founder and executive producer of the Yiddish-language podcast Vaybertaytsh: A Feminist Podcast in Yiddish.
Fox applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, The Jews of Summer: Summer Camp and Jewish Culture in Postwar America, and reported the following:
Page 99 of my book talks about camp festivals, and in particular “Color War” games at camp Hemshekh, a socialist and Yiddish-focused Jewish summer camp that was founded in 1959 by Holocaust survivors from Poland, and closed in 1980. Here’s the excerpt:Visit Sandra Fox's website.In one such play, the 1968 Chanukah group considered the “fight against assimilation” an ideal of their holiday, making a case for their particular view of secular Jewishness. “We secular Jews agree with the Jewish sages of old that Yiddishkayt—Jewishness—may be linked to ‘mayim chayim’—living, flowing water,” the script explains. “We desire movement rather than rigidity; we seek friendship and understanding rather than laws and commandments. Instead of supernatural faith and dogma, our primary concern is with and for man and his fellows. Those are the ideas embodied in our celebration of Yontefdike Teg—festive days—here at Camp Hemshekh. Through song and dance, play and story, we cherish anew the treasures of our cultural heritage.” The Shevuos team’s 1967 play, which bounced from ancient Israel to contemporary America and between English and Yiddish, similarly portrayed the immediate lessons to be gained from understanding the holiday as applied to the camp and its Yiddish-related convictions. “The children of Israel today are abandoning their culture as those who danced around the golden calf,” explained the narrator. “The commandments become the building symbol for our growing and beautiful culture, which Hemshekh is preserving in the present world.” As with the Yada, Di Yontefdike Teg emphasized Hemshekh’s vision of Jewishness, reframing the holidays to fit their Yiddishist and Bundist values.The Page 99 Test kind of worked for my book, but not completely. Page 99 talks about Color War games at Jewish summer camps. Many kinds of American camps held versions of Color War, a day or set of days in which the whole camper body is broken into teams. Each team is represented by a color (red, blue, green, white, yellow, etc), which then battles it out in games, artistic competitions, and sports until one team is declared the winner. Educational, nationalistic, and religious Jewish camps often put their own particular ideological marks on the day. The page shows how staff members at Hemshekh molded this very American camp tradition of Color War to their visions of secular Jewishness, with a tinge of socialist-imbued cosmopolitanism. Camp Hemshekh had a few different versions of Color War, one called the Hemshekhyada, which page 99 doesn’t cover, and then Di Yontefdike Teg (The Festive Days) and the Olympics, which page 99 does cover. On the Yada, the whole camp was broken into teams representing Yiddish authors; on Di Yontefdike Teg, the whole camp would be broken into teams representing a Jewish holiday -- Hanukkah, Shavuot, Passover, and Sukkot. Considering the camp promoted itself to be a bastion of secular Jewishness, Di Yontefdike Teg reflects how, in their version of Jewish secularism, holiday traditions could still play an educational role for children, helping educators pass cultural Jewishness to the next generation. The Hemshekh Olympics, on the other hand, reflected the camp’s aspiration towards cosmopolitanism, as campers were broken into teams based on countries, and would learn about their countries to cheer, make skits, and sing about them.
Hemshekh’s final competitive special day, the “Olympics,” represented another common variety of color war. Hemshekh’s Olympics shared some traits with the Yada, with similar activities and teams competing against one another in a variety of games. However, instead of embodying different Yiddish authors, the teams represented different countries in the world, imbuing the day with a cosmopolitan ethic. Through the Olympics, counselors hoped campers would learn the cultures of their assigned countries as they role-played its people, drawing inspiration from their flag, songs, and customs. In socialist spirit, staff wanted campers to “understand social and economic problems of the countries represented in light of their own history.” Other kinds of Jewish camps also conducted Olympic-style special days but placed more focus on specifically Jewish communities around the world. In 1964, Swig broke campers up into teams, each representing a different country, including Israel, Brazil, Denmark, Ireland, Turkey, and the United States, and instructed them to “learn about the Jewish community of its particular…
The test reveals a good bit about the book. The book’s chapters at the heart of the book are largely thematically arranged, assessing how Jewish camps interpreted everyday elements of life at camp to make them reflect their ideologies. Color War is just one example of that. On the other hand, no one page can reflect the diversity of the camps I studied, and how they all took certain core elements of camp life and translated it to their ideologies in certain unique ways. This page only covers the Yiddish camps, which were interesting in their own right. But to understand the full diversity of how camps used Color War, and thus how Jewish camps took all sorts of American camp activities and made them fit their ideological framework, you’d have to read the pages around it, too!
--Marshal Zeringue
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