistically respond to being on the receiving end of such I'm sorry but frankly bizarre attentions. When you put all that emphasis on someone being loved anyway, it just underscores and reinforces the notion that this behavior is exceptional and special, and anyone else would recoil in horror. And again, the whumpee has no agency in this scenario. They are just a vessel for the caretaker's love and acceptance. 99.9% of the time, we don't see the whumpee's reaction at all. They just don't enter into it.

This is not a critique of "light whump," so please do not take it that way. I love light whump, I've written and read my fair share of it. It's great. It's also not what I'm talking about here. Light whump is what it says on the tin - whump lite. And just like more intense whump, it's principally about the subject and the object of the whump, not an optional side character trope. Even environmental whump is subject/object focused, because it requires you to at minimum identify and give some detail of the cause of whumpee's pain/injury.

This is the whump genre. If the object of the whump gets zero creative consideration relative to the person ostensibly assisting in their recovery, that is an issue, and not a minor one. Now, if you understand all this but that is your Thing and you wish to write it, have at... but I would respectfully suggest you reevaluate what genre you're writing for, and whether you might need to instead be in the hurt/comfort tag, where the caretaker can be the sole character of substance and still fall within the parameters of the genre. Just naming a character Whumpee doesn't make something whump if "Whumpee" is just a set piece.

[crimechannels]

By • Olalekan Fagbade We cant do it alone; CP seeks Traditional, Religious leaders’ support to end GBV The Kano State Commissioner of Police, Mr Mohammed Usaini-Gumel, has called for the support of traditional and religious leaders to end the menace of Gender-based violence in the state. Usaini-Gumel made the call while addressing youths of the Arewa Peace Ambassadors Forum (APAF), a youth and students’ movement, in Kano at the 2023 Peace conference in commemoration of International Day for Peace. The conference with theme: “Gender-based Violence From Religious, Western and Cultural Perspectives” was organised by APAF. Gumel expressed concern that gender-based violence was deeply rooted in the fabric of African society and increasingly affects many more individuals across religious, traditional and cultural backgrounds. “In our quest for a more compassionate and just society, it is crucial to explore these issues through diverse lenses, including religious, traditional, and cultural perspectives. “Gender-Based Violence is deeply rooted in the fabric of our society and increasingly affecting many more individuals across religious, traditional and cultural backgrounds. ” It is a pervasive issue that undermines the very essence of our humanity and keeps threatening the well-being and dignity of individuals,” he said. According to him, traditional and religious leaders have a vital role to play in ensuring cultural, traditional beliefs and practices to sustain the incidence of domestic violence are jettisoned in their respective communities. ” By embracing the principles of respect, education, and empowerment, we can create a society where individuals of all genders can thrive. “We must continue to address crime prevention, raise awareness, and provide comprehensive support to survivors to ensure their empowerment” Usaini-Gumel said The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the CP received an excellence award for outstanding performance in Policing Kano State. On his part, Sheikh Muhajjidina Sani-Kano, a Kano based Islamic cleric also got a special recognition award for Peace Icon due to his contributions to peace and humanitarian assistance. He appealed to women to always dress modestly based on basic Islamic code of dressing to avoid being molested. Sani-Kano also called on youths to always fear God and be ambassadors of peace. Also speaking, the National Coordinator of APAF, Alhaji Nura Ali-Abubakar, called on youths to go back to school and be advocate for world peace. “Education promotes knowledge,skills and attitude to help people prevent conflict,resolve conflict peacefully or creat condition of peace” he said Other award recipients are Amb. Surajo Dantata, Amb. Sunusi Musa and Abdul’aziz Umar-Ganduje among others.(NAN)

[riusugoi]

JESSE MCCARTHY Notes on Trap A world where everything is always dripping

https://nplusonemag.com/issue-32/essays/notes-on-trap/   A SOCIAL LIFE STRICTLY ORGANIZED around encounters facilitated by the transactional service economy is almost by definition emotionally vacant. 8.

TRAP IS THE ONLY MUSIC that sounds like what living in contemporary America feels like. It is the soundtrack of the dissocialized subject that neoliberalism made. It is the funeral music that the Reagan revolution deserves.

9.

THE MUSICAL SIGNATURE embedded in trap is that of the marching band. The foundation can be thought of, in fact, as the digital capture and looping of the percussive patterns of the drum line. The hi-hats in double or triple time are distinctly martial, they snap you to attention, locking in a rigid background grid to be filled in with the dominant usually iterated instrumental, sometimes a synth chord, or a flute, a tone parallel that floats over the field. In this it forms a continuum with the deepest roots of black music in America, going back to the colonial era and the Revolutionary War, when black men, typically prohibited from bearing arms, were brought into military ranks as trumpet, fife, and drum players. In the aftermath of the War of 1812, all-black brass bands spread rapidly, especially in cities with large free black populations like New Orleans, Philadelphia, and New York. During the Civil War, marching bands would aid in the recruitment of blacks to the Union. At Port Royal in the Sea Islands, during the Union Army occupation, newly freed slaves immediately took to “drilling” together in the evenings in public squares, men, women, and children mimicking martial exercises while combining them with song and dance — getting in formation. The popularity of marching and drilling was incorporated into black funerary practice, nowhere more impressively than in New Orleans, where figures like Buddy Bolden, Louis Armstrong, and Sidney Bechet would first encounter the sounds of rhythm and trumpet, joy and sorrow going by in the streets of Storyville. This special relationship, including its sub rosa relation to military organization, persists in the enthusiasm of black marching bands, especially in the South, where they are a sonic backdrop of enormous proximate importance to the producers of trap, and to its geographic capital, Atlanta.

10.

But closer to home, Traplanta is saddled with too much of the same racial baggage and class exclusion that criminalizes the music in the eyes and ears of many in power. The same pols who disgrace their districts by failing to advocate for economic equity find themselves more offended by crass lyrical content than the crass conditions that inspire it . Meanwhile, systemic ills continue to fester at will. It’s enough to make you wonder who the real trappers are in this town.

— Rodney Carmichael, “Culture Wars”

The pressure of the proliferation of high-powered weapons, the militarization of everyday life, an obvious and pervasive subtext in trap, is also one of the most obvious transformations of American life at the close of the American century: the death of civilian space.

Trap is social music.

TRAP VIDEOS FOR OBVIOUS reasons continue an extended vamp on the visual grammar developed in the rap videos of the Nineties, a grammar that the whole world has learned to read, or misread, producing a strange Esperanto of gesture and cadence intended to signify the position of blackness. In the “lifestyle” videos, the tropes are familiar, establishing shots captured in drone POV: the pool party, the hotel suite, the club, the glistening surfaces of dream cars, the harem women blazoned, jump cuts set to tight-focus Steadicam, the ubiquitous use of slow motion to render banal actions (pouring a drink, entering a room) allegorical, talismanic, the gothic surrealism of instant gratification.

Like David Walker’s graphic pointers in his Appeal, one of the key punctuation marks of this gestural grammar is the trigger finger, pointing into the camera — through the fourth wall — into the consuming eye. The very motion of the arm and finger are perversely inviting and ejecting. You are put on notice, they say. You can get touched.

A preoccupation with depression, mental health, a confused and terrible desire for dissociation: this is a fundamental sensibility shared by a generation.

Among other things, it’s clear there has never been a music this well suited for the rich and bored. This being a great democracy, everyone gets to pretend they, too, are rich and bored when they’re not working, and even sometimes, discreetly, when they are.

19.

IMAGINE A PEOPLE enthralled, gleefully internalizing the world of pure capital flow, of infinite negative freedom (continuously replenished through frictionless browsing), thrilled at the possibilities (in fact necessity) of self-commodification, the value in the network of one’s body, the harvesting of others. Imagine communities saturated in the vocabulary of cynical postrevolutionary blaxploitation, corporate bourgeois triumphalism, and also the devastation of crack, a schizophrenic cultural script in which black success was projected as the corporate mogul status achieved by Oprah or Jay-Z even as an angst-ridden black middle class propped up on predatory credit loans, gutted by the whims of financial speculation and lack of labor protections, slipped backward into the abyss of the prison archipelago where the majority poor remained. Imagine, then, the colonization of space, time, and most importantly cultural capital by the socially mediated system of images called the internet. Imagine finally a vast supply of cheap guns flooding neighborhoods already struggling to stay alive. What would the music of such a convergence sound like?

TRAP IS A FORM OF soft power that takes the resources of the black underclass (raw talent, charisma, endurance, persistence, improvisation, dexterity, adaptability, beauty) and uses them to change the attitudes, behaviors, and preferences of others, usually by making them admit they desire and admire those same things and will pay good money to share vicariously in even a collateral showering from below.

A SOCIAL LIFE STRICTLY ORGANIZED around encounters facilitated by the transactional service economy is almost by definition emotionally vacant.

The grand years of the Obama masque, the glamor and pageantry of Ebony Camelot, is closed. Les jeux sont faits. The echo of black resistance ringing as a choral reminder to hold out is all that stands between a stunned population and raw power, unmasked, wielding its cold hand over all.

The deep patterns of the funeral drill, the bellicose drill, the celebratory drill overlay each other like a sonic cage, a crackling sound like a long steel mesh ensnaring lives, very young lives, that cry out and insist on being heard, insist on telling their story, even as the way they tell it all but ensures the nation’s continued neglect and fundamental contempt for their condition.

TRAP IS INVESTED in a mode of dirty realism. It is likely the only literature that will capture the structure of feeling of the period in which it was produced, and it is certainly the only American literature of any kind that can truly claim to have a popular following across all races and classes. Points of reference are recyclable but relatable, titillating yet boring, trivial and très chic — much like cable television. Sports, movies, comedy, drugs, Scarface, reality TV, food, trash education, bad housing: the fusion core of endless momentum that radiates out from an efficient capitalist order distributing itself across a crumbling and degraded social fabric, all the while reproducing and even amplifying the underlying class, racial, and sexual tensions that are riven through it.

“When young black males labor in the plantation of misogyny and sexism to produce gangsta rap, white supremacist capitalist patriarchy approves the violence and materially rewards them. Far from being an expression of their “manhood,” it is an expression of their own subjugation and humiliation by more powerful, less visible forces of patriarchal gangsterism. They give voice to the brutal, raw anger and rage against women that it is taboo for “civilized” adult men to speak.”

— bell hooks, Outlaw Culture

THE EMO TRAP OF LIL UZI VERT, his very name threading the needle between the cute, the odd, and the angry, might be thought, given his Green Day–punk styling and soft-suburban patina, to be less invested in the kind of misogynistic baiting so common to trap. But this is not the case. Like the unofficial color-line law that says the main video girl in any rap video must be of a lighter skin tone than the rapper she is fawning over, there is a perverse law by which the more one’s identity is susceptible to accusations of “softness” (i.e., lack of street cred), the more one is inclined to compensate by deliberate hyperbolic assertions of one’s dominance over the other sex.

THE QUIRKY PARTICLES coming out of the cultural supercollider of trap prove the unregulated freedom of that space: that in spite of its ferocious and often contradictory claims, nothing is settled about its direction or meaning. The hard-nosed but unabashedly queer presence of Young M.A; the celebratory alt-feminist crunk of Princess Nokia; the quirky punkish R&B inflection in DeJ Loaf; the Bronx bombshell of Cardi B: to say that they are just occupying the space formerly dominated by the boys doesn’t quite cut it. They are completely changing the coordinates and creating models no one dared to foresee. The rise of the female trap star is no longer in question; an entire wave of talent is coming up fast and the skew that they will bring to the sexual and gender politics of popular culture will scramble and recode the norms of an earlier era in ways that could prove explosive in the context of increasingly desperate reactionary and progressive battles for hearts and minds.

The boys are not quite what they were before, either. Bobby Shmurda’s path to “Hot Nigga,” before landing him in prison, landed him on the charts in no small part because of his dance, his fearless self-embrace, and his self-love breaking out in full view of his entire crew. People sometimes forget that for the latter half of the Nineties and the early Aughts, dancing for a “real one” was a nonstarter. Now crews from every high school across the country compete to make viral videos of gorgeous dance routines to accompany the release of a new single. The old heads who grumble about “mumble rap” may not care for dancing, but the suppression of it as a marker of authentic masculinity was the worst thing about an otherwise great era for black music. Its restoration is one of the few universally positive values currently being regifted to the culture by trap.

(sobre Young Thug) The music critic for the Washington Post writes that “if he lived inside a comic book, his speech balloons would be filled with Jackson Pollock splatters,” which is halfway there (why not Basquiat?). Thugger is more exciting than Pollock, who never wore a garment described by Billboard as “geisha couture meets Mortal Kombat’s Raiden” that started a national conversation. Thugger’s work is edgier, riskier, sans white box; if anything it is closer to Warhol in coloration, pop art without the pretension. It is loved, admired, hated, and feared by people who have never and may never set foot in a museum of “modern art.”

THE PROBLEM OF THE overdetermination of blackness by way of its representation in music — its tar baby–like way of standing in for (and being asked to stand in for) any number of roles that seem incongruous and disingenuous to impose upon it — is the central concern of Dear Angel of Death, by the poet Simone White. Her target is the dominantly male tradition in black literary criticism and its reliance on a mode of self-authorization that passes through a cultivated insider’s knowledge of “the Music,” which is generically meant to encompass all forms of black musical expression, but in practice almost always refers to a canonical set of figures in jazz. It’s clear that she’s right, also clear that it’s a case of emperors with no clothes. It may have been obvious, but no one had the courage to say so. Take these notes on trap, for example: they neatly confirm her thesis, and fare no better under her sharp dissection.

Let’s be clear: White’s larger point stands. Looking to trap music to prepare the groundwork for revolution or any emancipatory project is delusional and, moreover, deaf. If we start from the premise that trap is not any of these things, is quite emphatically (pace J. Cole) the final nail in the coffin of the whole project of “conscious” rap, then the question becomes what is it for, what will it make possible. Not necessarily for good or ill, but in the sense of illumination: What does it allow us to see, or to describe, that we haven’t yet made transparent to our own sense of the coming world? For whatever the case may be, the future shape of mass culture will look and feel more like trap than like anything else we can currently point to. In this sense, White is showing us the way forward. By insisting that we abandon any bullshit promise or pseudopolitics, the project of a force that is seeping into the fabric of our mental and social lives will become more precise, more potent as a sensibility for us to try and communicate to ourselves and to others.

34.

TRAP IS WHAT GIORGIO AGAMBEN calls, in The Use of Bodies, “a form-of-life.” As it’s lived, the form-of-life is first and foremost a psychology, a worldview (viz. Fanon) framed by the inscription of the body in space. Where you come from. It never ceases to amaze how relentlessly black artists — completely unlike white artists, who never seem to come from anywhere in their music — assert with extraordinary specificity where they’re from, where they rep, often down to city, zip code, usually neighborhood, sometimes to the block. Boundedness produces genealogy, the authority of a defined experience. But this experience turns out to be ontology. All these blocks, all these hoods, from Oakland to Brooklyn, from Compton to Broward County, are effectively the same: they are the hood, the gutter, the mud, the trap, the slaughterhouse, the underbucket. Trappers, like rappers before them, give coordinates that tell you where they’re coming from in both senses. I’m from this hood, but all hoods are the hood, and so I speak for all, I speak of ontology — a form-of-life.

the force of our vernacular culture formed under slavery is the connection born principally in music, but also in the Word, in all of its manifold uses, that believes in its own power. That self-authorizes and liberates from within. This excessive and exceptional relation is misunderstood, often intentionally. Black culture isn’t “magic” because of some deistic proximity of black people to the universe. Slavers had their cargo dance on deck to keep them limber for the auction block. The magic was born out of a unique historical and material experience in world history, one that no other group of people underwent and survived for so long and in such intimate proximity to the main engines of modernity.

One result of this is that black Americans believe in the power of music, a music without and before instruments, let alone opera houses, music that lives in the kinship of voice with voice, the holler that will raise the dead, the power of the Word, in a way that many other people by and large no longer do — or only when it is confined to the strictly religious realm. Classical European music retained its greatness as long as it retained its connection to the sacred. Now that it’s gone, all that’s left is glassy prettiness; a Bach isn’t possible.

The people who make music out of this form-of-life are the last ones in America to care for tragic art. Next to the black American underclass, the vast majority of contemporary art carries on as sentimental drivel, middlebrow fantasy television, investment baubles for plutocrats, a game of drones.

Coda: What is the ultimate trap statement?

Gucci Mane: “I’m a trappa slash rappa but a full-time G

[garywonghc]

Accepting the Unacceptable

by Traleg Kyabgon Rinpoche

Over the last century or so, death has been becoming increasingly institutionalised and removed from immediate experience. It is no longer a common experience in concrete terms. Where people used to die at home in the past, this is no longer the case, and the usual gathering of relatives and family no longer takes place spontaneously. It is no longer a communal affair, but on the contrary, it is hidden from public view, resulting in less actual contact with death and dying. Perversely, the literature on death and dying has been growing considerably, and people are actually talking about it more and more, while handling the practical fact less and less. The irony of this situation is described by Ray Anderson, a Christian theologian, in his book Theology, Death, and Dying:

There is then a fundamental ambivalence about death for the contemporary person. Death has been pushed out of sight and out of the context of daily life. No longer is death itself a meaningful ritual of family or social life. Yet, there is the emergence of a quite specific awareness of death as an existential concern quite apart from the event of death itself.

Strangely enough, awareness of death in the form of the psychological effects of death as a condition of life has grown in inverse proportion to the silence concerning death itself. Where death was once the unspoken word that accompanied communion with and commitment to the dead as a ritual of public and community life, there was virtually no literature on death and dying.

In contemporary Western society, it is quite the opposite now, with one author stating that he has reviewed over 800 books on death and dying and has more than 2,000 articles on the subject in his files. Overall, there is much more talk about death and dying and far less immediate experience of it, in terms of actually handling those who are dying, or having to witness death. We see a lot of simulated death on television and so on, but as a rule, we have very little immediate contact with it compared with people living in developing countries, or in the past.

For all these reasons — the ever-present fear of death and our lack of contact with it — it is all the more important to have a proper encounter with the facts of death and to deal with the fear of death, because, from the Buddhist point of view, coming to terms with death is part of making our life worthwhile and meaningful. Death and life are not seen as completely separate and opposed, but as giving rise to each other. They coexist in a complementary fashion. For Buddhists, the aim is not to conquer death but to come to accept it and familiarise ourselves with our own sense of mortality and impermanence.

According to Buddhism, we die because we are a product of causes and conditions (pratityasamutpada in Sanksrit). Whatever is caused is impermanent, is subject to decay, to death. Human beings are not exempt, as it is a natural process. Life without death is impossible, and vice versa, and therefore the ultimate aim of Buddhist practice incorporates an acceptance of death and a cultivation of an attitude that does not reject it as something ugly and menacing that steals our life away, and thus something to be pushed aside and ignored. Nor does a Buddhist think of living forever. The Buddhist view is that everything is transient and impermanent, and so death and life are inseparably bound up with each other, at all times in fact, even while we live, as the aging process itself is viewed as a part of the dying process.

There is the famous story of the Buddha’s being approached by a mother carrying her dead baby in her arms. She pleads with the Buddha: “You are an enlightened being; you must have all these extraordinary powers, so I want you to bring my child back to life.” The Buddha says, “All right, I’ll do this for you if you’ll do one thing for me first.” “I’ll do anything,” she replied. He responds, “I want you to go around and knock on all the doors of this town and ask each person who comes to the door whether he or she had anyone die in his or her family, and if he or she says no, then ask him or her to give you a sesame seed.” The woman knocks on every door she can, and returns empty-handed, saying to the Buddha, “I don’t want you to bring back my child now. I understand what you are trying to teach me.” The lesson here is that death is all-pervasive and not something that happens, sometimes, to particular people, but it happens to every one of us. Knowing this can lessen the sting of the fear of death. It is analogous to people sharing some kind of psychological or personal problem. Eventually everyone starts to open up and talk to others with similar problems, realising essentially that we are all experiencing the same thing. In this way, the problem becomes diffused. The Buddha’s point to the grieving mother, that everybody dies, is compassionate because to think “my child, my child, he has died, I want him back” is to narrow our focus in such a way as to generate an enormous personal problem. It is better to think of all the mothers that have lost children and experienced the same grief, whereby it becomes more encompassing. The problem moves beyond the personal into something much wider.

In terms of karma, it is an interesting question from a Buddhist point of view to ask if our death is in a way predetermined. In some ways, it is feasible to say that there is a preordained time to die, as our karma determines it. When the time to die arrives, we then die. This would be a result of our karma. On the other hand, our death is also dependent on a lot of causes and conditions, so it is not preordained in that sense. So it is predetermined in one sense and not so in another. Following form this, it is quite expected that Buddhists, if unwell, would seek medical attention and remedies, or go to the hospital if necessary. They would not simply acquiesce and say, “Well it must be my karma to die now,” and do nothing about the situation, for the time may very well not have come yet, so to speak: and if they are not careful, because of the causes and conditions set in motion, they might die before they need to. Even so, at times, no matter what we do in order to live, it will become impossible to do so.

People do not fear just eternal pain and suffering in hell, but extinction, not being around, not existing. This thought is very much disturbing in itself for many people, and so the removal of the idea of hell will not alleviate the fear of death itself. We have a fear of death, as do other creatures, but from a Buddhist view, ours is intimately linked to our notion of a self. While meditation or contemplation on death can be very confronting initially, we will be far better off for doing it than not, precisely because the fear of death is always there, underlying everything. The fundamental sense of anxiety is always there, so it is better to bring it to the fore and deal with it than suspend consideration, because it will continue to influence our life, often in a negative way, if ignored. We must remember, too, that this type of practice is done in the context of other Buddhist practices, which are all designed to incorporate and process the full range of negativities in the mind.

It is sometimes thought Tibetans have a different approach to death, having been raised among it perhaps, but the very fact of there being specific spiritual instructions especially designed for the matter indicates that Tibetans are no different. They fear, as we do in the West, not just for themselves, but they also fear leaving their children and loved ones behind, and they too wish not to grow old and die, or to die young, for that matter. Fear of death is all-pervasive and acultural. Everybody experiences it, but an important difference in the Buddhist tradition is the emphasis on working with that fear. Therefore Tibetans, if they choose to, have access to traditions and practices of this nature. Monks for instance, would go to charnel grounds, or graveyards, to practice and contemplate impermanence, which might seem a bit excessive to us. In Tibet the charnel grounds use to be in the wilderness, so they were a very eerie place to practice, especially on one’s own, and it was guaranteed to throw up all kinds of fears. Thighbone trumpets and other implements used on these occasions have horrified some Westerners, who have described these rituals as shamanistic, incorporating elements of black magic and so on. However, for Tibetans, living in primitive physical conditions, these bones had no magical qualities, but were merely reminders of impermanence, of transience. It would help them deal with their fear of death, and the fear of the dead as well.

There are Buddhist traditions, of course, like Zen, that do not have such elaborate rituals as are found in Tibetan Buddhism that involve mantras, visualisations, and so forth, and focus more on being immediately present with what is happening now, avoiding all mental constructions of what might take place, as the best form of preparation for the future, including the eventuality of death. The end result is the same. Both methods lead to greater acceptance of the event, and the ultimate aim is the same, which is to increase awareness and develop insight. In addition, of course, the Buddhist view is that life and death are inextricably bound to each other, moment to moment. The death of the past is happening right now, and we can never really see what is going to happen in the future. When one moment passes, that is death, and when another arises, that is life, or rebirth, we might say. Therefore, living in the present with awareness, links in a fundamental way with appreciating impermanence.

It does not matter how elaborate certain teachings or meditation techniques are, the fundamental aim is still to deal with immediate experience, here and now. It has nothing much to do with what might or might not happen in the future, or attaining some wonderful mystical experience in the future, because, as the masters have continuously emphasised, as important as the attainment of enlightenment is, it has to be arrived at through being in the here and now, dealing with present circumstances, not through indulging in speculation about what enlightenment might be. None of this is to say that we have to be practicing Buddhists to die in a peaceful manner. Ultimately one cannot tell, judging by people’s personalities, who will die peacefully. Some Christians die very peacefully, whereas others struggle; some Buddhists die peacefully, and some kicking and screaming, as they say, and some atheists die peacefully, and so on. A very mild-mannered person can become quite aggressive and obnoxious at the time of death, refusing to accept it, and others, normally obnoxious characters, turn out to be very accepting and amiable. We can never really say with certainty how anyone will react to death, but we can say that certain meditations, including those on death, will definitely help a person come to accept it more readily, although we can never be absolutely sure, and the moment may produce panic even in a dedicated practitioner. But if we know what’s going on, it is likely to be far less confrontational.

This brings us to the critical factor of seeing meditation, reading, and contemplation as conjoined. We should not be satisfied to just think about impermanence and death; we have to have the real experience, which comes from meditation. To read about Buddhism’s approach to death is important, but it needs to become an existential concern and to be translated into something approximating a real intuition or a real encounter with death. Following such a path will prevent our knowledge from evaporating in the actual experience itself. From a Buddhist point of view, so much depends upon our habits, and so thinking about death in a certain way helps us to get used to it, to become habituated to it. Therefore a real transformation has to take place on an emotional and intellectual level. Most of us have a fair degree of intellectual understanding of the facts, but that is really not the main point. A sense of impermanence has to be felt and experienced. If we understand it truly, we will handle all our tribulations far better, such as when our relationships break up, when we get divorced, when we get separated from our loved ones, when relatives die. We will handle all of these situations far differently with a truer appreciation of impermanence than we would otherwise have.

Knowing in an abstract sense that everybody dies or that everything is impermanent is different from experiencing impermanence, coming face to face with in everyday life. If we have felt impermanence, then tragedies are easier to deal with because we fully grasp that all is impermanent and transient and nothing lasts forever. As the Buddha said, we come in contact with people and things that we wish not to come in contact with, and we get separated from people and things that we wish to stay among, and that is how things are, in reality. Similarly, when death occurs, it may still be a very fearful experience, but we may be able to maintain that sense of awareness. Fear may still be present, but maintaining a sense of equilibrium is very important. Buddhist meditators may get separated from their partner and experience great stress and grief, but they may not yield to that grief so completely that it overwhelms them, and this applies with respect to their own death as well.

[bluewatsons]

Sandra F. Fox, "Laboratories of Yiddishkayt": Postwar American Jewish Summer Camps and the Transformation of Yiddishism, 103 Am Jewish Hist (2019)

In the late 1960s, a group from Camp Hemshekh, a Yiddishist, Bundist sleepaway camp in upstate New York founded by Holocaust survivors, took a field trip to see a regional theater production of Fiddler on the Roof.1 At Hemshekh, campers spoke Yiddish on a daily basis, immersed themselves in the literature and history of Ashkenazi Jewry, and commemorated the Holocaust through celebrating and emulating the Yiddish-speaking culture that existed before. To one counselor named Jo, Fiddler felt not like a depiction of the past, but rather "an expression of our life," making campers think of themselves "very much like the 'chosen people' … Watching the play, and more importantly, watching the rest of the audience watch the play, we felt almost as though we were in on a very special secret." The campers, who sang Yiddish songs to the play's "audience of bewildered up-starters" afterwards, described their "inescapable feeling of authenticity." Drawing a clear line of distinction between the audience and the campers, "Yiddish-speaking Jews … and Hemshikhistn" who saw themselves as participators in the culture on stage, the counselor contrasted what she saw as the authenticity of camp life with a mainstream American Jewish culture that was detached from Jewish heritage and authentic Jewishness.2

Yiddish-focused summer camps emerged in the United States beginning in the 1920s, providing immigrants' children an escape from city life and recreation among fellow Jewish youth. These camps generally adopted a socialist, communist or cosmopolitan worldview, and encouraged the continuation of Yiddish culture and language. As the use of Yiddish among American Jewry declined year by year, two camps in particular assisted this trend by doubling down on their ideologies and educational efforts. At Camp Hemshekh and Camp Boiberik, post-World War II educators shaped their programs in hopes of ensuring the future of Yiddish after the Holocaust, infusing the language into official camp life even as it ceased to be used for everyday communication between campers.

Much like the leaders of Zionist, Reform, and Conservative camps of the same period, Yiddish summer camp leaders also addressed more general anxieties over the future of American Jewry as they moved from cities to suburbs and became increasingly affluent. Camp attendees like Jo came to believe that the infusion of Yiddish into camp life contributed to their personal and collective Jewish authenticity in the face of these changes; Jews who attended Boiberik and Hemshekh emerged not only different, they believed, but better than Jews in the mainstream. Camp leaders thus merged their twin concerns—one regarding the future of Yiddish, and the other regarding the future of American Jewry under new, more comfortable conditions—into an ambitious project for their camps. They reconstituted Yiddishism, a late-nineteenth-century nationalist-linguistic ideology concerned with raising the status of Yiddish, as a tool for transforming American Jewish youth according to their adult visions of real or ideal Jewishness.

Some scholars of American Jewish history have chronicled the rise of Reform and Conservative camping movements, highlighting how these movements transformed Jewish camping to match their particular visions of an intelligent and capable lay leadership.3 Others have centered their work on the Zionist camps, showing how these camps became "miniature Israels" where leaders promoted Hebrew culture and aimed to build support for the Jewish state.4 With the important exception of Fradle Freidenreich and Naomi Prawar Kadar's works on secular Yiddish education, historians have largely described early-twentieth-century Yiddish camps as incubators for camps run by more mainstream institutions later on rather than subjects to be assessed in their own right.5 Practically nothing has been written about these camps after World War II; the lack of attention matches trends in scholarship regarding postwar Yiddish more broadly. As Jeffrey Shandler argued, "more often than not, discussions of Yiddish culture terminate in 1939, 1948, or some other date, with any later phenomena involving the language either characterized as vestigial or not mentioned at all."6 Indeed, Yiddish did decline all over the world during the postwar years for reasons including American Jewish linguistic assimilation, Soviet repression of Yiddish culture, Zionist anti-Yiddish attitudes, American anti-communism, and the Holocaust. In America, the postwar years coincided with a steep decline in Jewish secularism, as suburbanization altered Jewish life, making synagogue membership a primary way to participate in Jewish communities, and as the Cold War created suspicion of secularists.7 Nevertheless, studying the details of how American Jews engaged with Yiddish in the postwar years makes clear that the language and its culture continued to play a role in American Jewish life, "albeit" as Shandler wrote, "one quite different from that of the prewar era."8 This article tracks how Yiddish summer camp educators altered their programs, goals, and ultimately their understandings of Yiddishism from the mid-1940s through the late 1970s in response to these historical circumstances and trends. A look at these camps' programs helps to complicate popular narratives of Yiddish as a dying language and culture.9 Yiddish did not disappear entirely from the American scene after the war, remaining integral to camps (including not only Boiberik and Hemshekh, but others such as Kinder Ring and Kinderland) and a variety of other institutions. At the same time, these camps do not provide a simplistic, fantastical story of Yiddish "revival," another pervasive narrative that is still contingent on the assumption that Yiddish is constantly on the brink of death.10

Rather than reflecting either of these extremes, Boiberik and Hemshekh reveal how American Yiddishists and their institutions struggled, negotiated, and ultimately transformed their purposes and ideologies in the postwar decades. Hemshekh and Boiberik's histories reveal how Yiddishism transformed to fit postwar Jewish Americans' needs. Associating with the movement then became more about finding identity and Jewish authenticity and about "saving" Yiddish in the face of assimilation, than about raising the status of the language as a nationalist endeavor. These camps also set the groundwork for Yiddishist projects and activism that continued well after their closures at the end of the 1970s. Boiberik and Hemshekh's renditions of Yiddishism, as well as many of their individual alumni, are deeply rooted in the myriad Yiddish programs, movements, and activities that continue through the current day.

Yiddishism and the Foundational Years of Yiddish Camping in America

To understand Yiddish camping, one must first understand the European context out of which the camps emerged. While writers and intellectuals had advocated for raising the status of Yiddish as far back as 1863, the 1908 Czernowitz Yiddish Language Conference crystallized the goals of a movement that writer and nationalist Nathan Birnbaum called Yiddishism. The attendees, who included prominent writers such as Y.L. Peretz and Sholem Asch, agreed upon three primary objectives: "The recognition and attainment of equal rights for the Yiddish language," "the advancement and dissemination of culture and art in the Yiddish language," and "the unification of the Jewish people and its culture in its language." The status of the language, these Yiddish kulturtuers (culture makers or doers) argued, mirrored the status of the Jews. Therefore, raising the status of Yiddish, whether through cultural production, political rights, or the standardization of grammar and spelling, would serve to uplift European Jewry.11 In America, Yiddishists found a leader in Chaim Zhitlovsky, a socialist philosopher and writer who believed that the future of Jewish "national" and "cultural existence" in America would be based on the furtherance of the Yiddish language. Zhitlovsky emphasized the role of Yiddish schools in particular, envisioning the Jewish American public "establishing [its] own educational institutions, from elementary schools to universities." These educational institutions would together become "the crown of Yiddish culture."12 In Zhitlovsky's time, American Jews built a formidable Yiddish-speaking public sphere, with theaters, movies, newspapers, publishing houses, and summer camps. But his vision never came to pass on the scale he proposed: at their peak from the mid-1930s through the mid-1940s, the Yiddish schools or folkshuln (people's schools) in America had roughly 20,000 students. Moreover, the use of Yiddish both in the home and in communal life declined in the decades following the end of mass immigration. The Immigration Act of 1924 ended the century of Jewish migration, putting a stop to the steady flow of new Yiddish-speaking immigrants into urban Jewish enclaves. By the beginning of the postwar period, a potent combination of factors threatened the language's future on a global scale. Although a handful of Yiddish organizations continued to promote Yiddish education and culture during the postwar years, and while European institutions like the Yiddish Scientific Institute (YIVO) arrived in America in the forties, the American Jewish masses did little to uphold Yiddish culture on communal or institutional level due to a decline in Yiddish knowledge, fears of accusations of communism, and the continued rise of American Zionism. Survivors of the Holocaust who immigrated after the war often spoke Yiddish in the home with their children. But for the majority of postwar American Jews, the language became an object of nostalgia and a postvernacular language, with Yiddish speech and engagement of all kinds essentially turned into performance.13 And yet the onset of the postwar years did not herald an end to Yiddish camping, a fact that reflects both the particular history of Yiddish language activism and the broader history of American and Jewish summer camping.

From the very beginning of summer camping in the United States, American Jews were, as historian Leslie Paris described, "particularly enthusiastic consumers of camps."14 Many early summer camps, founded in the late 1880s through the early 1900s, arose from the settlement house movement, serving immigrant and second-generation youth, many of whom were Jewish. In the same years, Jewish philanthropic agencies began to build camps for Jewish immigrant children, sites where Jewish boys and girls could become exposed to Progressive ideals among their co-religionists. Private camps also began to crop up at the turn of the century, serving mainly middle-class Jewish youth whose families had arrived in the United States a few decades earlier.15 Hebraist and Zionist camps emerged in the 1920s, as did Yiddish camps, basing their pedagogies on the theories of John Dewey and formulating parallel missions. All of these camps planted the seeds for what would blossom into a formidable and diverse Jewish camping sector.

Indeed, Yiddish language camps themselves, established by a variety of fraternal organizations, labor unions, and schools, were notably diverse. Camp Boiberik, established in 1923, emerged out of the Sholem Aleichem Folk Institute, a network of secular Yiddish supplementary schools.16 Led by Leibush Lehrer, the camp distinguished itself from other Yiddish camps in a few important ways. First, the camp had two "sides," one for adult guests and the other for children. Second, the camp was politically non-partisan, unlike most Yiddish camps which associated overtly with Zionism, socialism or communism. The camp also embraced Jewish ritual more than other camps.17 Indeed, most other Yiddish camps were founded by fraternal organizations: the New York Labor Zionist Farband founded Camp Kindervelt in 1925, the Workmen's Circle organized Camp Kinderland in 1925 and Camp Kinder Ring in 1927. (Kinderland was eventually funded by the International Worker's Order [IWO] after a divide between the Workmen's Circle's communist and socialist factions).18 Over the course of the twentieth century, the Workmen's Circle sponsored ten different camps, the IWO seven, the New York Labor Zionist Farband six, and the Sholem Aleichem Folk Institute four in the United States and Canada.19 Aside from their use of Yiddish, the programs of these camps deviated from one another according to the ideologies of the sponsoring organizations: Workmen's Circle camps promoted socialism, the IWO camps communism, and the New York Labor Zionist Farband camps Zionism.

In the immediate postwar decades, American Jewish camping entered a new era. More Jewish children and teenagers than ever packed their bags, boarded trains and buses, and headed to the countryside to attend Jewish summer camps around the United States. As Jews climbed into the middle class, parents had more money to put towards recreation, their children's education, and the luxury of child-free summers. Sleepaway camps, embraced not only by Jews but by other, mainly white Americans, fit neatly into this American middle-class way of life. In line with the American public's obsession with youth and family in the postwar period, Jewish leaders, educators, and philanthropists turned their attention towards American Jewish children and teens like never before. Yet Jewish camps bore an additional burden not present for other white Americans. For Jews, writes Riv-Ellen Prell, the Holocaust made the question of "how to make Jewish children Jews … a different, more compelling task."20

With this "compelling task" on the minds of leaders, American Jewish summer camps became more ideological and educational than they had been in the prewar decades, which was reflected in the changing content and intensity of their programs, as well as changes in their stated missions. As Jonathan Sarna wrote, "the crucial decade" of Jewish camping took place from roughly 1942 to 1952 when Jewish summer camps went from largely recreational to educational in focus, and in which a spike in the building and supporting of Jewish educational and ideological camps occurred.21 New Zionist, Reform, and Conservative movement camps opened their doors. These camps incorporated the ideas, rituals, and politics of their respective movements into their educational curricula and their Jewish practices, constructing themselves as simulations of what leaders saw as authentic Jewish lifestyles. Zionist camps fostered themselves as sites to role-play the authentic, strong "New Jews" of Palestine and later Israel, singing the songs and dancing the dances of "pioneers," putting on plays on the building of the state, and simulating the experience of illegal immigration to Palestine. In the Reform movement's summer camps, operated by the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, and the Conservative movement's camps, operated by the National Ramah Commission, educators sought to mold campers into future leaders of their movements by acting out models of their ideal Jewish lifestyles.22

Yiddish-centered camps deviated from this chronology: most of them existed decades before 1942, and most had explicitly ideological goals from the start. (Camp Hemshekh, founded in 1959 by Bundist Holocaust survivors, was an exception, emerging several years after the "crucial decade" had ended.) And yet they engaged in similar pedagogical tactics as camps organized by the National Ramah Commission, which focused much of their educational resources on Hebrew, and the more intensely Hebraist Camp Massad. Leaders of Yiddish camps also shared with the Hebraists anxieties over the effects of affluence and social mobility on the Jewish identities of youth. These concerns influenced the camps' trajectories and programs, making them more ideological and educational in the face of communal, linguistic, and cultural change.

The leaders of Yiddish camps also faced two specific and challenging realities: starting in the 1940s, fewer and fewer children arrived at camp with Yiddish knowledge from their homes, raising questions about how the camps had heretofore utilized Yiddish. At the same time, camp leaders came to understand the realities and horrors of the Holocaust. The Holocaust undoubtedly influenced Jewish educational programs across the ideological spectrum, but the aftermath of the war brought up particularly urgent questions for Yiddishists about the future of the language and culture. Without vibrant European Jewish communities to look towards as the centers of Yiddish life, American Yiddishists came to believe that they would have to carry Yiddish culture into the future.23 Their camps became sites for addressing that burden.

The following sections consider how two emblematic Yiddish-focused camps, Boiberik and Hemshekh, sought to fight against Yiddish decline in the postwar years. The Kinder Ring and Kinderland camps around North America continued to adhere to socialist or communist political ideologies respectively. Indeed, their continued embrace of these ideologies amidst rising anticommunist sentiment in the US make a full-scale comparison of these camps with Boiberik and Hemshekh difficult: few sources on Kinder Ring and Kinderland from the 1950s and 1960s are available in archives, possibly because they were destroyed. But these camps, according to alumni and the few available sources, did not seem to maintain Yiddish as an educational or ideological focus in the postwar era to the same degree as Boiberik and Hemshekh.24 Boiberik and Hemshekh, on the other hand, kept Yiddish central to their missions. In the prewar years, Yiddish was the language of Boiberik as a matter of circumstance. But the camp evolved beginning in the 1940s, becoming more ideologically and educationally centered around Yiddish. Camp Hemshekh began as an explicitly Yiddishist and Bundist project, incorporating these ideologies into each and every hour of the day. Hemshekh's founders aimed to continue (hence the word hemshekh, the Yiddish word for continuation) the Yiddish-speaking culture of Eastern Europe, inspired in particular by the Bundist youth culture of interwar Poland with organizations such as SKIF, Tsukumft, and the Medem Sanatorium.

While their origin stories were different, Boiberik and Hemshekh's struggles to defend and strengthen Yiddish culture took similar shape, and each reflected how Jewish educators revamped Yiddishism for the postwar moment. The next two sections explain how camp educators embedded Yiddish in the texture of camp life, as well as the particular challenges they faced in doing so.

Camp Boiberik: A "Laboratory of Yiddishkayt"

In a 1959 essay, Yiddish educator Leibush Lehrer, the director and founder of Camp Boiberik, noted a generational divide within the ranks of American Jewry. "Those who have ever been under the sway of authentic Jewish tradition," wrote Lehrer, "must have felt the disparity of some basic elements of Jewish and American culture, a disparity which has led to interminable conflicts between older and younger generation. An infantile malaise, deeply imbedded in American culture, that perennial and unquenchable thirst for easy entertainment as an end in itself and felt to be an overriding value of life."25 As Jews experienced greater affluence and social mobility in postwar America, Lehrer believed, authentic Jewish life would not naturally occur. Lehrer was not alone. Jewish leaders from across the ideological spectrum came to see authenticity much as Dean MacCannell describes it, as inherently "elsewhere: in other historical periods and other cultures, simpler lifestyles."26 Summer camps, these leaders argued, had the potential to counter the inauthenticity caused by comfort and assimilation by providing an immersive, 24/7 Jewish ethos. The summer camp offered unparalleled opportunities to mold campers according to camp leaders' ideologically-imbued visions of real Jewishness.

Lehrer used Boiberik to promote his particular vision of Jewish authenticity, forming the camp as an immersive experience in a mythological Yiddishland. Filling campers' days with Yiddish singing, dancing, drama, and language instruction, Lehrer and his colleagues hoped to both instill them with a sense of the importance of Yiddish and to give them the knowledge necessary to build Yiddish culture in the future. Yiddish took center stage in Boiberik's daily schedules, educational programs, and special camp holidays. The daily "Jewish hour" included Yiddish education, the music hour devoted itself to Yiddish songs, and announcements were often made in Yiddish. The yearly Felker yontef (Festival of the Nations) embodied the camp's embrace of a Yiddish-inflected cosmopolitanism mixed with Jewish pride. Divided into groups representing different folk-groups, including a Jewish folk-group and eventually an Israeli one as well, the campers performed ethnic dances and songs, and educated one another about their folk-group's culture. Tisha B'Av also held an important place in Boiberik's summer schedule, marking both cultural and physical losses in the very recent Holocaust.27

All of these Yiddish activities marked life at Boiberik as different from life back in the cities and suburbs from which the campers came. Moreover, direct engagements with the Yiddish language played a particularly important role in Boiberik's efforts to immerse children in yiddishkayt—a word both camps used to mean Yiddish culture—on their path to transformation. In the first few decades of Boiberik's existence, campers who arrived without prior Yiddish knowledge constituted "a small … often disgruntled minority" who typically left camp midsummer. With each passing decade however, the camp struggled with "the furtherance of Yiddish as the normal medium for the children's camp." Throughout the postwar years, Yiddish evolved from "a run of the mill part of the environment [that] wasn't necessary to do propaganda for" into "an abstract principle."28 As fewer and fewer campers arrived with Yiddish fluency, the camp came to emphasize Yiddish more and more.29

This transition in Boiberik's focus revealed itself in myriad ways, starting with the content of Yiddish educational programs. While learning Yiddish took up an hour of each day from the camp's foundation onward, lessons had once included advanced grammar and writing instruction on Jewish holidays and culture taught in the Yiddish language. Now, the character of the lessons changed substantially. By the mid-1940s, the camp offered more basic Yiddish lessons geared towards non-speakers. In 1951, Boiberik's "Jewish Hour" aimed for the youngest group in camp to "understand a few single words in Yiddish or Hebrew," and to name a few objects in the camp environment in either language.30 For the Mittele (middle-age groups), Lehrer hoped to teach a more extensive vocabulary as well as the ability to write. Each and every child at Boiberik received a "mimeographed brochure on conversational Yiddish especially prepared for use during the Jewish Hour … based on the principle of selected cognate words in both languages" with "119 sentences, employing 301 different words, and a specially-invented game which may be used as a methodological approach."31 These changes presented pedagogical challenges: in 1960, the Jewish Culture counselor, who was in charge of Yiddish instruction, noticed a problem with breaking children into groups according to age rather than ability. "Some of the campers speak and understand Yiddish, while the knowledge of some of the others is nil," wrote the counselor. "This makes it extremely difficult to find a common denominator for the instruction of the language so as to make it interesting to the entire group." The counselor then suggested "some sort of division according to the knowledge of the campers, for the purposes of instruction of Yiddish." Pedagogical approaches thus required continuous rethinking.32

Boiberik's transitions regarding Yiddish were also reflected elsewhere in camp life. Starting in 1945, Boiberik's staff began to collect statistics on how well campers and their parents spoke Yiddish, asking campers how many of their parents spoke Yiddish in the home, whether they attended a Yiddish folkshul, and if parents wanted to receive the camp newsletter in Yiddish or English.33 The tone of these surveys reveals deep anxieties among Lehrer and his colleagues, not only over the decline in Yiddish at camp, but how that decline reflected what they saw as threatening sociological trends. Boiberik's songbooks also reveal changes in the camp's approach to language. Up until 1956, Boiberik's liderbukh (song book) included both Yiddish songs and English songs such as "Coming 'Round the Mountain" and "Jimmy Crack Corn" in nearly equal measure.34 Indeed, in the earlier decades of Boiberik, when the campers mostly spoke Yiddish at home, the insertion of some American cultural staples was embraced, as it did not threaten the camp's Yiddish environment. However, by 1962 the liderbukh included only Yiddish songs, reflecting the intensified effort to bring the language into the camp as the campers' Yiddish knowledge declined.35

Finally, Boiberik's approach to religious ritual reflected Leibush Lehrer's personal anxieties over the shortcomings of Yiddish as a central source of Jewish identity. By 1936, Lehrer had begun engaging campers in Jewish rituals such as lighting candles, blessing wine and food before meals, and singing on the Sabbath. As Lehrer explained in 1959, since the teaching of "formal subjects" proved "out of step with the camp situation," the observance of "forms of the Jewish traditional rituals" proved useful "in the cause of bringing our children closer to the sphere of our history and heritage."36 The Sabbath rituals performed at camp often "were the first experience of the Sabbath for … many of the campers." As former camper Mara reflected of her time at camp in the late 1960s, "On Friday nights we filed into the Rec Hall to greet the Sabbath queen … Dressed all in white, we sang haunting, lilting melodies about the sun setting and the Sabbath peace descending. There was no mention of God that I remember. But it was quite an ushering in of the Sabbath for secular socialists."37 Indeed, since New York City Yiddishists tended to be adamant secularists, Lehrer noted, the camp's embrace of Jewish ritual caused controversy between the staff, parents, and leaders of the Sholem Aleichem Folk Institute. But Lehrer stood by his choice, believing Yiddish would not be enough on its own to secure the Jewish identities of American youth. "The spread of the misleading concept of secular Jewishness, as something divorced from religious feelings, ideas and practices," wrote Lehrer, "has led to the erroneous notion that it was desirable, or even possible, to have Jewish life based upon the difference of language."38 While Lehrer identified as a Yiddishist and upheld the role of Yiddish in Boiberik, he disagreed with many of his colleagues over the potential of Yiddish to propel Jewish culture forward on its own. Though the camp's embrace of religious ritual began before the postwar decades, the centrality of religion in the camp's efforts to maintain "creative Jewish existence" grew more and more pronounced as producing young Yiddish speakers became a challenging goal.39

In 1962, Lehrer claimed that "the conviction" that Yiddish "is an important positive force in Jewish creative survival … never weakened in Boiberik," and that the camp's "work with Yiddish … as far as our opportunities and personnel permit, was unceasing … [and with] no compromise."40 To keep Yiddish a part of their programs, the camp had to alter its plans, approaches, and expectations. In an attempt to control a challenging educational program, for which Yiddish-speaking and Jewishly-informed counselors became harder to procure, Lehrer switched much of the educational focus in the late 1950s and early 1960s to large, all-camp festivals, which he and a few other knowledgeable staff members could implement on their own. By delivering impassioned speeches as well as daily announcements in Yiddish, Lehrer performed fluency for the campers, keeping the Yiddish atmosphere afloat through the end of his long tenure. He remained at camp each year until 1964, when he passed away at the age of seventy-seven.

After Lehrer's death, the camp shifted further away from Yiddish speech, although the language continued to appear in the camp schedule, the names of sites around the campgrounds, the names of festivals, the songs campers sang, and the plays they performed. In 1967, a new camp director, Peretz Milbauer, praised the camp's Yiddish atmosphere, explaining that "after an absence of eighteen years … I have discovered that the excellent synthesis of camp life, athletics, and a cultural educational environment which is enhanced by an emphasis on Yiddish, both as a language and culture is still characteristic of our camp life." Nevertheless, the use of Yiddish did seem to change without Lehrer's presence. In 1967, a report on the annual Jewish folk festival explained that it was "of a slightly different nature this year," presenting "English folk songs or in some instances English folk songs that were translated into Yiddish," rather than just Yiddish songs.41 One alum from the 1970s recalled that the daily Jewish Hour continued to exist, but staff taught "Yiddish culture" rather than language.42 The amount of Yiddish spoken, sang, and performed differed from year to year along with the camp's leadership, which changed frequently throughout the late 1960s and 1970s.

Boiberik's staff experimented with many approaches over the camp's decades, as they reshaped their language ideals to fit changing linguistic and communal realities. The camp's original vision of Yiddishism, which had related to the late-nineteenth-century European context, transitioned to fit postwar American and Jewish culture. To keep Yiddish alive, Boiberik would not only have to immerse children in the language and culture, but also to teach and perform them. And to mold Jewish youth into authentic Jews of a Yiddishist type, the staff would need to use multiple approaches to achieve its aims, inflecting camp programs with ritual and performance. Yiddish alone, Lehrer found, was not a solution to the problems of postwar Jewishness; rather, Yiddishism had to be reformulated as part of a multipronged effort centered on providing campers immersion in a full Jewish life, with linguistic, cultural, and ritualistic elements.

Camp Hemshekh: "Shoyn der nomen fun camp redt far zikh"43

In the midst of Boiberik's Yiddish struggles and transitions, a new camp arrived on the scene. Founded by Holocaust survivors and affiliated with the Jewish Labor Bund, Camp Hemshekh opened its doors in 1959 in Liberty, New York, filling its ranks first with the children of survivors and then to others interested in Yiddish and secular Jewish culture. Bundist, socialist, and Yiddishist in ideology, the camp emphasized Yiddish culture from the very beginning as its core organizing principle, alongside a focus on the values of justice and comradery. According to long-time director, Mikhl Baran, Hemshekh aimed to "strengthen the children's knowledge of Yiddish and Yiddish culture, and their identification with the Jewish people," to "create within them a lively feeling for social justice … and to give them the virtues of comradery, solidarity, and cooperation."44 The name of the camp (Hemshekh translates as "continuation"), as well as signs around the campgrounds, relayed the message that the campers were tasked with continuing Yiddish culture in the wake of the Holocaust: a sign above the camp's stage declared "Let's carry the spirit that was entrusted to us."45

In line with its educational goals, Hemshekh worked to build a Yiddish-speaking atmosphere, inserting the language into every aspect of camp life.46 Staff members made announcements in Yiddish, and spoke Yiddish at camp-wide events and performances like the weekly Culture Night, which celebrated a revolving set of Yiddish authors and artists. During the yearly Hemshekhyada, the camp's version of color war, staff divided campers into two teams, each representing a Yiddish cultural figure around whom the campers centered their cheers, songs, and performances. The camp taught and sang Yiddish songs every day and performed Yiddish plays weekly.47 As an expression of its socialist Bundist values, the camp included work hour, arbet-sho, on the daily schedules, as well as a morning line-up called the khavershaft farzamlung, in which campers and staff would sing the Bundist youth hymn and Hemshekh anthem, "Mir kumen on."48

As an expression of its explicit secularism, the camp did not observe the Sabbath in a religiously traditional way. On Friday nights, however, the kitchen cooked a tastier meal than usual, and everyone dressed in white and proceeded from dinner to the weekly Culture Night. On Saturdays, campers ceased work, awoke to a breakfast of fresh babka, and wore blue work-shirts with a red bandana around their necks, a uniform reminiscent of those in socialist youth movements back in Europe. As one former camper named Miriam explained, "Shabbes wasn't religious at all, but to me, it felt different, more peaceful."49 Similarly, the camp did not observe Tisha B'Av, the religious day of mourning for a number of tragedies in Jewish history, including the fall of the Temple in Jerusalem. Instead, they created a day called "Ghetto Day," on which campers and staff mourned the recent Holocaust. Interspersed with songs like "Zog nit kayn mol" and "Es brent, briderlekh," the "Ghetto Night" presentation aimed to provide an emotional, tear-jerking experience to campers through scripted recollections of Holocaust history. The scripts began with the tragedy and losses of the Holocaust, typically leading to stories of resistance and armed rebellion, in which campers would take pride, staff hoped. The day's activities always emphasized the importance of campers becoming fighters like those of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. However, instead of fighting for their lives, they were encouraged to fight for the cause of Yiddish survival, every Ghetto Night play ending with the line, "Yidish zol aybik lebn!"—Yiddish shall live forever.50

Hemshekh's staff described the camp as having a "Yiddish atmosphere" aimed at "instil[ing] a love for Yiddish."51 But how much and what kind of Yiddish that atmosphere contained differed from year to year.52 Some campers arrived with Yiddish knowledge from the home, particularly those with parents who came to America as Holocaust refugees. The children of Yiddish linguist Mordkhe Schaechter attended the camp, speaking Yiddish with one another and a handful of friends.53 However, by the late 1960s, a sizeable contingent of campers arrived without knowing Yiddish at all, and the camp, much like Boiberik, had to forge a path for itself as an educational institution shaped by and fighting against Yiddish decline.54 The camp integrated Yiddish classes at different levels. For children who knew only some Yiddish, the camp created a "literature seminar where they read and analyze works," as older teachers from Poland sat with other campers on the porch and taught conversational basics, as well as basic reading and writing skills needed to follow the camp announcements, performances, songs and schedules. For campers with more advanced Yiddish from the home, the camp presented special Yiddish-only activities, mostly lectures from visitors from New York City—Bundists, Holocaust survivors, and Yiddish writers and performers—late into the night.55

The reduction in expectations for what a Yiddish camp entailed certainly disappointed some staff members. In 1965, a staff member named Zory Lermer explained that while the founders of the camp had had the intention to form it as a continuation of the Bundist youth movement's SKIF camps in Poland, the American iteration was different. While Hemshekh aimed to "be a synthesis of the spirit that led youth life in Poland and the material-based life in America," it proved challenging for the staff "to create an atmosphere that would allow us to give the young generation the traditions of Bundism, socialism, justice, and Yiddish culture," since "the schools and the streets, not only the goyishe [non-Jewish] but also the yiddishe [Jewish], work against us." The American campers, Zory found, reacted "differently than the children did at SKIF camps with the same methods" of education, and the staff quickly figured out that they "couldn't impose Yiddish as the only language at camp."56 Avrom Pat, a counselor in the summer of 1967, expressed similar frustrations. "It is easy to teach about justice and comradery when the children come from homes where the parents speak Yiddish and where they learn about these ideals," wrote Pat, "And in the first few years Hemshekh was really that way. But as it goes on, more started to come from American, assimilated homes, and in the summer of 1967, there were already very few Yiddish speaking children in the roughly 125 campers in Hemshekh." Sore-Rukhl Schaechter, one of Mordkhe Schaechter's children, emphasized her fond memories of her years as a camper at Hemshekh, but also recalled feeling that "the fact that I spoke Yiddish with my sister at camp did not exactly enhance my reputation, socially-speaking … they [the staff] wanted the camp to be Yiddishist, but there was no context [for it]."57

These frustrations became fodder for calls to action, which took place in performances and in essays in the camp newspaper. As one counselor, Sam Kazman, wrote in the camp newspaper, Di Hemshekh Vokh:

There is still the problem of learning and teaching Yiddish [at camp]. Singing may be wonderful, but it is not enough to be the hemshekh [continuation] of a culture all by itself. We may all leave camp with a genuine feel for our Yiddish heritage, but what's going to happen in ten or fifteen years? Are we going to become a secular equivalent of Reform Jews? If we can't learn Yiddish here, what's going to happen out THERE?58

Kazman's editorial reflected uncertainty concerning what Yiddish cultural engagement might look like without linguistic fluency. While he wrote that "the faces in the Hemshekh chorus, when they sing, are beyond belief, let alone description," he questioned if campers' pride and enjoyment performing in Yiddish was enough. "There are joys to be had in this camp," Kazman continued, "but no culture can survive solely in the smiling minds of people remembering their summer vacations."59 In hopes of inspiring campers to participate more fully in Yiddish-oriented educational activities, Hemshekh's staff presented campers with impassioned play scripts to perform and essays to read touting the value of learning, preserving, and defending the Yiddish language. For instance, a script from a Hemshekh play presented an imagined conversation between a counselor and a camper:

… But why don't you want to learn Yiddish?

I have too much to do already. Yiddish isn't important here. I'm American.

Yiddish is the language of our people. You're depriving yourself of a rich culture incomparable in the world.

I don't care.

The children of Israel today are abandoning their culture as those who danced around the golden calf. The commandments become the building symbol for our growing and beautiful culture, which Hemshekh is preserving in the present world.60

This script, ironically written and performed in English, framed Hemshekh as a place threatened by assimilation, where campers did not see the importance of Yiddish to their American lives. Using curious religious imagery for an explicitly secular camp, the play aimed to inspire campers to see Hemshekh as a place, perhaps the only place, producing a cohort of youth who could "save" Yiddish from assimilation.61 Hemshekh presented itself as fiercely ideological and committed to Yiddish and Yiddishism, weaving together the language and its culture with Bundist visions of social justice. One Boiberik alum, who recalled visiting Hemshekh to watch their plays, recalled that Hemshekh campers did speak Yiddish through the 1970s in public announcements and at times between friends, at least much more than their Boiberik counterparts. Nevertheless, Hemshekh's staff had to alter their expectations in regard to language due to changing historical conditions. Just as Boiberik transitioned in the years following the war, so too did Hemshekh turn more towards emphasizing Yiddish culture, inflected by values of justice and comradery, rather than Yiddish speech.62 Hemshekh did not send campers home as truly fluent Yiddish speakers, a failure which stung for many staff members. But the educational focus of Hemshekh indeed served a different goal. Through inflecting camp with Yiddish, Hemshekh managed to transform the language and its ethos into a tool towards immersing campers in what staff considered to be a more authentic form of Jewish life, inextricably tying the language to values they attributed to Jewish socialists of the past. Yiddishism as a path towards Jewish identification drove Hemshekh's programs, remaining central to the camp's culture up through its closure in 1980.

Conclusion: A Yiddish Pill

In 1973, Hemshekh's Sam Kazman wrote a story for Hemshekh's camp newspaper about a magical "Yiddish pill," which had the power to make all Hemshekh campers miraculously fluent in Yiddish. "It is drawing towards the end of an extended free play, which means that it is getting dark," wrote Kazman. The camp director, Mikhl Baran:

… sits in front of the office … Baydl Vov (Bunk 6) approaches … Emily says, "Farvos zitstu do alayn?" (Why are you sitting here all alone?) Mikhl's interest picks up … Laura says "Di griln griltsn, di feygel zingt [sic], ober Mikhl zitz [sic] alayn. Der dikhter Yehoyash hot amol gezogt …." (The crickets chirp, the birds sing, but Mikhl sits all alone. The poet Yehoyash once said …") … For the next hour, they all speak in Yiddish. Mikhl tests the limits of their vocabulary and finds none. He speaks to other bunks. … They all speak Yiddish. They speak it fluently. How? No one knows. A few say they dreamt something the night before, that someone came and gave them a pill.63

Kazman's story reflected the fantasy of the Yiddish summer camp: that camp itself would serve as a magical pill, teaching children Yiddish not just for the sake of the language itself, but rather as an important station on their paths towards Jewish identity.

The Yiddish pill was indeed a dream unfulfilled. Hemshekh and Boiberik undeniably struggled to uphold Yiddish-speaking atmospheres, missing the marks on their language goals and becoming more and more defined by what Jeffrey Shandler would later call postvernacular Yiddish. However, the camps' struggles also yielded a new purpose and use for Yiddish in the twentieth century. When Yiddish author Samuel Niger visited Camp Boiberik in the early 1940s, he described it as "laboratory of Yiddishkayt," one of a handful of summer camps working to create a "new Yiddish lebnshtayger" [way of life] in America. Indeed, through Boiberik and Hemshekh's experiments, struggles, and negotiations over the role of Yiddish at camp, those who attended and planned these camps ultimately helped reshape Yiddishism into a pathway towards what they understood to be Jewish authenticity. Camp Yiddishism surely deviated from Yiddishism's nineteenth-century iteration, but Yiddish and Yiddishism did not disappear in the postwar period. Rather, like Zionism or Jewish practice, Yiddish became one of a handful of symbolic tools that Jewish leaders utilized in their efforts to foster Jewish identity in youth in an age in which many adults worried that Jewishness—as they understood it—was on the decline.

Boiberik closed in 1979, with Hemshekh following a few months later.64 Both camps struggled with declining registration, financial problems, and weakened sponsoring organizations, all brought on by a decline in the number of Yiddish speakers, transitions in American Jewish priorities, and a recession. And yet the new form of Yiddishism that institutions like Boiberik and Hemshekh fostered had a longer life than the camps themselves. The camps produced many of the Yiddish teachers involved in Mordkhe Schaechter's Lehrer-Seminar (Yiddish teacher's seminar), as well as many members of Yugntruf, a Yiddishist youth movement founded in 1964.65 Out of Yugntruf and the inspiration of Hemshekh and Boiberik came the yearly Yiddish Vokh. A week-long, completely Yiddish-speaking camp for all ages in upstate New York, the Yiddish Vokh began in 1975 with Schaechter's family and his students. The program flourishes through the current day with many of the original attendees, their descendants, and increasing numbers of new and notably young Yiddish speakers.66 These developments have led to numerous contemporary ripple effects, including the Yiddish Farm (a Yiddish-speaking farm community with immersive educational programs in upstate New York), a variety of new Yiddish websites, meet-up groups, two houses in New York City (each called Yiddish Hoyz) where roommates speak Yiddish exclusively, Yiddish podcasts and social media pages, and a sizeable group of non-Hasidic parents raising their young children in Yiddish.67 The Hasidic community's enormous growth, and their maintenance of the Yiddish language makes up a much larger and mostly separate Yiddish-speaking culture. However, there has been increasing interaction between these two groups in the last several years, both on the internet and in person. In these cases, Yiddish serves as both an avenue for communication and a point of connection.68

Yiddish also has become an increasingly popular and important symbol among left-leaning American Jewish youth, who connect the language to what they see as radical Jewish movements of the past. These young people increasingly engage with Yiddish (and other aspects of diaspora Jewish culture) as a path towards new forms of Jewish identity, often citing how Yiddish provides an alternative connection to Jewishness than those presented by most mainstream Jewish educational programs, in which the quest to establish Jewish identity in youth tends to reap inspiration from Zionism and Israel.69 The linkages made between American Jewish diasporic identity and new forms of anti-, non-, or post-Zionism taking shape today certainly hearken back, to an extent, to historical divisions between Bundists and Zionists in Eastern Europe, as well as to parts of the 1960s and 1970s Jewish counterculture. This trend of connecting Yiddishism to a leftist critique of Israel is not a direct outgrowth of Hemshekh and Boiberik's politics surrounding Israel: although Bundist in orientation, Hemshekh's staff did not engage with anti-Zionist rhetoric, but rather seemed to mostly avoid the topic of Israel at camp, at least in official programs. Leibush Lehrer identified with Zionism, and a handful of programs at Boiberik addressed and celebrated Israel's founding and culture, although Israel never became a central theme within camp. Rather, this evolving contemporary trend presents a particularly compelling contemporary example of how American Jews continue to reshape Yiddish and Yiddishism to fit new historical, social, and political circumstances, a process within which Boiberik and Hemshekh played crucial foundational roles.

The leaders of Boiberik and Hemshekh considered their camps only partial successes, missing the mark on their language goals and closing down as so many other Jewish camps continued, many still in existence through the current day. But the way they redefined Yiddishism at their historical moment provided new paths for Jewish expression and identification, which continue to be revised under new conditions. In 1959, Leibush Lehrer reflected how it was "incumbent" upon him and his fellow educators "to point up emphatically to the value" of Yiddish at camp. While he believed that the camp setting could not "turn [languages] into subjects of extended study," he hoped educators could "awaken a feeling for" the value of Yiddish, allowing it to contribute to the "intensification of Jewish consciousness" among youth. Rather than serving as symbols of the death or the revival of Yiddish, these camps reflect efforts made at continuing Yiddish language activism and ideology in the face of serious challenges and help to explain the immense evolution Yiddishism has undergone from the late nineteenth century through today. As a tool towards the "intensification of Jewishness," Boiberik and Hemshekh altered the meaning, shape and purpose of Yiddish and Yiddishism beyond their gates, in a process that continues well past their closures.

Footnotes

The General Union of Jewish Workers in Lithuania, Poland, and Russia, or the Bund, was founded in Vilna in 1897 by Jews influenced by Marxism and various forms of socialism. Their goal was to bring Eastern European Jews into the Russian revolutionary movement. The Bund eventually adopted ideological positions regarding Jewish culture along the lines of a principle they called doikayt ("hereness"). As opposed to Zionists who hoped to build a Jewish state in which a new Jewish culture would bloom, Bundists believed that the future of the Jewish people would best take place in the Diaspora where its culture had already developed.

Jo Backer, "Thoughts on What Fiddler Made Me Think About Mame Loshn/Yiddish Loshn," Di hemshekh vokh, undated, 015009254, YIVO Library.

See Jonathan Sarna, "The Crucial Decade in Jewish Camping" in A Place of Our Own: The Rise of Reform Jewish Camping, eds., Michael M. Lorge and Gary Phillip Zola (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006); Riv-Ellen Prell, "Summer Camp, Post-War American Jewish Youth and the Redemption of Judaism," The Jewish Role in American Life: An Annual Review 5 (2007): 77–106; Daniel Isaacman, "Jewish Education in Camping," American Jewish Yearbook 67 (1966); 245–252.

See Jenna Weissman Joselit and Karen S. Mittelman, A Worthy Use of Summer: Jewish Summer Camping in America (Philadelphia: National Museum of American Jewish History, 1993); Avraham Schenker, "Zionist Camping in America," Jewish Education 36, no. 2 (1966): 103–107; Sandra F. Fox, "'Here, We're Real Jews': Producing Authentic Jews in Postwar American Jewish Summer Camps, 1945–1980" (PhD diss., New York University, 2018).

Fradle Freidenreich, Passionate Pioneers: The Story of Yiddish Secular Education in North America, 1910–1960 (Teaneck: Holmes & Meier Publishers, 2010); Naomi Prawer Kadar, Raising Secular Jews: Yiddish Schools and Their Periodicals for American Children, 1917–1950, (Waltham: Brandeis University Press, 2016); Fox, "Here, We're Real Jews."

Jeffrey Shandler, Adventures in Yiddishland: Postvernacular Language and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 1.

Jonathan Sarna, American Judaism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 281–282.

Shandler, Adventures in Yiddishland, 2. Shandler defines this new postwar role Yiddish played as defined by postvernacularity, in which the "privileging of the secondary level of signification," Yiddish culture, is placed "over its primary level," the Yiddish language (4). Summer camps are primary sites for this sort of postvernacular engagement, but they also share ties with movements and people dedicated to use of Yiddish as an everyday spoken language.

See Shandler, Adventures in Yiddishland, 177–202. For discussions of Yiddish decline in the press, see David Remnick, "News in a Dying Language," The New Yorker, January 10, 1994; Michael Simons, "Staying Alive," The Guardian, July 11, 1995; Tanya Basum, "Oy Vey: Yiddish Has a Problem," The Atlantic, September 9, 2014; Eli Sniv, "The Death of Yiddish?" Moment Magazine, December 27, 2010.

Curt Leviant, "Living Waters," New York Times, October 22, 1967; Matias Chazanov, "It's Not Dead Yet: Yiddish is the Common Language Nowhere on Earth, but It's the Mother Tongue of Some Jews Seeking Their Roots," Los Angeles Times, September 14, 1989; Murray Shumach, "The Yiddish Theater Refuses to Die," New York Times, December 7, 1980; A.V., "The Revival of Yiddish in Music and Literature," The Economist, February 13, 2017; Lara Moehlman, "New Faces of Yiddish Revival," Moment Magazine, August 17, 2018. For commentary on the "revival" narrative, see Saul Noam Zaritt, and the Editors, "Yiddish Lives! Loshn of the Living Dead," In geveb (March 2017); Rokhl Kafrissen, "Straw Man," Rootless Cosmopolitan, January 4, 2012, http://rokhl.blogspot.com/2012/01/straw-man.html; Jennifer Young, "Down with the 'Revival': Yiddish is a Living Language," YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, September 12, 2014, https://yivo.org/down-with-the-revival-yiddish-is-a-living-language.

"Czernowitz Conference of the Yiddish Language (1908)," in The Jew in the Modern World: A Documentary History, eds., Paul R. Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 424–425.

Susan Tamasi and Lamont Antieau, Language and Linguistic Diversity in the US: An Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2014), 491. For more on Chaim Zhitlovsky, see David H. Weinberg, Between Tradition and Modernity: Haim Zhitlowski, Simon Dubnow, Ahad Ha-Am, and the Shaping of Modern Jewish Identity (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1996).

Shandler, Adventures in Yiddishland, 4; Sol Steinmetz, Yiddish and English: A Century of Yiddish in America (Birmingham: University of Alabama Press, 1986). Steinmetz states that Yiddish went through three "stages" from 1880 to 1980: a golden age, from 1880–1920, a period of decline in the 1930s and 1940, and a slow continuous decline but with a renewal of interest in its preservation since the post-World War II period.

Leslie Paris, Children's Nature: The Rise of the American Summer Camp (New York: New York University Press, 2008), 93.

See Paris, Children's Nature; Daniel Isaacman, "Jewish Education in Camping"; Fox, "Here, We're Real Jews"; Kadar, Raising Secular Jews..

The camp existed as an experiment with two dozen or so campers starting in 1913, but it is unclear if it met each year until the first year at the Rhinebeck, NY site in 1923.

See Prawer Kadar, Raising Secular Jews, 3, 9.

Freidenreich, Passionate Pioneers, 364.

Ibid.

Prell, "Summer Camp, Postwar American Jewish Youth and the Redemption of Judaism," 80.

Sarna, "The Crucial Decade in Jewish Camping," 28.

Fox, "Here, We're Real Jews," 48–80.

For more on postwar Yiddishism and Yiddish engagement in America, see Shandler, Adventures in Yiddishland; Joshua Friedman, "Yiddish Returns: Language, Intergenerational Gifts, and Jewish Devotion" (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2015); Fraidenreich, Passionate Pioneers; and David Slucki, The International Jewish Labor Bund after 1945: Toward a Global History (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2012).

See Y. Shmulvitsch, "The Significance of Yiddish Camps," Forverts, August 10, 1964, Jewish Historical Press.

Leibush Lehrer, Camp Boiberik: The Growth of an Idea (1959), YIVO Library, 16.

Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Schocken Books, 1989), 3.

See Sholem Aleichem Folk Institute (SAFI) Camp Boiberik Collection 1923–1978, RG 659.1, YIVO; Lehrer, Camp Boiberik; Lehrer, The Objectives of Camp Boiberik (1962), YIVO Library.

Lehrer, The Objectives of Camp Boiberik, 68.

Shmulvitsch, "The Significance of Yiddish Camps." As Shmulvitsch reported, "The camp does everything to maintain [Yiddish] in the children's camp … but with Yiddish that comes with some more difficulty than it does with the elders" on the adult, guest side of the camp.

Lehrer, The Objectives of Camp Boiberik, 68.

Lehrer, The Objectives of Camp Boiberik, 72.

"1960," folder 254, RG 659.1, Sholem Aleichem Folk Institute (SAFI) Camp Boiberik, YIVO.

"1945," folder 118, RG 659.1, SAFI, Camp Boiberik, YIVO.

"1956," folder 217, RG 659.1, SAFI, Camp Boiberik, YIVO.

"1962," folder 279, RG 659.1, SAFI, Camp Boiberik, YIVO.

Lehrer, Camp Boiberik, 9.

Mara Sokolsky, "Article from The Forward," May 29, 1998, "The Return to Shabbes Rock (Reunion 1998)," Boiberik Alumni Website, boiberik.media.mit.edu.

Lehrer, Camp Boiberik, 25.

Naomi Prawar Kadar attributes this change, which she sees beginning around 1936, to the rise of Hitler. She explains "the rise of Hitler and the persecution of the Jews of Germany in the 1930s affected the American Yiddish secularists who belonged to the Sholem Aleichem Folk Institute and caused them to reconsider the place of Jewish tradition in their schools." Prawer Kadar, Raising Secular Jews, 9.

Lehrer, The Objectives of Camp Boiberik, 72.

"Reflections on the Folk Festival," August 27, 1967, folder 315, SAFI Camp Boiberik Collection 1923–1978, YIVO.

Lisa Litman, phone interviewed with author, October 25, 2018.

Translation: "The name Hemshekh speaks for itself." "Goals," 1966, folder "Correspondence," box 3, RG 1468, Camp Hemshekh Collection, YIVO.

Ibid.

In Yiddish: "Lomir trogn dem gayst vos me hot undz fartroyt," as seen in photographs. "Photographs," various, box 7, RG 1468, Camp Hemshekh Collection, YIVO.

Shmulvitsch, "The Significance of Yiddish Camps."

Fox, "Here, We're Real Jews," 48–80.

Eleanor Gordon Mlotek and Joseph Mlotek, eds., Songs of Generations: New Pearls of Yiddish Song (New York, Workmen's Circle, 2004). "Mir kumen on" was written by Nokhem Yud with music by Yankl Troupianski, popular composer and music teacher of the Yiddish schools of Warsaw and Vilna. The song was published in Undzer Gezang (1947), and was the musical theme of the pre-World War II film called "Mir Kumen On" about the Medem Sanitarium in Miedzeszyn, Poland, which was connected to the Bund. Camp Hemshekh used this song as its anthem.

Rukhl Schaechter and Gitl Schaechter, interviewed by author, recorded at Yidish Vokh 2018, Vaybertaytsh: A Feminist Podcast in Yiddish, episode 37, podcast audio, August 20, 2018, http://www.vaybertaytsh.com/episodes/2018/12/3/episode-37-sore-rukhland-gitl-schaechter; Miriam Oxenhandler, conversation in Hemshekh Alumni Facebook Group, October 2018.

"Ghetto Nights," box 4, RG 1468, Camp Hemshekh Collection, YIVO.

Shmulvitsch, "The Significance of Yiddish Camps."

See Sarah Bunin Benor, Jonathan Krasner, and Sharon Avni, Survey of Hebrew at North American Jewish Summer Camps (Waltham: Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Studies in Jewish Education, Brandeis University, 2016), http://www.brandeis.edu/mandel/pdfs/2016-Hebrew-in-camp-survey-report.pdf. The authors explain language infusion at camp as "a metaphor to represent the more common uses of Hebrew [at camp] … Hebrew is infused into the English-speaking environment through words, songs, prayers and signs—practices that do not require participants to be proficient in Hebrew.

Rukhl Schaechter and Gitl Schaechter-Viswanath, interview with author, August 20, 2018.

George Rothe, phone interview with author, November 14, 2016. Rothe explained that the camp director Mikhl Baran began to recruit campers from his year-round job as a teacher on Long Island, causing a growth in the number of campers without Yiddish knowledge. While Baran was an ideological Yiddishist, the camp needed more campers in order to survive financially.

"Educational Program," 1966, box 3, RG 1468, Camp Hemshekh Collection, YIVO.

Zory Lermer, "Etlekhe Bamerkungn," 1965, folder "Correspondence," box 3, RG 1468, Camp Hemshekh Collection, YIVO.

Schaechter and Schaechter-Viswanath. Vaybertaytsh.

Sam Kazman, "Making It," 1973, folder 7, box 1, RG 1468, Camp Hemshekh Collection, YIVO.

Ibid.

"Shavuos Play," 1967, box 4, RG 1468, Camp Hemshekh Collection, YIVO.

This trend also appeared in articles written by campers for the Hemshekh newspaper. See Sharon Cohen, "Me and Yiddish Culture," box 10, RG 1468, Camp Hemshekh Collection, YIVO.

Avrom Pat, "Der zumer sayzon 1967 in kemp hemshekh," Yugntruf Zhurnal 13–14 (1968): 6, Yugntruf Archive Online, www.yungtruf.org/arkhiv.

Sam Kazman, "The Yiddish Pill," 1973, box 16 - Duplicates, RG 1468, Camp Hemshekh Collection, YIVO.

There seem to be a lot of inconsistencies surrounding what year Hemshekh closed, with YIVO listing it as 1978. However, one source points to the fact that it at least was supposed to open in summer 1980: a letter sent to Boiberik parents on December 16, 1979 explained, "As we are deeply concerned with the preservation of the Yiddish language and Jewish culture, we sincerely regret the closing of Camp Boiberik. We believe that you will be interested in learning of another camp with a similar orientation but with a stronger emphasis on Yiddish language and culture." It seems that Hemshekh did not open in summer 1980, but that the staff did not decide it was closing until after December 1979. Correspondence and Daily Activities, 1979, box 3, RG 1468, Camp Hemshekh Collection, YIVO.

Avrom Pat, "Der zumer sayzon 1967 in kemp hemshekh." Yugntruf as a movement existed as a previous iteration in the 1940s, and was reestablished in 1964. See L. Z., "Mir zaynen do," Yugntruf Zhurnal 1 (1964): 2, Yugntruf Archive Online, www.yungtruf.org/arkhiv.

"42 Years of the Yidish Vokh," Yugntruf: Youth for Yiddish Website, https://yugntruf.org/yiddish-vokh/history.

See Yiddish Farm's website, www.yiddishfarm.org; the work of Rokhl Kafrissen on her blog "Rootless Cosmopolitan: Dynamic Yiddishkayt for the New Millennium," http://rokhl.blogspot.com/, and her Tablet magazine column "Rukhl's Golden City," https://www.tabletmag.com/tag/rokhls-golden-city; see also YiddishPop, www.yiddishpop.com, Vaybertaytsh: A Feminist Podcast in Yiddish, www.vaybertaytsh.com and Leyenzal, www.leyenzal.org. There is an active Facebook group for parents raising children in Yiddish, called Yiddish redndike mishpokhes un zayere khaverim, https://www.facebook.com/groups/1056947534315674, a Google Group called Tate-mames, and a blog entitled "Tate-Loshn: The Adventures of a Father Raising a Son in Yiddish," https://tate-loshn.weebly.com. For some early stage research on some of these families, see Tsvi Sadan and Elena Luchina, "Hashva'ah Sosiolingvistit shel Yidish v'Esperanto K'safot HaBayit Bekerev Dovrim Lo-Yelidi'im" (A Comparative Sociolinguistic Study of Yiddish and Esperanto as Home-Languages Among Non-Native Speakers), Handout for Graduate Colloquium, Bar Ilan University, April 25, 2017.

Hasidim and non-Hasidic Yiddishists communicate through the comments section of the Yiddish Forward (Forverts), on Instagram and Facebook, as well on some online Yiddish-language message boards. There are also meet-ups in Brooklyn such as Cholent, where Hasidim who are either leaving the community or considering leaving often make connections with young, non-Hasidic Yiddish-speakers, and sporadic opportunities for the two groups to interact on the Yiddish Farm. Hasidim and former Hasidim also access and communicate to some degree with Yiddishist media and institutions, downloading e-books from the Yiddish Book Center, reading the Yiddish Forward, and listening to podcasts.

This trend is reflected in protest songs, wearable Yiddish merchandise, and the millennial revival of the leftist Jewish magazine Jewish Currents. The klezmer band Tsibele's rendition of the song, "Mir veln zay iberlebn" ("We will outlive them"), and their popularized patch with the same slogan, has now also become their Facebook profile "photo frame" following the attack on the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh (see:https://tsibele.bandcamp.com/merch/we-will-outlive-them-embroidered-patch-yiddish). See also the music of Daniel Kahn and his Daniel Kahn and the Painted Bird: several of his songs are heard at protests among left-wing Jewish groups, https://www.paintedbird.de/.

[tribeworldarchive]

Religion and The Tribe Some facts about Religion Religion: Dictionary definition: system of belief in, worship of a supernatural power of god, system of faith and worship; human recognition of superhuman controlling power and esp. of a personal God entitled to obedience, effect of this on conduct. This is the worship system emerging from The Chosen, their level of worship of Zoot developing to hero/cult status…"Praise Zoot!` Religion ~ Is the human beings` relation to that which they regard as holy, sacred, spiritual, or divine. Religion is commonly regarded as consisting of a person`s relation to God or to gods or spirits. Worship is probably the most basic element of religion, but moral conduct, right belief, and participation in religious institutions are generally also fundamental elements of the religious life as practiced by believers and worshipers. The history of mankind has shown the pervasive influences of religion, and thus the study of religion, involving the attempt to understand its significance, its origins, and its myriad forms, has become increasingly important in modern times. Broadly speaking, the study of religion comprehends two aspects: 1) assembling information and 2) interpreting systematically the material gathered in order to elicit its meaning. The 19th century saw the rise of the study of religion in the modern sense, however, rarely has there been unanimity among scholars about the nature of the subject. This is partly because assumptions about the revealed nature of the Christian (or other) religion or assumptions about the falsity of religion become entangled with questions concerning the historical and other facts of religion. Thus, the subject has, throughout its history, contained elements of controversy. Nature and significance An acceptable definition of religion itself is difficult to attain. Attempts have been made to find an essential ingredient in all religions (eg, spiritual, experience; the contrast between the sacred and the profane; belief in gods or in God), so that an "essence" of religion can be described. The gods play a very subsidiary role, for example, in most phases of Buddhism. A more promising method would seem to be that of exhibiting aspects of religion that are typical of religions, though they may not be universal. The occurrence of the rituals of worship is typical, but there are cases, however, in which such rituals are not central. The fact that there is dispute over the possibility of finding an essence of religion means that there is likewise a problem about speaking of the study of religion or of religions. In practice, a religion is a particular system, or a set of systems, in which doctrines, myths, rituals, sentiments, institutions, and other similar elements are interconnected. Thus, in order to understand a given belief that occurs in such a system, it is necessary to look at its particular context--that is, other beliefs held in the system, rituals, and other aspects. Even if an record of types of belief and practices can be gathered--so as to provide a typical profile of what counts as religion--the lack of a tight definition means that there will always be a number of cases about which it is difficult to decide. Furthermore, some ideologies, such as Soviet Marxism, Maoism, and Fascism, may have analogies to religion. Though there is no consensus on this point among scholars, it is not unreasonable to hold that the boundary between traditional religions and modern ideologies represents one part of the religious field to be studied. Neutrality and subjectivity in the study of religion Subjectivity in the study of religion Religion can be said to be subjective in at least two senses. First, the practice of religion involves inner experiences and sentiments, such as feelings of a God guiding the life of the devotee. Here religion involves subjectivity in the sense of individual experience. Religion may also be thought to be subjective because the criteria by which its truth is decided are obscure and hard to come by, so that there is no obvious "objective" test in the way in which there is for a large range of speculative claims in the physical world. The follower of a faith is no doubt authoritative as to his/her own experience, but is not necessarily so in regard to the communal significance of the rites and institutions in which he/she participates. Thus, the matter of coming to understand the inner side of a religion involves a rationale between participant observation and interpersonal relationships with such followers of the other faith. Basic aims and methods Religions, being complex, have different aspects or dimensions. Thus, the major world religions typically possess doctrines, myths, ethical and social teachings, rituals, social institutions, and inner experiences and sentiments. These dimensions lie behind the creation of buildings, art, music, and other such extensions of basic beliefs and attitudes. But not all religions are like Christianity and Buddhism, for example, in possessing institutions such as the church and the sangha (Buddhist monastic order), which exist across national and cultural boundaries. In opposition to such institutionalised religions, tribal religion, for example, is not usually separately established but in effect is the religious side of communal life (or way of life) and is not treated as distinct from other things that go on in the community. How does this fit to The Tribe??? In the Tribal instance, Zoot is now being held as the Divine being and his notion of Power and Chaos is being acted out and maintained by The Chosen, as led by The Guardian. Life was fairly normal for Martin (Zoot) until the virus came to the fore, he was jealous of his older brother (Bray) who seemed to have everything he didn`t, a popular boy in school, captain of the football team, popular girl wanting him. Eventually Martin got a bit fed up, cracked under the pressure and so a new persona Zoot - "Power & Chaos" was created by Martin. When the virus wiped out all the adults he used his theory of `force` and power to manipulate the chaotic situation in society and try to rule the land with his followers - The Locos. After he died it was left up to Ebony to maintain this `power and chaos`. She was a strong girl, and manipulative too. She was trying to take out vengeance on the Mall Rats for killing Zoot. "Be a victim of your fear or make it work for you", The Guardian (having been a school mate of Martin and often picked on by him prior to the virus) had learnt this philosophy from Zoot. Therefore, now he wanted power and the way to get the power himself is by making others fear him….and so this is how Zoot`s system/doctrine is carried on today….and the Religion of Zoot is borne!!!

[podcastsofpsa]

(Feel free to listen to the podcast via audio only, or follow along with the transcript if you’d like).

I realize that with much of the United States in a constant state of turmoil, it’s increasingly more difficult for us to grasp a firm understanding of how we are being influenced and persuaded by the information around us. Take this case of Theo Wilson, a human being (of color) that went “undercover” in a digital sense to explore and try to understand more of the attitudes and beliefs of the alt-right population.

Side note: The fact that I have to address Mr. Wilson as a person of color to even get my point (or his) across is the reason we are having this conversation in the first place.

This is the reason why we need to have the courage to engage in those face-to-face conversations with people we may disagree with, even if they truly that are difficult.

Here’s the thing - and you’ll have to bear with me, feel free to move further on if you want me to get back to the topic at hand. I have a tendency to run off on tangents that help to further explain my reasoning behind something.

Let’s take a fairly generalized concept that most people have a basic understanding of; evolution. We know (or may not believe for some of us) that evolution is the biological process that enables organisms to respond/react to their environment and their surroundings. The conditions and the limitations of “what they are now” (or rather, then) is the blank canvas from which their eventual masterpiece will arise.

Either way, evolution has been an incremental factor in how the scientific community has gained a better understanding of how the human race came-to-be. Evolution, for better or for worse, is not a selective process. This isn’t the idea or the argument that “natural selection” is how nature chooses one specific organism over another. It’s about adaptation, and in some cases, it’s about the probability of genetic mutation. We know that our genes are part of the stuff that makes us who we are. Genes are part of the big picture that gave me brown eyes and black hair. The kind that makes my Chihuahua/Dachshund mix have a bullet-shaped body and a tiny little face. These don’t just affect the outward appearances, but also the internal make-up of who we are.

These genes, this process of “evolution,” it’s why sharks can’t walk and why we don’t have wings that allow us to fly (e.g. unless we’re onboard a Boeing 747 or something like that). Say that there’s a planet that’s inhabited by little red blobs &  birds that like feeding on these red blobs. If you’re a red blob and a bird is circling overhead, it’s probably the last day you’re going to be a red blob. But let’s say a red blob family has a little-baby blob, and instead of being a red blob the baby is a green blob. (Like how you might have blue eyes but your parents don’t).

Imagine that the group of red blobs and little baby green blob are hanging out in a field of grass. Who do you think might be the hardest blob to find for a hungry bird flying in the sky? Now, this is an extremely generalized example of one way that evolution can influence organisms to “adapt” to their surroundings. However, this isn’t always the case - not every group of red blobs will have a little green blob baby. Some planets inhabited by red blobs might actually be extinct because they were eaten by all the birds in the sky.

Point is, change needs to happen for evolution to ensue. The change may be by random chance (like the little baby green blob), or it may be intentional. Maybe there’s a planet full of green blobs, and now the birds flying in the sky are the ones in danger. They can’t see during the day and spend all night sleeping. But let’s say that the green blobs glow in the dark, and their red blob relatives did not. So the birds are having trouble finding food to eat, so they search longer during the day and sleep later at night. No blobs in sight, nothing for them to eat. But imagine a few birds have trouble sleeping at night, so they decide to take a night-time stroll in the sky. During their flight, what do they see? Glowing lights on the ground. They don���t see red blobs, but they’ve never seen the glowing light like this before. What could it be, none other than the green blobs? So these birds in the sky, they learn to search for food during the night and try sleeping during the day. The green blobs could hide during the day but were much easier to spot during the night when the night birds were foraging for food to eat. Another extreme generalization, but another example of how evolution can influence genes which are enacted by a change.

This whole idea of evolution & adaptation as a means to respond to “life-or-death” situations is a large part of how the human race has made it this far on planet Earth. When faced with discomfort (or risk of extinction), most organisms have a tendency to err on the side of survival. It’s an innate tactic of living things to “continue to live.” Fish don’t decide to wash up on land because they don’t have lungs and cannot breathe oxygen - so they “continue to live” in the water, where they most appropriately adapted to.  

The really big complexity of today’s tension, or more specifically the grinding tension in the United States is largely a victim of this “inability/unawareness to change.” So I’m not trying to say that this is a bad thing. Just like the birds searching for food on little green blob planet, foraging for food during the day was something that they learned to do from the birds before them who hunted little red blobs. But when the planet was dominated by green blobs, the birds had one of two options: continue searching for food during the day and risk starvation (and eventually extinction), or adapt to their environment and their surroundings to “continue to live.”  

But I think that at this current time, the majority of the population of the U.S. is in a very similar situation to the birds on little green blob planet. We have become very accustomed to how things were and have been, and are minutely concerned with what could be a problem vs what we have been persuaded or misinformed to believe is a problem.

Hence the blog post title, “Positive Reinforcement of Polarized Biases.” We live in a world of convenient automation. Everything that our parents or grandparents used to do in person has been replaced/substituted (in some form or fashion) with an automated counterpart. No matter how you slice it, for better or for worse, technology has us completely invested in what utility and productivity we feel that we gain/get from it.

As is the case with most scenarios, emotional and attributed beliefs/meanings are what fuel our behaviors and actions in our day-to-day lives. This is a micro-response that we elicit when faced with challenging or difficult obstacles. Whether we choose to accept it or not, there are difficult decisions that each and everyone one of us has to make in our lives - it’s a variable of progress that inevitability turns the cogs of time. But here’s the kicker - while technology has enabled us with functionality and versatility like humanity has never had before; it has ironically robbed many of us from a quintessential part of what bonds humanity - communication.

Verbal, physical, mental, emotional - these ques and these channels of interpretation have been paramount in the development of the human race. From inscribed hieroglyphics on pyramids in Egypt to artificial intelligence between chatbots from Facebook, communication (e.g. primordially verbal) has given human beings an untapped potential for growth and development over millions of years through the process of evolution.

But our proclivity towards automation and the “future” of technology is also steering us in a direction that we don’t usually think about. Most of us associate technology with the “New-Age,” this era of prosperity and enhanced living that has allowed the human race to transcend the biological limitations that make us so. These are admirable qualities to envision for the future of society, but we underestimate the repercussions that this utopian dream can have on our very way of life.

That said, I am in no way attempting to discredit technology for the benefit and livelihood that it has brought us over the years - there is no denying that. But there is one thing that sticks out the most to me, something that I have also been subject to for as long as I can remember. The age of digital communication - of emails and text messages, even blog posts, and YouTube comments; the “convenience” and pervasive nature of this non-emotional conversation, it’s at the root of the battle that we as members of the human race need to address if we are to proceed forward in life as house-guests of this planet we inhabit.

Those “difficult” and “challenging” decisions in life that I referenced earlier? More and more I am beginning to see that face-to-face communication is becoming one of them. And if that doesn’t convince you that we are suffering from a deficiency in open dialogue - just keep in mind that in the United States, public-speaking used to be rated as the #1 fear among Americans. Unfortunately, the political stage in recent years has shifted that fear dramatically towards more present and subsequently prevalent issues. For more details, follow the link HERE.

But why was public speaking so largely feared by those who were surveyed? Just because our engagement in the “future of technology” has propelled society into a “New-Age” doesn’t mean that we are not still at the mercy of our genetic configuration. Our homo sapien ancestors invested an immensely greater portion of time (e.g. like millions of years to be more specific) to develop the basic framework we know today that is typically accepted as a universal axiom around the world. Verbal communication was of the last features to form during the evolutionary “refining” process of our ancestors. So much so, that humans developed the ability to speak (verbally) at the risk of dying.

You know about choking right?

Yeah, that’s how important the ability to communicate verbally was to our predecessors. We could have just had a mouth (e.g. with no vocal cords) to eat stuff with - but where would that have gotten humanity to now? The pharynx, that pocket of space that is essentially the fork in the road that leads to either our larynx (for speaking) or esophagus (for eating).

Interestingly enough, our windpipe (also where we conduct our voice) is just before our esophagus (as part of the digestive tract). So our bodies basically generated our ability to speak with the slight chance that we could choke while eating (and die - although hopefully, you know the Heimlich maneuver or someone around you does).

The big takeaway from this? Communication is key. And throughout the recent years, the importance of communication never dwindled in any way - but our perception and awareness of how it influences us and those around us have seemed to almost vanish completely.

(This is certainly not the last time that I will be addressing the implications and the inevitable downstream effect that our “absence” of communication has brought forth. My intention is to bring this idea to your attention and in so doing allow ourselves to get back in touch with the really fundamental aspects of what makes humans, human).