Notes on Camp

“To leave that idyll was to open a wound incapable of being healed.”

Kit Knuppel

Elan Kluger is a 22-year-old writer and founding editor of The New Critic from Michigan. He studied Intellectual History at Dartmouth College.

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Two months ago, unsatisfied by the water pressure of my dorm floor’s shower, I visited a different one, two floors down. The showerhead emanated the strange, repulsive smell of rust. I knew of only one other place with that smell…the showers at Camp Tavor, the Jewish summer camp in Three Rivers, Michigan I attended for seven summers.

The smell permeates the bathroom closest to the living area for the madatz (those going into 12th grade), and it was the hangout spot for me and the closest friends I have ever made: Milo, Eli, and Aitan. In order to evade a widely hated member of our age group, we would linger in the shower for hours, talking and joking around. On Fridays, after a lengthy afternoon shower, we would dress in nice clothes and walk down to the kikar (our grassy meeting area) for restful activities — prayer, if one was so inclined, or music. Then we would gather around the toren (flagpole), singing “HaTikvah” and “This Land is Your Land,” before heading up Shabbat Hill for more singing, this time a Chaim Nachman Bialik poem.

We would embrace before holding hands, walking back down Shabbat Hill to eat a delicious dinner, normally brisket. (Eli and I savored the holy sandwich designed by the mythic counselor Elliot. It consisted of challah, brisket, and barbecue sauce.) Then we would sing what remains to me some of the most beautiful music ever written, David Broza’s “Mitachat LaShamayim” — “Banu l’chaan, mitachat lashamayim, shnayim, cmo, zoog enayim” (we’ve come here, under the heavens, two of us, like a pair of eyes).

Most importantly, we sang “Shir L’Shalom” (“Song for Peace”):

“Let the sun rise, light up the morning,
The purest of prayers will not bring us back.
He whose candle was snuffed out and was buried in the dust,
Bitter crying won’t wake him up and won’t bring him back.
Nobody will bring us back from a dead and darkened pit —
Here, neither the victory cheer nor songs of praise will help.
So just sing a song for peace, don’t whisper a prayer,
Just sing a song for peace in a loud shout.” 

Yitzhak Rabin, former prime minister of Israel, was shot and killed shortly after singing “Shir L’Shalom” at a rally in 1995. His bloodstained lyrics are a metaphor for the death of Israel’s peace movement. With his assassination, the dream of a peaceful Israel was, at least to our American eyes at Tavor, delayed — delayed perhaps forever.

After singing “Shir L’Shalom,” we had Rikuddei Am (folk dancing), where even I, uncoordinated and lanky, would move and shake to Israeli music. Depending on the summer, I had my eye on a different girl, whom I would try to approach and talk to. Friday night, out of sight of the madrichim (counselors), was our chance to sneak about and finally earn that first kiss. For those not prowling in hopes of encountering the early fruits of youth, it was a time to bask in the collective effervescence of Tavor’s enchantment. The summer had the feeling of endlessness. When I think of joy, I think of those nights.

But I didn’t feel joy reminiscing about Tavor in my dorm shower. I felt mournful.

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I could have delayed leaving camp. Most of my friends now attend Tavor as counselors who create the kesem (magic) of camp for a new generation. My old camp pal Milo is dating someone he met at Tavor. Their life is like an endless summer camp; as I sat beside them and another Tavor friend in Chicago’s Millennium Park three weeks ago while listening to The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, it was as if no time had passed at all. But time had passed — after 12th grade, I stopped attending camp altogether, and while I maintained my friendships with Milo, Eli, and Aitan, I slipped away from the community I once had with everyone else.

The founders of Tavor and the larger movement of Habonim Dror (of which Tavor is a part) were Zionist. The movement’s goal was, and is, to gather the Jewish youth of the world and train them for socialist life on the kibbutz in the land of Israel. That goal structures everything about camp. We use Hebrew words for the farm (chava), kitchen (mitbach), and camper (chanich) — all because we will speak Hebrew in the land of Israel. We keep a farm with animals because we will keep a farm with animals in the land of Israel. We bond intensely with those in our age group (kvutzah) because we will live with our kvutzah in the land of Israel. We pool our money (kupah) because we are socialists and because we will share our money in the land of Israel. We sing the Israeli national anthem, “HaTikvah,” at the flagpole (toren) each evening because that is our national anthem. We hold special days for education about Israel (Yom Yisrael), have madrichim (counselors) from Israel (shlichim), and talk endlessly about hagshama (the realization of our values — i.e. moving to Israel).

We sing “Goodbye America, goodbye assimilation/We’re going to Israel to build the Jewish nation!” We are awoken once a session in the middle of the night for Aliyah Bet, in which we reenact the famous illegal entrance of thousands of Jews from calamitous Europe into Mandatory Palestine during and after World War II. An older camper leads us to sneak past counselors perched on roofs with strong flashlights, which, if shone on us, would send us back to Cyprus (or in our version, the flagpole).

But I attended Tavor at a time of change. Around the midpoint of my years there, the presence of anti-Zionism became palpable within the entire camp. A member of my oldest sister’s age group petitioned to remove Zionism as a “pillar” (a founding tenet) at one of Habonim’s national meetings. Aliyah Bet was eliminated. We stopped flying the Israeli flag, and we stopped singing the Israeli national anthem. For a couple of years, none of our counselors were Israeli. Enterprising counselors began to rewrite posters: “Politically we’re socialists/Culturally we’re Jews/We’re on our way to Zion with the youth movement for you” became “...We’re on our way to Tavor with the youth movement for you.” But we were already at Tavor!

While the staff at Tavor is small enough that any particularly charismatic counselor could sway the entire staff with an anti-Zionist opinion, I suspect the causes of these changes really had to do with shifts in the American Jewish left. Counselors are almost entirely college students, and in college — at NYU, Macalester, and Brown — they almost all join the furthest-left groups they can find. (Tavor is a socialist camp, after all.) At this time — the late post-Trump, pre-Covid era — being a Zionist was considered fundamentally illiberal.

Netanyahu, as we saw him at that time, was neither a supporter of the West Bank settlement movement nor a peacenik. His undecidedness and prevarications were the undecidedness and prevarications of an entire country. He perfectly represented Israel’s contradictions: unwilling to create peace, but not looking for war. Netanyahu — at least before October 7th — was the figurehead of a country that could not decide on a future. But while the world waited, settlers expanded their presence in the West Bank. The international left and the domestic American left — even the domestic American Jewish left — grew impatient with Netanyahu’s ambivalence and turned against Israel. My counselors took heed, which in turn shaped the mood at Tavor. However, their broader project — to make Tavor anti-Zionist — was made difficult because preparation for aliyah was the entire telos of the camp.

As a camper, I defended Israel. In middle school, I had become a budding right-winger by rejecting the stifling, conformist progressivism of Ann Arbor, Michigan, where I grew up. I started listening to right-wing podcasts, subscribed to National Review, and started debating my middle school teachers and peers. Back at camp, I was defending Israel from whom I saw as ultimately self-righteous, and self-righteously wrong, counselors.

These counselors had imported one of the most insufferable tendencies of 2010s progressivism: the war against gendered language. In this case, they tried to rewrite Hebrew, a language which they already judged the language of oppression. (A few years later, some counselors tried to start a Yiddish revival.) Gone — banned — were the gendered nouns of chanich (male camper) and chanicha (female camper). Every camper had to be called chanichol, a made-up, gender-neutral construction. Counselors, madrichim, which used the masculine plural, had to be called madrichimot, which added two plural endings, masculine and feminine, to the same word.

Gadfly that I was, I mocked these social justice warriors by pointing out their inability to change the most important words. Habonim (the builders) — the name of our movement — was in the masculine plural, I noted. We would have to be Habonimot to be truly inclusive.

Along with no longer flying the Israeli flag, we stopped flying the American flag and singing the American national anthem — to love the country of our birth was imperialist. This I was actually happy about. We continually failed to use the correct American flag-folding etiquette, so better not to fly it at all, I thought.

Overall, I was unhappy with the changes. But despite making a big deal of never returning to Tavor each year, I kept coming to camp every summer. How could I not? The people I loved were there. (It is not by accident that my first kiss, and first love, was someone I met at Tavor. Our first serious conversation revealed joint antagonism toward the counselors’ attempted changes to the Hebrew language.) I was even hired as a counselor in the summer going into college, despite my camp-wide reputation as a conservative.

I had good relations with most of my counselors, except for one: a nonbinary person who went by the enigmatic initials GK, which were said to stand for nothing. They pilloried me for screening Avi Nesher’s Image of Victory (a film produced half in Arabic and half in Hebrew about a kibbutz in 1948) for fellow counselors and for not dogmatically assenting to the revolutionary changes at Tavor. GK hadn’t even attended Tavor as a camper — they were only on staff as the partner of someone else, but that someone had gone home under mysterious circumstances, and the unbounded GK had decided to terrorize. They were, thankfully, the exception to the otherwise delightful staff. I think (or so I was told) that I was beloved by my campers. I still have a photo of myself carrying a very small middle schooler in a rucksack.

I waged a defense of Israel at camp during staff-wide debates. (Although I learned, in a moment of real betrayal, that one of my closest friends had, in the middle of the night, painted over a mural featuring the Israeli flag with a Shrek flag.) I tried to keep the hyperactive counselors from removing “This Land is Your Land” from the camp songbook (they said it was offensive to Native Americans). I got in fights with other counselors about their attempts to avoid work and observed how systems without incentives benefitted the laziest and most pathetic of staff members.

Instead of attending “Workshop” — the Habonim gap year in Israel that my father and one of my sisters attended — I went right to college. I was sick of these socialists; I was tired of defending Israel. I went to Dartmouth, where there was no socialism, little anti-Zionism, and even fewer Jews. One economics professor there had learned the following lesson from working on a kibbutz in Israel:

“On a kibbutz, there is no material incentive for effort and not much incentive of any kind. There are two kinds of people who have no problem with this: deadbeats and saints. When a group joined a kibbutz, the deadbeats and saints tended to stay while the others eventually left. I left. In retrospect, I should have known right away, from my first day, that something was wrong with utopia. On my arrival, I was struck by the fact that the pantry of the communal kitchen was locked.”

I, too, knew that something was wrong with utopia, because every year I spent at Tavor, I had grown more alienated. So my first summer of college I did not go back to Tavor. I studied abroad in Morocco instead, where I met Rufus and Tessa, future New Critic cofounders, and felt bolstered in my decision-making.

Debating Israel had exiled me from the garden: my style of politics, when I was in Habo, was decidedly contrarian. I knew what I stood against — shared money, anti-Zionism, the woke rewriting of history, laziness. But what I stood for was hazier; I loved my friends, I loved Israel, I loved hard work. College — Dartmouth, especially — meant fewer insufferable wokesters to oppose, but it also meant I had to decide what I really believed in, because I did not have serious people to oppose. Instead of leftists, all I found was apathy. I joined the infamous Dartmouth Review my sophomore year in order to feel something, albeit in a rather reactionary manner. I wrote some essays in which I offended both the left and the right, essays in which I believed both everything and nothing. I quit the paper after an editorial changeover.

I then joined up as a columnist for The Dartmouth, the student daily, where my penchant for the ironical became even more pronounced. (I also benefitted from a wide editorial berth, thanks to the enterprising editor-in-chief.) In my junior year, I wrote an op-ed demanding the end of collegiate academic journals, which I viewed as time-sinks. The fall of my senior year, I wrote to bright-eyed freshmen that if they thought Dartmouth was a place of learning, they should transfer. (In doing so, I also managed to offend a host of University of Chicago students.) I also wrote a winking praise of Dartmouth’s horde of bankers and consultants: “Dartmouth’s community of aspiring financiers and consultants deserve criticism inasmuch as we all do,” I wrote.

“What our financiers and consultants represent is Dartmouth’s revealed preference. Each one is likely the more honest person than any of their peers who choose different paths, because while the orthopedic surgeon may claim a love of surgery; the professor a desire to rewrite the narrative of American history; the lawyer a desire to understand America’s tax code — the financiers and consultants put it plainly: I want to be rich; I want a good job.

May God grant me the strength to be as honest as them.”

This is the writing of a man enjoying himself. I had some great laughs while writing that essay. But I believed every word of that paragraph and also none of it. One student titled her response to my piece “Kluger’s Cynicism is Misguided,” to the endless amusement of my friends. That student, proceeding with dime-store sincerity, wrote that praising money acquisition is actually bad — as if that were shocking information!

I had, and have, no respect at all for bankers and consultants, but I wasn’t exactly filled with admiration for those who avoided those paths, either — those who chose to eat, pray, and love like God demanded from them. That her response was idiotic did not mean that I hadn’t become a cynic — I had. Cynics are funnier anyway, I told myself, and I have always loved jokes.

My sophomore year, I had written about The Zone of Interest for The Dartmouth Review and was invited to be a guest commentator at Dartmouth’s screening of the film. After a packed audience of students, professors, and Hanover townspeople had spent two hours with that wrenching movie about the Holocaust, I, with a smirk, presented my review. I began:

“When one does not eat for a long time (I once went five days), one remembers all the wonderful meals he has spent a lifetime eating. The Zone of Interest has the same effect. I sat in the theater thinking about all the wonderful activities I have done in my life. By the time the movie ended, I had barely scratched the surface of my memory; everything I have ever done is more interesting than The Zone of Interest. It makes even the driest of academic lectures seem titillating. I had an infinite amount of memories to recall.

The Zone of Interest seems new and important to those who are not familiar with the entertainment staple of the past 2,000 years: the book. We follow the commandant of Auschwitz and his family as they show love for each other that masks the brutality around them. The movie is a childish derivative of Hannah Arendt’s classic work Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. The text, which I read in seventh grade (and I am not precocious, which thus says something about the intelligence of the average A24 fan), argues that, while Eichmann deserved execution, his actions constituted ‘banality’ because he was not an essentially evil man and instead did not question his actions.

This movie asks us to question the nature of our reality and realize which concentration camps we are willfully ignoring. This has the potential to be fascinating, but it is not. This movie is boring. I cannot say it otherwise. It reminds me of Ivy League classroom discussions: everything has been said, but not everyone has said it. What this movie does to the viewer constitutes the banality of evil.”

The audience was rather too stunned to laugh. But after they got over their initial shock, they began to ask combative questions. Was I trying to make light of the Holocaust? Did I know Arendt had gotten Eichmann wrong? The Hillel representative at the event made a note to the audience that I was Jewish, thus saving me from almost certain mauling. To this day, I walk with a slight fear of running into someone who was in the audience that day. I realize, in retrospect, that the screening marked the end of my time at The Dartmouth Review. I felt real shame about my presentation.

October 7th occurred around that time. It feels not accidental, in the context of this essay, that I was with camp friends when it happened. Nor does it feel accidental that our response was to eat edibles and watch Stop Making Sense. Returning to college, my solution was to lambast the extremists of the left — and there was never a shortage — and then make half-hearted gestures at joining the IDF.

But what became clear over the duration of the war was that there was no real aim. (My access to the Hebrew-language news revealed that the ruling right-wing government turned down hostage deals constantly; if one only read Commentary or Moment, such truths would be absent.) It was a war that, if I were Israeli, I would likely dodge. Why die for Bibi to continue his lies? But as I am an American, that is not my choice. My choice is my stance toward Israel. So what do I think?

Today, many former campers and counselors from Tavor boycott Israel, join pro-Palestine protests, and write jaded essays that all Jewish summer camp is a manipulation of the youthful libido in service of Israeli nationalism. Two years ago, dismissing these people was much easier. Why fight for ideals when it seems like so few people actually believe in anything at all?

But I am not a real cynic. I think of my father, who at my age was making aliyah. What would his idealism look like if he were me, today? It certainly wouldn’t be garin aliyah — with what garin, what gang of idealists? I think he would act like my friend Aitan — the man I consider my best friend and the most morally serious person I know. Aitan does not chant “from the river to the sea” and imagine the dissolution of Jewish life in Israel. (He is Israeli, after all, and loves his Israeli family, if nothing else.) He called me one night from Cornell’s Palestinian encampment, bothered by the lack of Jewish knowledge on display in the SJP leadership. But he is an idealist, like my father; Aitan believes in working toward peace.

And what is Aitan doing with his first year after college — his first real time unbounded from the expectations of suburban American Jewish life? He is doing protective presence in the West Bank, working as a human shield. He wants to stop Israeli military encroachment; he believes Jewish lives are equal to Palestinian lives. He wants to use the energy and idealism of youth for something positive. He rejects the brutishness of Israel, not out of a faux-diasporism, but out of hope for Israel’s future. I respect and admire and hope to emulate him in some way. But what now, for me?

Perhaps writing and editing, moving people’s minds just a little further in the direction of honesty to oneself and to others, is enough for me. But in writing those words, I feel that they are unsatisfactory to the questions posed. I am not a cynic but nonetheless find comfort in the disinterested pose it provides. I distrust most activists. They rarely seem to want to face their own contradictions. How many supposed anti-nationalist humanists find energy in the surrogate nationalism of Palestine? If capitalism creates false consciousness, what makes their thoughts so lucid? But this is a pose I am incapable of holding for long.

The promise of Camp Tavor was the promise of pure love for a community of peers and for Israel. This world is too impure for such a thing. To leave that idyll was to open a wound incapable of being healed. But I will try my best to treat Tavor’s scar.

THE YOUNG AMERICANS