Content warning for mentions of homophobia, transphobia, harassment, and assault. Some names in this article have been changed to protect the privacy of interviewees, marked with an asterisk.
Daniel* was one of the only out, queer campers when he attended Camp Young Judaea Midwest in the early 2000s and became the object of a “game” among his peers.
“The rules were anyone who could catch me could kiss me, so I would be basically ready to run from anyone at any time. The boys made a rule that their kisses were extra points because ‘I would actually like them,’ so even in my cabin I would have to be on full alert.”
Daniel’s experience of targeted harassment, stress, and loneliness was mirrored in interviews with LGBTQ+ former campers who attended Jewish summer camps across the United States and abroad.
Jewish summer camps have long provided havens for young Jews to form deep connections, develop confidence, and explore who they are. However, alongside all the brochure-ready benefits of spending summers at camp, many of these environments contain intense norms that children feel compelled to meet, especially unmentioned expectations of gender performance and hypersexuality. While all youth are impacted by this charged culture, LGBTQ+ campers are at extremely high risk of feeling isolated or exploited due to these unspoken pressures. For decades, stories like Daniel’s have gone unrecorded and unaddressed: LGBTQ+ campers have been neglected by staff and peers, suffering fraught relationships to their queer identities at camp and trauma in the summer’s aftermath.
Highly gendered environments, unsupportive responses to queer identities, and the presence of intense, heteronormative sexual pressure are all components which facilitate a culture of exclusion, emotional conflict, and damage for thousands of Jewish LGBTQ+ campers and counselors every year.
In the wake of Rabbi Ethan Linden’s removal from his position as Director of Camp Ramah in Wingdale, New York, pending an investigation into allegations that he covered up a camper’s sexual abuse claim in 2018, the Jewish community is urgently facing issues of gender justice and sexual safety at summer camp. Our investigation explores how hypersexual environments, absence of clear policy on issues of sexual harassment and assault, and inaction of camp staff and administrators can lead to the neglect and even abuse of campers, specifically those who identify as LGBTQ+. Out of the twenty camp administrators reached out to for comment, only five responded.
As this year’s summer camp season begins, New Voices Magazine has held conversations with former counselors, campers, and administrators from Jewish summer camps across the United States and abroad about their experiences with queer identity and LGBTQ+ issues at camp. Our findings illustrate a pattern of isolation and enforced heteronormativity, instilled in large part not only by camp staff, but by an absence of protective policy and the traditions that define camp as a Jewish cultural institution.
Wild Expectations
Sex and summer camp are stereotypically synonymous. The opening scenes of cult camp classic Wet Hot American Summer are filled with pubescent bodies wriggling in cots, teen lust, and a generally apathetic staff too focused on their own hijinks to care about their campers. The film revolves around sexual resolutions: losing virginities, navigating love triangles, and discovering queer identities. A piece of expert satire, Wet Hot American Summer nonetheless reflects how sexual experiences are inherent to Jewish summer camp cultures. Though often escalating only to a point of impassioned necking behind a pine, the atmosphere of heightened youth sexuality is nonetheless extremely prevalent and has been a defining aspect of summer camp culture for thousands of young Jews across the nation, and even the world.
The pressure to engage in sexual or romantic activity alienates children who might struggle with defining themselves as sexual at all, eliminating the space for discussions of asexual or aromantic narratives. Camp cultures often uphold such a frenetic, uncertain standard of acceptable sexual activity that the mental and even physical safety of all campers is at risk, with particular damages for those who identify as queer.
“Sexual activity was treated as though it was an inevitability amongst the counselors, amongst the campers it was celebrated,” said Jem Sugnet, a former camper and counselor who attended B’nai B’rith Camp in Oregon. “When I was a camper, there wasn’t a lot done to discourage it.”
A culture marked by acceptance, even celebration of sexuality is one of the key trademarks of many Jewish summer camps. Unlike many Christian counterparts, Jewish summer camps do not generally adhere to an abstinence-based approach to youth sexual activity. Rather, according to interviews, Jewish camps often hold a relaxed, destigmatized, but ambiguous approach to campers exploring their sexuality.
The majority of interviewees relayed that their camps maintained an atmosphere of acceptance towards sexual activity, but often with confusing or convoluted guidelines. Former counselors rarely noted sexuality itself as an issue; instead, interviewees remarked upon the lack of clarity surrounding consent or safe practice.
”There wasn’t anything explicitly stated regarding sexual encounters, other than a suggestion to be conservative and to be ‘practical’,” Sugnet recalled of his training as a counselor in the early 2010s. While staff meetings traditionally include training and discussion about the physical safety of children, there have been very few historical instances of camps educating counselors on how to discuss sex among camper groups. “It was implied that if the campers seemed to be engaging in anything like that, we shouldn’t step in as long as one, they weren’t breaking the rules and two, we were healthy role models and telling them what was and wasn’t okay … but I want to clarify, I don’t think that was explicitly stated to the counselors.”
Rachael*, who spent several years at Ramah New England in Massachusetts as a camper and counselor throughout the 2000s, recalled how her camp allocated time for unsupervised co-ed mixing after evening activities, which felt imbued with unspoken heteronormative overtones. “Before bed time, the older campers would have anywhere between 10 to 25 minutes of free time, and that was like the unnamed social sexual pressure time,” she said.
Counselors never accompanied this unsupervised time with frank discussions of consent, boundaries, or LGBTQ+ inclusion. Instead, in the rare instances that topics about sexuality and consent norms were addressed, they were vague and unhelpful.
“Our whole group was sat down by the director of the camp to talk. At the time we were all giggling, laughing, joking, because, I don’t know, it was this man who was talking to us about adolescent sexuality, but in a very roundabout way,” Rachael recalled. “We didn’t have specifics like, ‘no you cannot have sex,’ ‘you can’t perform oral sex’, that kind of thing. It was, ‘your clothes can’t come off’… which left everything very ambiguous.”
Sexually charged environments are often an outcome of historical institutional concerns about Jewish preservation and continuity, as described in New Voices Magazine’s previous investigation into youth group hookup culture. Family building and community sustainability have been key focuses of modern Jewish institutions following the Jewish National Population’s 1990 survey which revealed increased intermarriage rates, a discovery that led to a series of focus changes in youth programming. Procreation-focused initiatives like Birthright, fraught with stories of harassment, and acts of sexual misconduct defended by major Jewish figures all evidence the darker side of hypersexuality in Jewish institutional culture. In the absence of proper education or explanations of consent in youth programming, pressures compound for LGBTQ+ children, causing damage while ostracizing them from a premise of camp as a place of safe sexual exploration.
The approaches that camps have taken towards discussing and monitoring sexual activity between campers range from the laissez faire to the non-existent, particularly in terms of recognizing, educating, and supporting queer or questioning campers. At some camps, campers and counselors would call night-time monitors “sagol patrol,” sagol being the Hebrew for “purple,” a tongue-in-cheek reference to boys as blue and girls as red, with staff on the lookout for any afterhours mixing. The binary colors paint a picture of how heteronormative sexual monitoring at camp can be.
“I think it took me a really long time to realize my sexuality because camp was such an environment where it was so normal to snuggle your best friends or take a shower with them,” Rachael of Ramah New England remembered. The assumption of same-gender affection being exclusively platonic is a key example of camp heteronormativity, causing confusion for young campers questioning their sexuality but lacking the proper education or opportunities to articulate their experiences and needs.
“There wasn’t really a ton of oversight within our cabin, which at the time felt really fun,” recalled Jamie*, who attended JCC Ranch Camp in Elbert, Colorado. “Counselors would sort of roll their eyes if we kissed or grabbed at each other, but I think to them we were just little girls showing affection. We didn’t know any better and no one had really told us girls could be sexual with each other but in hindsight, I guess that was what was going on.” Camper-centric discussions of consent and boundaries are extremely recent developments in Jewish communal discourse, and still maintain a deeply heterosexual slant.
According to interviews, many camps across the United States have been operating on a ‘silence is golden’ policy, in which staff members were aware of and, at times, encouraging sexual activity between children under their care without adequately providing education, guidance, or support for campers to process their experiences. Leniency towards heterosexual activity was usually coupled with a lack of support for and even outright neglect of queer children in respect to both sexual activity and emotional health.
“Counselors never brought up sex, but often found themselves in the position of sex educators without the training to have those conversations,” said Alyx Bernstein of her experience as a camper at Ramah Berkshires. Bernstein, who later worked at Ramah Nyack, also reflected on her time as a staff specialist. “I did not receive training on discussing sex with campers beyond a general don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy,” she said, recalling however, that Nyack offered “some consent training, both in respect to campers and other staff.”
In some settings, conversations about safer sex are had among staff, but not explicitly supported by administration. According to interviews, internal institutional discussions around whether or not camps should provide safer sex materials such as condoms were sometimes contradictory, with some staff feeling that policy guidelines were in need of revisiting.
”There were no basic ‘here’s what you need to know about respect’ talks, it’s like they know about it but pretend not to know about it,” Ori Tsameret said of his time on staff at Oregon’s B’nai B’rith Camp.
“Even at that age it wasn’t like I had any real understanding of my sexuality in general, but it all goes much quicker than you’re really ready for, because that’s what the camp environment is. It’s like, ‘who are you gonna kiss, who are you going to the dance with’, all those kinds of things,” said Syd Brown, who attended Noam Masorti Youth Camp in Wales. “So not just in terms of like, whether my sexuality was being gay or being straight, just having sexuality as a concept was just sort of thrown at me, and I don’t think I was fully ready for it.”
From Neglect to Abuse
Queer youth have not been afforded the same privileges of unabashed exploration and acceptance as their straight peers. LGBTQ+ campers are nonetheless socially expected to keep pace, forcing them to either hide their queer identities or comply with tropes of hypersexuality, often at the cost of their own comfort and safety.
According to interviews, LGBTQ+ campers contend with the high pressure to engage in sexual activity in silence. When talks about sexual boundaries and explanations of were present, they were usually catered towards heterosexual campers or left genderless, absent any explicit mentions of same-gender relationships. “I was never particularly impressed by how we handled sex as a staff, I don’t even know if it was an official training, but it was at least an announcement by our boss… they had kind of a ‘don’t ask don’t tell’ attitude for it,” Ori Tsameret said. “There was nothing for queer campers.”
The assumption of romantic violence as exclusively heterosexual also makes it more difficult for counselors to consider that same-gender assault may be occurring at camp and requires the same attention.
Rebecca Weisse, a former camper from Camp Gan Israel in Orlando, Florida described feeling pressured by friends to engage sexually with her bunkmate who was “curious”. Weisse also recalls being constantly encouraged not to be “uptight”. She was told that should “enjoy the situation” because of her homosexuality.
“The way I was expected to react to that was the opposite of how I actually felt. Girls in my cabin would have been so excited if a boy had shown interest in them the way my bunkmate did to me, but all I was was scared,” Weisse said. Queer stereotypes and camp hypersexuality became a damaging combination that Weisse noted as a distressingly formative moment in her queer identity.
These instances have rarely been recognized as acts of sexual harassment or violence due to their queerness. Even when campers did recognize their experiences as assault, some who attempted to report it described being dismissed by camp staff.
Rahm Shoshana, a former camper at Olin-Sang-Ruby Union Institute (OSRUI), a URJ camp in Wisconsin, described an ongoing pattern of same-gender assault by one of his bunkmates. “It was in the camp bunk, where we were sleeping…I went to use the bathroom and the kid, he went in and he locked the door. Then he went up to me and immediately kissed me and I was like wow, I did not expect this at 3:00 AM. I thought, oh that’s weird, why are you doing that?” he said. “Each night that would happen and eventually, half way through, I was like, this is not what I want to do.”
When Shoshana approached members of staff for help, they gave no support. “I was like, why is nothing happening? I told a counselor and nothing changed? And I think throughout that summer, I always thought it was my fault, cause I wasn’t told…you aren’t evil for being involved in that, it’s not your fault,” he said.
Shoshana was not aware of any routes of action or care for campers experiencing sexual violence. “I felt that I was not supported at all, and I felt that when I would share my story with people they would be like, ‘oh are you sure that happened?’ What do you mean ‘am I sure’? That happened to me.”
OSRUI administrators declined to comment on this allegation.
These painful and traumatic experiences at camp often manifest in future relationships and sexual encounters. Jamie* described how her experiences at JCC Ranch Camp conditioned her to accept unwanted sexual attention because of her sexuality. “When I was on staff, I was meant to be excited any time anyone showed interest in me, like I should be thankful if a straight girl wanted to pull down my top and make out with me because at least I was getting some play. I was assaulted by a camp friend years later, but I only really realized it was assault after a few months. At the time I felt like I had to because she was showing me attention.”
Jamie recalled how her relationship to sexual violence was complicated by camp heteronormativity. “I knew we were separated from the boys so we couldn’t hook up, so I assumed everything within our cabin or within Banot village was fine,” she said. “It’s taken years for me to undo that mindset of binary safety.”
Alyx Bernstein, a former camper at Ramah Berkshires, echoed this delayed reaction to sexual violence. “It took me until I was twenty to realize what happened to me at camp was sexual harassment. I didn’t know what that meant when I was at camp. I didn’t know it wasn’t normal to consistently have my boundaries and my body violated without my consent. Our counselors never did anything serious to cut out the harassment, and we never bothered to tell anyone because it was just ‘boys being boys.’”
Rahm Shoshana, now in his early twenties, is still coping with the fallout from the assaults he experienced at camp. “Even up to a few weeks ago, I would have nightmares about doors locking and people locking doors,” he said. “I think there’s a way to make it where people who are assaulted aren’t scared, a way to have them share their stories and feel safe… but being assaulted is the worst feeling. I can’t even put into words how unsafe you feel, it’s such a scary experience.”
Tradition, tradition
“I remember bawling my eyes out at our camp’s ‘Counselor Wedding’. I thought it was a real ceremony and we were actually seeing a man and a woman get married, so I was really moved, but to see such a heteronormative event that young and to be that emotionally invested in it is insane to look back on now,” said Sarah Rawlings, a former camper from Shwayder Camp of Temple Emanuel in Denver, Colorado.
Most camps separate boys and girls into individual villages with independent facilities, including bathrooms, showers, bunks, and changing rooms. Call and response chants that divided into boys and girls, ‘Shabbat walks’ encouraging heterosexual coupling, the stark relationships between brother and sister cabins; relationships, activities, and environments are often all defined within the parameters of a gendered divide. Because tent or cabin bonding is usually prioritized, sometimes even meals, rest time, and community building activities are ‘boys only’ or ‘girls only’.
Rahm Shoshana recalled the frustration and confusion that emerged with every Shabbat walk at OSRUI. “I never wanted to walk with a girl,” he recalled. “I was asked a lot by girls and I was like, I don’t want to, I’d rather go with a guy… In my head, I was like, why do I only want to go with guys? Then three years later I was like, that’s why!”
These binary camp customs exclude and further complicate the place of queer campers, especially transgender campers. Binary tropes maintained over decades have come to define how campers view themselves within the space of camp. Non-binary and gender non-conforming children not only have to navigate their emerging awareness of their own identities, but the complicated and archaic notions of gender that define camp infrastructure and traditions. These structures implicitly communicate to young gender non-conforming, transgender, and non-binary campers whether or not they belong.
Syd Brown of London’s Noam Masorti Youth Camp recalled how that gendered divide impacted their relationships to fellow campers, even before they came out as non-binary. “Friendships were very gendered,” they said. “Obviously being with all girls would encourage close friendships with other girls, which created this all encompassing structure of being divided, or really binary.”
Brown noted the stress around dressing for Shabbat, when many campers find themselves confronting highly gendered dress codes, clearly stated on packing lists and sometimes rigidly enforced. “When I think about my gender, a lot of possibly traumatic experiences, binary experiences blur into one,” they said. “I do remember issues with clothing that we had to wear for Shabbat and stuff… getting excited about what you were going to wear was such a gendered experience, and sexuality always came into that too, it was like ‘who’s going to be looking at you’.”
“I would always dread Shabbat. My mom always packed me dresses from Target that I’d pretend to lose or give to the girls in my cabin so I could wear jeans instead,” said Ivy Lawsen, who attended Camp Tel Noar in the early 2000s. “When I was like 10, one of our shlichim (Israeli counselors), gave me his fedora to wear for services, just sort of popped it on my head. I have no idea if he knew how much I needed that awful hat,” they said. “I just felt so butch and so cool in that moment.”
Those first experiences of celebrated gender non-conformity at camp can be significant for young queer Jews who cannot explore their identities at home. Ben Simon, an alumnus of Camp Young Judaea Texas, described that euphoria the first time they had their nails painted for services by enthusiastic members of their sister cabin. “The way that I didn’t have to beg to be included, the girls asked me if I wanted my nails painted and it wasn’t a huge deal, I could just say yes and it didn’t really mean anything. That was huge for me in hindsight, being able to fall out of those really strict lines, even if it was just for a night.”
Simon’s experience of gender euphoria was echoed in stories of queer campers across the nation who, despite a perilous environment, often find each other in their first LGBTQ+ friend groups – sometimes before they’ve even come out or realized their own gender identities or sexuality.
Ori Tsameret of B’nai B’rith Camp in Oregon was one of a large cohort of queer campers. “Camp is where I first came out, it was good in that way I guess. It was also the first time I was around that many queer men,” he said. “There were a lot of queer boys in our cabin. It was really refreshing.”
Finding chosen families and queer kinship often lasts beyond the summer and into campers’ futures. “I don’t know how, but as the years have gone on, pretty much everyone in my camp friend group has come out in some way shape or form,” said Jacob, a former camper from Camp Shwayder in Colorado, who asked to use only a first name. “It’s really cool because we still share all these journeys with each other.”
In recent years, some camps have attempted to break out of gendered, heteronormative rituals: camp songs have been changed to omit gendered references, ‘Boy’s Village’ and ‘Girls Village’ have been renamed in some locations. Camp Towanga in California offers an ‘all-gender’ cabin alongside comprehensive steps to educate their campers and destigmatize queer identies, an exception to the rule of traditionally binary camp environments.
Changes to the binary gender systems of camp are not only steps towards inclusion of queer campers, but towards a growing reckoning with broader cultural sexism and misogyny.
“Camp really plays up how the boys’ sports are the more interesting ones, the boys are doing something funny – their validation is very highly valued,” recalled Rachael of Ramah New England. “I’m personally not attracted to men, but when I was at camp I kissed them, and that was purely based on like that social sexual pressure, that validation of men.”
Alyx Bernstein, a trans woman who spent her time at Ramah Berkshires in the boys cabin, remembered how gender divides impacted her early friendships and went hand in hand with sexism. “Homophobic bullying enforced a rigid social separation where being genuinely friends with a girl – especially one who wasn’t ‘cool’ or ‘attractive’ – was just not acceptable. I spent my camp years with some girls who are now my closest friends, but never felt comfortable being friends with them.”
Strict separations also can allow sexism to go unchallenged. “Young men believe they have a permission not afforded to the rest of the community to get away with, when the mood strikes them, acting however they want… [with] acts of bullying, humiliation, and discrimination, often obscured from view by the glowing charm of their popularity,” wrote Adam Zemel, a former camper and staff member at URJ Camp Harlem, detailing Jewish summer camp’s problematically prized, energetic Jewish masculine archetype. According to interviews, fighting misogyny at camp is inextricably tied to the comfort and safety of LGBTQ+ youths, as the preferential mentality towards cisgender, straight boys devalues and disenfranchises those outside of that demographic.
“[There was a] general atmosphere of homophobic and transphobic bullying that was present all the time during my camp experience,” Bernstein recalled. “If you were a boy who spent a lot of time with girls in a platonic context, or weren’t super manly, or wore something feminine, you would get bullied. It gave me a lot of shame around my gender, my sexuality, and my body that took me a lot of time to move past.”
Despite growing awareness of the impacts of camp-wide misogyny and heteronormativity, for some alumni, this reckoning is too little too late.
“We used to use phrases like calling each other ‘gay’, you know, as an insult. But it wasn’t that gayness was negative, there just wasn’t any room for it,” recalled Syd Brown. “A lot of my sadness and confusion of growing up was that I wasn’t given an opportunity to think about my identities in ways that would have been a bit more helpful, and camp was a big part of that.”
Don’t Leave Me Out
“Camp is the ‘yes and’ in improv. Saying no or being indifferent to something doesn’t really work, not because anyone is making you do anything, but because you want so badly to be a part of the group,” said Rebecca Short, who attended Ramah in the Rockies. She was in the closet while at camp. Her decision to keep participating in heterosexual sexual activity was not because she felt forced, but because she desperately wanted to fit in. Instead of feeling comfortable enough to come out, like many others interviewed, Rebecca fell prey to a culture of compulsory heterosexuality, based on fears of isloation and otherness.
Fear of exclusion was a common emotion in our interviews, but more striking was the almost universal sentiment of queer campers not wanting to ruin everyone else’s fun. Campers struggling with their sexuality felt their identities were inherently disruptive to the order of camp; because of the hyperpositive environment, many queer campers have felt that their emotional revelations might clash with camp culture, or worse, provoke anger from campers or counselors. Many LGBTQ+ former campers expressed that a primary feeling of their queer beginnings at camp was guilt.
To not engage with a camp song, to hide from the action during capture the flag, or to balk at requisite sexual pressure from one’s cabin mates can result in feelings of exclusion from the greater community. As Lilah*, who attended Northern California’s Camp Ramah, put it, “not playing along means you don’t play at all.”
Lilah’s experiences of camp exclusion developed throughout her time as a bisexual camper. She recalled an exceptionally cold reception from her cabin when she told them she was bisexual. “The biggest issue was that our brother bunk would have one boy without a date. But that made me feel like I was single handedly ruining this kid’s camp experience so I stopped talking about it and just went with him,” she said.
Lilah also noted the absence of support from administrative and bunk staff.
“With the exception of one amazing counselor, everyone looked at me like I wasn’t safe to be around. I didn’t really get any support so I just didn’t mention it again. I wasn’t out at home yet and I was so worried someone would tell my parents, so I just stopped,” she said.
Rahm Shoshana remembered how staff reacted to gender expression that fell outside the norm at OSRUI. “I wanted to put on nail polish,” he said. “When I did, all the guy counselors were angry at me.”
Ori Tsameret also recalled a lack of support from the camp staff. “The counselors mostly ignored [my sexuality]. I actually remember one of the counselors said something nasty about me, and I think that was more because we had a very casual relationship between counselors and campers, which is fine until it isn’t.” he said. “The fact that I can even remember that means it really imprinted into my mind.”
As both substitute parents and young role models, counselors often embody everything campers aspire to, wielding a tremendous amount of social and emotional influence over the children in their care. Many queer former campers remarked on how their counselors were pivotal to their summers, including noting that ‘counselor crushes’ were among their first sexual awakenings.
“I was head over heels for my head counselor,” remembered Rebecca Short. “Genuinely anything I could do to get her attention or make her like me, I would do. It’s such an isolated place, you’re with girls you’ve never met, and then there’s this older girl who’s so cool and so nice and you just want to be as close to her as possible.” Coldness or disregard from counselors can be an even more painful reaction for queer campers to receive. When that coldness is laced with homophobia or transphobia, the results can be debilitating.
Asher* faced a negative reaction from a staff member when they came out as non-binary at Ramah in the Rockies in the early 2000s. “I was always having to remind one of my counselors about my pronouns, I was always at odds with her and it felt like she was always trying to find excuses to leave me out. It was the complete opposite of what camp should be honestly, and if my friends hadn’t helped me remind her or given me support when I was feeling so alone, I probably would have left.” Though they finished out the summer, this marked Asher’s last year at camp, a loss representative of hundreds of ostracized LGBTQ+ campers across the country.
Sometimes, the idea of disappointing a counselor or spoiling a cabin dynamic resigns young queer Jews to remain closeted. Expectations around heterosexual activity can subsequently serve as a wedge between well-intended counselors and their queer or questioning campers.
Rachael remembered some of those instances in which counselors would engage campers in heteronormative, hypersexual conversations. “Sometimes you’d have a counselor who didn’t have great boundaries and would ask you details about these things… maybe in a supportive way but also in a ‘I want to know information’ kind of way,” she said. “So that perpetuated that environment of like, ‘Oh, my bunkmates who are hooking up with other people, they’re getting more attention from counselors.’ And everyone sort of wants that.”
Counselors’ investment in the sexual activity of campers has often been seen as benign enthusiasm. However, our interviewees noted that some staff members, sometimes barely older than the campers themselves, devoted more energy to the campers who had ‘gossip’ to share or stories to tell, particularly if that gossip revolved around a significant other or heteronormative sexual exploration.
“I was in a cute little camper relationship with a girl when I was 15,” Jem Sugnet from B’nai B’rith in Oregon recalled. “It was something everyone knew about including the staff, and at the end of the session when they passed out awards… I got ‘Lover Boy’,… it was very clear that everyone knew about it and no one was trying to stop it.”
Recent LGBTQ+ staff members interviewed vocalized a passion for changing this norm. “When I became staff, we made a point of trying to be as inclusive as possible… I think the kids really felt that, or I hope they did,” Lilah expressed. However, the experiences of LGBTQ+ campers who have been unconsciously or knowingly excluded by staff seems to currently outnumber the efforts of these individual counselors.
Expanding the Circle of Queer Inclusion & Protection
“We have to completely rethink how we staff summer camps. They can’t just be a place for alumni to have a fun summer while keeping an eye on some kids,” said Alyx Bernstein. “We need to be giving counselors far more extensive and ongoing training in dealing with queer and trans youth, in sexual harassment, in consent, in sex education, and in much more. We need to be equipping them better to help their kids thrive. Without a massive overhaul in staff training, quality, and professionalism, camp will never stop being a place where abuse happens.”
The Jewish community’s reckoning with LGBTQ+ inclusion comes alongside a wave of anti-transgender legislation that has rocked the country and directly impacted the lives of transgender Americans in thirty three states, especially children. Bans on gender-affirming treatment in minors, mandatory exclusion from sport, and restrictions on personal privacy have battered the safety and humanity of trans individuals and serve as a stark reminder of what is at stake for LGBTQ+ youth across the country.
There are educators, administrators, and camps, however, who are listening to this urgent call for action. Every year, a growing number of steps are taken across the country to ensure camp truly functions as a community for all.
The creation of Camp Ga’avah, a Long Island based camp run specifically for LGBTQ+ kids, and the ever growing Keshet LGBTQ+ Family camp, run out of Camp Tawonga show national progress in efforts to better protect and nurture LGBTQ+ youth. With all-year networking, support systems, and social events, space for Jewish queer children and their supporters is becoming more tangible.
Adam Zemel, a former counselor and seasoned supervisor at URJ’s Camp Harlam noted the changes his camp was making towards stronger inclusion. “Harlam took huge strides in desexualizing the culture, working to uproot structural sexism, providing support for LGBTQ+ campers, and generally combating the most obvious and some less obvious effects of toxic masculinity on Harlam’s culture.” Zemel also spoke about the professional team that manages the policy process around Harlam’s “open and safe” commitment to camper inclusion. He cited a groundbreaking moment in 2017, in which two transgender individuals were accepted to live in the cabin that aligned with their gender identity, a first for Harlam.
Some other institutions have undergone comprehensive policy change in recent years. The URJ’s Crane Lake Camp, in keeping with the greater URJ institution, adopted a movement-wide “Resolution on the Rights of Transgender and Gender Non-Conforming People” in 2015. Crane Lake also boasts a wealth of resources and best practice guides alongside clear action points for trans campers seeking information on their privacy, safety, and inclusion at camp.
As actions are taken across the nation to promote inclusion in Jewish summer camps, administrators are also reckoning with legacies of damage and exclusion.
Rabbi Eliav Bock, Director of Ramah in the Rockies, reflected on the traumatic experiences expressed by interviewees with sadness. “We strive to have an open community where people can express themselves as they are. We strive for radical inclusivity and I think have a pretty good track-record of this. At the same time, we all make mistakes, myself included,” he said. “But when I realize my mistake, I apologize and know that I need to try harder.”
Other interviewees emphasized that apologies must be bolstered with policy change. “If a camp is reaching the point where a camper no longer feels comfortable attending camp because of how staff or other campers treat them, that is not just a mistake. It’s an institutional failing,” said Alyx Bernstein, a former camper and staff member of Ramah affiliated camps. “Apologies are not going to fix that. There has to be a committed attempt to admit there is a problem, not just that a mistake was made, to make change at a staffing and policy level so that it does not happen again, and to make restitution to the people Ramah has hurt. Otherwise we’re just going to stay in this cycle where Ramah continues to fail its campers and staff.”
Bock reiterated his camp’s stance on inclusion and community. “Ramah should be a place of radical inclusivity for any Jewish child who wants to join us,” he said. Ramah of the Rockies now provides single stall, gender neutral restrooms, training on inclusivity for all staff, and maintains a relationship with former senior staff member Rafi Daugherty as an informal advisor on LGBTQ+ issues. According to Bock, camp leaders have attended training sessions by Keshet and Moving Traditions over the years, though Ramah of the Rockies has never done formal programming or consulting with either.
Rafi Daugherty himself spoke to the importance of educating administrators on LGBTQ+ issues. “It doesn’t make sense to implement structural changes if you don’t have the understanding,” he said.
Daugherty also specified specific areas of change that have gone neglected or under-researched by administrators. “One of the biggest issues is trans and non-binary youth not having a place where they can sleep,” he said. “That’s a place where a lot of camps get stuck, in not knowing how to house their trans and non-binary population in a way that would be safe and inclusive.” Daugherty also suggested camps maintain strong connections to their local LGBTQ+ organizations and activists. “Every camp should have a Rafi they can talk to and figure out what tack to take with various things.”
Interviews with other senior level administration revealed that while the majority of camp leaders are interested in change, only a handful have undertaken real shifts in policy.
As directors and administrative teams ease towards cosmetic inclusion in the form of pride pins and rainbow merchandise, on-the-ground cultural change is often being pioneered by counselors and administrators who are themselves former campers who experienced these struggles firsthand.
One of these young leaders is 24 year old Assistant Director of JCC Ranch Camp Katelyn Skeen. A camper-turned-administrator, she spoke candidly about the realistic approach she maintains to sexual cultures at Ranch Camp. “We know that camp is a place of innate exploration,” Skeen said. “We ensure that campers feel comfortable asking questions, create boundaries, learn about consent, and engage with their peers in a developmentally appropriate way.” Ranch Camp has written trans inclusion into policy, employed resources from the Trevor Project to combat homophobia, and has revamped their inclusion practices over the past five years.
“[Our sessions] are evaluated every year for relevancy and we change what we need to based on what’s going on in the world and our staff feedback,” Skeen said. Ranch Camp has also developed a mandatory inclusion training that is led by a paid transgender member of the JCC Denver community and currently partner with local organizations to upkeep their training programs.
Adopting inclusion guides, implementing protective policy, better training staff, holding focus groups of LGBTQ+ former campers, listening to parents advocating for their LBGTQ+ children, and responding to the need for camp cultural change with grace and enthusiasm are essential steps that institutions can take to better protect queer youth. Camps must also increase awareness about same-gender sexual violence, which can be differently or less visible than heterosexual sexual violence, and train staff in supporting campers when situations of harm, harassment, or abuse occur.
Despite some policy changes at a handful of camps, gender inclusion and LGBTQ+ acceptance are still far from mainstream in Jewish camps across the nation, influenced by the greater Jewish community. Many camps still take their cues from their congregational affiliation, and are often reliant on individual synagogue leaders to take an active stance against homophobia, transphobia, and misogyny in their own congregations.
Rafi Daugherty again spoke to how his experiences as a queer, transgender man have been impacted by his relationship to his Jewish community. “Because I came from an ultra-Orthodox background, I came out as queer almost in spite of my Jewish upbringing,” he said. “It’s been very meaningful along the way to combine my two identities as queer and Jewish, and I would want young LGBTQ+ people to feel the same way… [that] there are spaces for them, that there are rituals that include them, that people are taking the time to think about these questions.” He emphasized change beyond summer camps. “Having rabbis who talk about inclusion from the bimah, those are all really important things.”
Until these steps are taken, the comfort and safety of young queer Jews in institutional environments remains weak. Former campers expressed a deep dissatisfaction with the broader Jewish community’s tenuous acceptance of LGBTQ+ people. Rahm Shoshana remarked that queer existence in Jewish spaces is “exhausting”, stating, “I wish there was a part of Jewish culture that was more open for sharing these stories, cause it would only make us stronger, it would only make me prouder to be Jewish… but now I’m like, really? I’m Jewish and they don’t care?”
Syd Brown echoed these sentiments, summing up their disappointment in the Jewish community’s relationship to LGBTQ+ issues. “We’re even more at risk in the Jewish community because people don’t want to be aware of us.”
Camp remains a formative location that has helped develop the identities of its attendants, even among those who experienced harm. “Camp helped me a lot because it showed me there are interesting ways to connect to your Judaism that aren’t rigid and it definitely was the place that gave me an interest in my Jewish identity,” said Syd Brown. However, in the hindsight of adulthood and after acquiring a vocabulary to describe their camp experiences, their rose tinted glasses have come off. “Sometimes I think, ‘how was that allowed?’ But it’s a shame, because I think it was really what made me the person I am today, but so much of it was really awful.”
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For camp administrators seeking ways to promote inclusion at their institutions: https://www.keshetonline.org/resources/inclusion-guide-for-summer-camps/
For LGBTQ+ campers seeking community: https://www.movingtraditions.org/programs/tzelem/
If you currently experiencing harassment or abuse in your Jewish workplace or communal space, please contact Ta’amod’s free and confidential helpline powered by the Jewish Coalition Against Domestic Abuse (JCADA) at 1-833-760-0330 or submit a confidential message to http://taamod.org/call-line/. You can also call the RAINN National Sexual Assault hotline at 800.656.HOPE (4673).
