"Yiddish Pills" and Summer Thrills: Reconstituting Yiddishism at Camp Hemshekh

In person and on Zoom

In the decades directly following the Holocaust, Jewish leaders anxiously debated how to preserve and produce what they considered authentic Jewish culture, fearful that upward mobility and suburbanization threatened the integrity of Jewish life in America. In their searches for solutions to the problem of cultural decline, post-war Jews came to see residential summer camps as panaceas to their communal ills, constructing deeply educational and ideological camp programs with an eye towards collective transformation. Yiddishists — Jews who dedicated their efforts to the future of Yiddish culture and speech in America — not only set the groundwork for Jewish educational camping to take off, but also participated in this wider phenomenon of anxiety over the state of post-war Jewry. And yet despite their vital roles, Yiddishists are often left out of the story of Jewish camping, education, and identity-building in post-war America. In this talk, Sandra Fox will discuss how the founders and leaders of Camp Hemshekh embraced the sleepaway camp as a potential cure for Yiddish cultural and linguistic decline, and how the generations at the camp created a new purpose for and style of Yiddishism for the post-war moment.

This evening’s program is the second in a series of programs held in conjunction with YIVO’s current digitization of the Jewish Labor and Political Archives (JLPA). Consisting of nearly 200 collections encompassing 3.5 million pages of archival documents that were collected by the Bund Archives, the JLPA forms the world’s most comprehensive body of material pertaining to Jewish political activity in Europe and the United States.

This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.

You may also like the following events from YIVO Institute for Jewish Research:

• This Tuesday, 16th September, 05:00 pm, Polish Jewish Collecting and Museums, 1891–1941 in New York, New York
• This Wednesday, 17th September, 05:00 pm, Taking Yiddish Science Global: YIVO’s Foreign Branches, 1925-1994 in New York, New York
• This Thursday, 18th September, 07:00 pm, The Great Dictionary of the Yiddish Language in New York

Also check out other Trips & Adventurous Activities in New York.