What’s Happening at the Flag Pole? Studying Camps as Institutions for Israel Education

ABSTRACT

Jewish overnight summer camp has been touted as an especially well-suited venue for Israel education. This article brings an institutional lens to test this proposition. Data come from the survey responses of 1,382 campers, CITs, and staff at 12 overnight and day camps. We find that Israel education does indeed occur almost anywhere at camp. At the same time, across a variety of camp settings, the outcomes produced by these features are variegated. Relative to other immersive experiences where young people encounter Israel, camp has much less additional impact on Israel engagement.

KEYWORDS:

• Canada
• Israel education
• sociology of institutions
• summer camp

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ A table of each of the factors and the items of which they are comprised is included in Appendix A. A matrix of the factors, items, and respective loading coefficients is included in Appendix B.

² Unlike the other factors, this factor relies heavily on the self-perception of the outcome (knowledge about Israel), rather than the outcome itself. Over the course of a number of studies, we have found this to be a stable proxy for obtaining a useful measure of participants’ level of knowledge. Qualitative research would make it possible to delve deeper into the actual content of this knowledge beyond self-perception.

³ “Involvement on social media” was not generated as its own factor; rather it was parsed out as an additional factor in order to be able to reflect on similar dimensions/expressions of Israel engagement to those who were included in our previous study of Israel engagement in the Toronto Jewish community.

⁴ Stars were assigned based on the results of the regression analysis to show the relative magnitude of the significance of each variable in the model. More stars indicate greater magnitude of significance. See Appendix C for regression data.