It’s off-season for the Jewish summer camp world. But the conversation about including Palestinian perspectives in Israel education, started by IfNotNow earlier this year with their #YouNeverToldMe campaign, will continue to haunt institutions like Camp Ramah, the Conservative movement’s camping arm.
As any camper, counselor, or camp professional knows, last summer defines what next summer looks like. And last summer was explosive.
This past March, Rabbi Mitch Cohen, director of the National Ramah Commission, sat down with Ramah alumni affiliated with IfNotNow, an anti-occupation movement led by young American Jews. According to the alumni, Cohen was receptive of their ask that Ramah change how it teaches about Israel.
They spoke of the need to inform campers and counselors about the occupation, and to share Palestinian narratives at camp. Both sides, supposedly, walked away from the conversation satisfied about the potential for change.
“The reason that we came into contact with these institutions is that they’re places we think have the potential to grow, and change their Israel programming, and actually be on our side,” said Rebecca Millberg, an organizer for the #YouNeverToldMe campaign.
The campaign highlights the stories of disillusioned young Jews who feel that information about Israel, presented to them by youth groups and summer camps, was one-sided and created a false view of Israel-Palestine. The campaign’s website has 55 testimonials from alumni of various Jewish youth programs, and states that “we have come together under the banner of IfNotNow, to ask our institutions to provide Jewish education that advances freedom and dignity for all people.”
“There’s a reason we consistently protest outside other institutions like AIPAC,” Millberg said, “and are never going to meet with them, or try to get them to change their approach – in the sense of inside institutional change. They’re just fundamentally not on our side.”
On June 11th, Ramah released a statement making it clear they were also not on IfNotNow’s side.
IfNotNow had held a camp counselor training weeks earlier, teaching staff of various camps how to educate about the occupation. The training became a media sensation, eliciting headlines like “Sowing the seeds of Israel-hatred at summer camp” from a Jerusalem Post blog, and “Anti-Israel group plans to indoctrinate youth at Jewish summer camps” from CAMERA, a pro-Israel media watchdog.
Ramah, according to members of IfNotNow, caved to Jewish communal panic over the training. “Ramah Camps have not engaged – and will not engage – in any way with IfNotNow as an organization,” Ramah’s June 11th statement read, labeling If NotNow’s agenda in stark terms. “While liberal pro-Israel views on the conflict can be voiced and taught at camp, we do not allow any anti-Israel, anti-Semitic or anti-Zionist education at Ramah.”
For Millberg, the statement felt like a betrayal and “highlighted why IfNotNow has the principle of not doing closed door negotiations, and not working specifically on small institutional change within singular organizations,” she said.
“Because things like this happen. People get scared, donors call, parents call, they want to pull their money or kids. And the institution, even if they were excited about the changes they could make, get scared, and they don’t end up doing anything. We end up with probably worse Israel education than if there had never been any of the press.”
Ramah’s statement may have been a black-and-white message about IfNotNow’s request to bring Palestinian narratives to camp during the summer of 2018, but IfNotNow-affiliated staff found the reality on the ground to be inconsistent with that message.
Even in other camping movements, like Habonim Dror, Union for Reform Judaism (URJ), and Young Judaea, where IfNotNow also provided programming support to staff, individual camps had different levels of comfort with teaching Palestinian narratives, Millberg said.
In some camps, there was minimal enough pushback – or enough institutional support – that staff were able to run educational programs about the occupation. At others, staff were outright shut down by camp leadership. “We had some counselors who came into the summer with really positive attitudes, excited about what they would be able to do, and by the end of the summer felt really disappointed,” Millberg said.
Whether or not staff taught about the Palestinian narrative also had to do with a number of other factors, like having campers that were too young to understand the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the fear of being ostracized by peers.
“I felt super empowered after the [INN camp counselor] training, but by the time I arrived at camp, I was feeling nervous again,” said Ami Furgang, a third-year staff member at Ramah in the Rockies, a camp in Denver, Colorado. Furgang spoke with New Voices through Facebook Messenger. “I forgot how difficult it was to have conversations about Israel-Palestine with other counselors, and forgot how little the campers [know].”
Some Ramah camp directors themselves sent mixed messages to staff about Ramah’s official stance on Israel education. Nina Havivi, a staff member at Ramah California, a camp in Ojai, California, recalled that “my camp director was very responsive, eager to talk about this issue honestly and thoughtfully. However, consensus of the conversation was discouraging: there’s nothing to be done right now, critics from the left and the right are blocking any possible changes regarding Israel education, and this is just not the right time.”
Havivi told New Voices, in a Facebook Messenger interview, that she found the conversation with her director frustrating. “I’m hopeful that the administrators of my camp will realize that in the absence of action, young members of their community will begin to leave,” she said.
“I was pretty candid about the urgency of the situation – I love Ramah, it has helped to inform the very core of my Jewish identity, but I cannot continue to be a part of this community (as a staff member, donor, or future parent) if Ramah Israel education doesn’t change.” Havivi made clear to New Voices that she would not return to work at Ramah in the future, after serving 4 years as a counselor.
For Caryn Shebowich, a first-year staff member running outdoors programming at Ramah in the Rockies, her experience didn’t reflect either Ramah or IfNotNow’s perceived messaging.
“I personally am pretty lefty on my Israel politics, and I personally am pretty anti-occupation,” Shebowich said. “I was told that that was going to be really difficult, for me to be at camp and have those opinions, and that was not what I found.”
Shebowich ended up running a well-received program with staff called “Authentic Experience with Israel-Palestine” about how to create Israel-Palestine related camp programming “that accurately reflect people’s experience with Israel.”
Shebowich, together with another staff member, facilitated a non-judgmental space for camp staff to discuss whether current traditions at Ramah, like Yom Israel (Israel Day) and tfillah (prayer), include a genuine engagement with Israel-Palestine. Staff also talked about how they can integrate their relationship with Israel-Palestine into the daily schedule of camp.
The program emerged after multiple conversations with the camp directors who, after Ramah released their June 11th statement, made it clear to Shebowich that they are “not here to censor what people say in any capacity,” she said.
“I was really nervous that there was going to be incredible pushback and that we were going to have to fight really hard to get any airtime at camp, and I was really impressed with the support that the directors gave us as individuals,” Shebowich said. “They really wanted to emphasize that we could say whatever we wanted and do whatever we wanted as long as it was from our authentic experience with Israel-Palestine.”
When asked about the inconsistency between Ramah’s stance on Israel education and the actions of individual camp directors, directors at Ramah California and the Rockies deferred to Rabbi Mitch Cohen for comment.
“We do not believe that there are any significant differences between our camp directors and the movement-wide messaging with regard to Israel education,” Cohen said when reached by email. “All Ramah camps are strongly pro-Israel, and will not partner with organizations that do not support the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state in the land of Israel. Within these parameters, there is a wide range of acceptable political and educational positions expressed and taught at Ramah, including positions which are critical as well as supportive of specific Israeli governmental policies.”
When asked if he was asserting that IfNotNow doesn’t support the state of Israel’s right to exist, Cohen said “we do not make any assertions about IF NOT NOWs [sic] positions. Some of our alumni who are sympathetic to INN also support Israel.”
Having never been at a Jewish summer camp before last summer, either as a camper or as a staff member, Shebowich was taken aback by how few political conversations were happening at Ramah in the Rockies. For her, the goals of the #YouNeverToldMe campaign would have been clearer if Ramah had been actively pushing political engagement at camp and deliberately refusing to talk about Palestine. Instead, what she found was a place that didn’t focus much on politics at all.
“There wasn’t anyone in any formal capacity talking about Palestinian narratives, and there wasn’t anyone in any formal capacity talking about the political obligation that I think Jews have to the land of Israel-Palestine,” Shebowich said. “So that part wasn’t there. But to be frank, neither was any other political discussion.”
Furgang, also reflecting on the atmosphere at Ramah in the Rockies, thinks that the lack of overall political engagement is an important part of the issue. “Campers leave after 4 weeks never having heard any mention of Palestinian’s [sic] existence. Those same campers are hearing all about the conflict when they’re away from camp, mostly from right wing perspectives, and will likely look back when they hopefully learn of the bigger picture and unfortunately have to join everyone else in saying ‘you never told me’ at Ramah.”
Millberg takes a big-picture approach to how the summer, and relations with Ramah, went for IfNotNow. After Ramah publicly rejected any intention to teach about the occupation or to associate with group, she says many alumni came out of the woodwork to question Ramah’s decision. Millberg considers this a success.
“We’re pushing for an end of the American Jewish community’s support for the occupation, which doesn’t doesn’t just mean the heads of institutions, and the people who are running the camps and doing programming. It means the people who attend, and who are in community with the people who attend, or who used to attend these camps and other institutions,” she said.
Millberg said that the tension between IfNotNow and Ramah also had an impact on the rest of the Jewish summer camp world and its intentions for talking about Israel-Palestine.
“I think it’s noteworthy that after Camp Ramah put out these statements, all sorts of other Jewish camps felt the need to clarify their approach to Israel education publicly,” Millberg said. “It was a huge win for IfNotNow that these places felt like they had to either defend their approach to Israel education, or show that they are teaching about the occupation, or explain why they aren’t for the first time.”
Lev Gringauz was a 2018 New Voices reporting fellow.
Correction: A previous version of this article stated that Nina Havivi is a first-year counselor at Ramah. She has worked as a Ramah counselor for 4 years, and the article has been updated to reflect this.
