A Yiddish Camp Saga
The weeklong trip to Camp Kinder Ring has been around, formally, for 14 years. But, for the first time, yunge mentshn (“young people”) would fill the bunks, and meet the generations that came before.
Journalism by Jewish college students, for Jewish college students.
The weeklong trip to Camp Kinder Ring has been around, formally, for 14 years. But, for the first time, yunge mentshn (“young people”) would fill the bunks, and meet the generations that came before.
“As the war continues, students search for an outlet for their grief, and ways to do something that feels meaningful. But constraints like social anxiety, institutional pressure, and blacklisting have made activism difficult.”
“I am choosing to allow for my discomfort because dialogue is important to me, and I believe that peace will always begin with a commitment towards understanding.”
The films ranged from poignant renderings of love and loss of faith to high energy concepts toying with the forms of Judaism and film alike.
“To ignore my emotions would be to ignore the empathy I have for Israelis and Palestinians who are being driven from their homes and who are being killed as collateral damage.”
“The Yiddish word haymishe comes to mind… It immediately made sense to me as an equal-parts ironic and sincere evocation of the joy and warmth of Midwestern Jewishness.”
While major Zionist organizations lobby to change California’s Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum, many Jewish students and scholars across California have a different outlook on the issue – and are being overlooked in the debate.
Shira had been texting her best friend for a long time. Maybe this will be forever, she thought. This imperfect, one-sided conversation. The world is built on longing, she remembered as she pulled one end of the gum out of her mouth, stretched it out, and stuck the end back in and pulled to make a loop.
“To my surprise, Shabbat dinners became a predictable and grounding occurrence every week. My mom cooked, I set the table, and my dad and brother cleaned up after the meal. Sometimes it was twenty minutes of near silence then everyone scurried off to their bedrooms again. Sometimes it ended in explosive arguments and someone finishing their plate an hour or two later in the kitchen. But sometimes it worked.”
Best-practices gleaned from a new generation of Jewish Educators, making the Zoom makom meaningful.
More people are curating their surroundings, framed within a Zoom window. Yet, what lies beyond the edges of the composed picture tells deeper stories of the day-to-day.
A short instructional guide in six easy steps.
“You can’t work at camp for all those summers, watch all those campers burst into bloom under a summer sky that feels close enough to reach out and grab hold of with the tips of your outstretched fingers, without learning to believe in something. And those things I believe about camp live at the very center of my heart; to deny they were true for myself rendered them meaningless, entirely.”
Originally published in the Fall 2016 edition of The Current. Since the famed student uprising of 1968, many generations of Columbia students have felt an obligation to perpetuate the legacy of the late 60s by creating a myriad of activist clubs and organizations here on campus. And not uncommonly, Jewish students have occupied prominent lay…