Abstract
Over the past century, administrators and educators have advanced a variety of rationales for Hebrew in Jewish summer camps. For example, in the early 1960s, the education director at the pluralistic Cejwin Camps, in Port Jervis, New York, viewed the cultivation of “a Hebraic atmosphere” as one element in a wider religious and cultural program designed to expose campers to “Jewish group living.” In 1970, an educator at the Goldman Union Camp Institute (GUCI), a Reform-affiliated camp in Zionsville, Indiana, connected the camp’s incorporation of “Hebrew, history and worship” into its program to an overarching goal of “Jewish identity” development.