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“As they age, campers are tasked with more leadership opportunities and chances to represent their peers in front of the entire camp. It is our job as counselors to put them in the best position to succeed. As they started getting older and the stakes got higher, it became paramount that inclusion and collective participation be at the forefront of their experience.”
Read New Voices Magazine’s new series, “Bunk Tales: Jewish Camp Counselor Stories” for reflections from camp counselors across the Jewish camping world.
“As a counselor, the few words saying that I was a reason as to why their summer was the best have meant the world to me….Hearing those words come out of her mouth has been one of the highlights of my entire counselor experience.”
“As female counselors, my friends and I have often felt that we have had to work twice as hard to earn the respect that our male co-workers receive from campers and staff alike. While I wish that my campers won’t have to feel that way by the time they become counselors, I know it is very possible that they will. So I realized that the most important thing I could do in that moment was talk to my girls about the importance of unification.”
“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.”
“Still, the images—Portland tweens and Seattle teens and Polish and British and American and Israeli and Hungarian and Canadian staff singing their hearts out in languages familiar and foreign, skipping around with friends and strangers turned best friends, busting moves in sync or at random without blinking an eye—remains starkly etched in the crevices of my mind. Finding my place in this global network of people and identities reminds me just how much room there is under the umbrella of Judaism.”
“My kids and my faculty taught me that I am no less of a person because I am disabled. I am not alone in being disabled, and I am able to help others because of my disability not in spite of it.”
Ariel Wexler gives an on-the-ground report on the Black Lives Matter protests against police brutality in Washington D.C. throughout the historic summer of 2020.
New Voices Fellow Miriam Saperstein’s poem on the evening before Tu b’Av, the Jewish celebration of love.
Erev¹ Tu b’Av² twilight where flesh and sorrow tumble in fields not sure the end of each or where beginnings tremble moonlight scoops my armpits arches my back hands reach down to lift me from a shallow grave³ then I help another out of theirs we promise to return some night leave the longing earth […]