‘The Hills Are Alive with the Sound of Music’: Musical Theatre at Girls’ Jewish Summer Camps in Maine, USA

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Notes

1. This work was supported by the Starr Fellowship in Jewish Studies at Harvard University in Spring 2013 and enabled by Kay Shelemay, Sara Hutcheon (Schlesinger Library), Nancy Lewisky (Maine Jewish Archives Project), and David M. Freidenreich (Colby College). I thank Wendy Belcher, Meghan Brodie, Judah Cohen, Jill Dolan, Michelle Dvoskin, Judith Hamera, Maureen Jackson, Wendy Jacobs, Robyn Kroll, Carol Oja, Louise Packard, Marcie Pachino, Deborah Paredez, Steve Runk, Megan Sandberg-Zakian, Sara Warner, Charlotte Weisenberg, Amy Wlodarski, Joshua Wolf, and Tamsen Wolff for reading drafts and/or sharing their thoughts with me, as well as the directors and staff, campers and alumnae of Skylemar, Fernwood, Tapawingo, Walden, and Tripp Lake Camp. Previous versions were presented as talks for the Old Dominion Fellows at Princeton University; Duke University; the University of Iowa; the AHRC-funded Amateur Creativity Symposium at the University of Warwick, UK; and the Jewish Studies group of the American Musicological Society. I also want to thank the anonymous readers for CTR.

2. Summer stock is the exception. See Martha S. LoMonaco, Summer Stock! An American Theatrical Phenomenon (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).

3. From a critical perspective, girls’ Jewish summer camps practice what Megan Boler calls ‘peer policing’, a form of ‘pastoral power’ over emotions, which ‘capitalizes on such structures of feeling as shame, humiliation, and desire for conformity’. Megan Boler, Feeling Power: Emotions and Education (New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 47.

4. ‘About the Leonard Bernstein Collection’, Library of Congress <http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/bernstein/lbpg01.html> [accessed 11 March 2013]. Bernstein and Green later teamed with Betty Comden (born Basya Cohen) to write On the Town (1944) and Wonderful Town (1954). See ‘Summer Camp Influence on Broadway’, Summer Camp Culture <http://www.summercampculture.com/documentary-highlights-summer-camp-influence-on-broadway/> [accessed 27 February 2016].

5. See Stephen J. Whitfield, In Search of American Jewish Culture (Hanover: Brandeis University Press, 1999).

6. See Stuart Hecht, Transposing Broadway: Jews, Assimilation, and the American Musical (New York: Palgrave, 2011).

7. Amy Sales and Leonard Saxe, ‘How Goodly Are thy Tents’: Summer Camps as Jewish Socializing Experiences (Hanover: Brandeis University Press, 2004). See A Worthy Use of Summer: Jewish Summer Camping in America, ed. by Jenna Weissman Joselit with Karen S. Mittelman (Philadelphia: National Museum of American Jewish History, 1993).

8. Their father was a well-known rabbi and their sister, Rebekah Kohut, was married to one of the founders of the Conservative Movement. Annie Pollard and Daniel Soyer, Emerging Metropolis: New York Jews in the Age of Immigration, 1840–1920 (New York: New York University Press, 2012), pp. 85–89. Also see Melissa R. Klapper, Jewish Girls Coming of Age in America, 1860–1920 (New York: New York University Press, 2005).

9. Helen Herz Cohen, who was Walden’s director for 57 years, from 1938–95, described in her diary as a staff member in 1932 the process of collecting the girls’ ‘city clothes and jewelry’ at the beginning of the summer. (Camp Walden archives, Schlesinger Library.)

10. Ron Bancroft, ‘Maine’s Crown Jewel’, Bangor Daily News, 1 July 2012 <http://bangordailynews.com/2012/07/01/opinion/maines-crown-jewel/> [accessed 5 December 2012].

11. Abigail A. Van Slyck, A Manufactured Wilderness: Summer Camps and the Shaping of American Youth, 1890–1960 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).

12. Ibid., p. 69.

13. Leslie Paris, Children’s Nature: The Rise of the American Summer Camp (New York: New York University Press, 2008), p. 63.

14. Charlotte Weisenberg, unpublished telephone interview with the author, 20 January 2013.

15. Caroline Alpert, unpublished telephone interview with the author, 5 February 2013.

16. Jenny Effron, unpublished email correspondence with the author, 13 February 2013.

17. Ibid.

18. H. W. Gibson, Camp Management: A Manual for Camp Directors (Cambridge, MA: The Murray Printing Company, 1923), p. 174.

19. Ibid.

20. Splash, 1951 (Camp Walden Archives, Schlesinger Library).

21. Splash, 1960 (Camp Walden Archives, Schlesinger Library).

22. Amy Levere, unpublished telephone interview with the author, 8 February 2013. Fiddler opened in 1964 and closed in July 1972.

23. Eric Yanoff, unpublished telephone interview with the author, 26 February 2013.

24. ‘Activities: Theatre’, Tripp Lake Camp <http://www.tripplakecamp.com/activities/theatre.php> [accessed 15 January 2013].

25. Alex Malanych, unpublished interview with the author, 17 July 2012.

26. Ibid.

27. Levere, ‘Interview’.

28. Since the theatre staff turns over more frequently than the camp director, she approves the cast list with an eye toward fairness. Kathy Jonas, unpublished interview with the author, 17 July 2012.

29. Larissa Cahill, unpublished interview with the author, 18 July 2012.

30. Having a rigid daily schedule at summer camps was a change introduced in the mid-twentieth century; early camps’ programs were relatively unstructured. Van Slyck, A Manufactured Wilderness, pp. 48–52.

31. Rym Kechlacha, unpublished interview with the author, 17 July 2012.

32. Yanoff, ‘Interview’.

33. Cahill, ‘Interview’; and Noémi Wolf, unpublished interview with the author, 26 March 2016.

34. See Jesse D. Ruskin and Timothy Rice, ‘The Individual in Musical Ethnography’, Ethnomusicology, 56.2 (2012), 299–327.

35. See Raymond Knapp, The American Musical and the Formation of National Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).

36. Wolf, Interview, 26 March 2016.

37. Emma, correspondence with the author, July 2012. Most of the girls to whom I spoke and who wrote me notes did not share their last names.

38. Correspondence with the author, July 2012.

39. Grace, correspondence with the author, July 2012. Emphasis in original.

40. This phenomenon of summer camp musicals also takes place on makeshift stages at thousands of summer camps across the USA each summer, with girls or boys, or both religiously affiliated and not, sleepaway and day camps.

41. Levere, ‘Interview’.

42. Niki Harris, unpublished telephone interview with the author, 26 June 2016.