Playing Indian at Jewish Summer Camp: Lessons on Tribalism, Assimilation, and Spirituality

ABSTRACT

Indian play at North American Jewish summer camps offered three sets of overlapping lessons. First, by providing activities created and understood as respite from urban pressures, including donning and removing so-called primitive faux-tribal identities, camps reinforced Jewish urban, modernist values and virtues. Second, as Indian play recapitulated the colonial process that had displaced actual Indigenous people to make room for the White, European settlers—Jews included—it provided Jews a vehicle to perform assimilatory and nationalistic sentiments. Finally, playing Indian offered camp staff members techniques for imparting visceral and emotional engagement with forms of spirituality they thought campers could absorb, particularly ones that overlapped with Jewish notions of Creation.

KEYWORDS:

• Summer camp
• Jewish
• primitive
• performance
• nature religion
• childhood

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

David S. Koffman

David S. Koffman, the J. Richard Shiff Chair for the Study of Canadian Jewry, is an associate professor in the Department of History at York University and the associate director of York’s Israel & Golda Koschitzky Centre for Jewish Studies, as well as editor in-chief of the journal Canadian Jewish Studies/Études juives canadiene.