A Diasporist Guide to Camping Here

Abstract

At Camp Doikayt, the landscape is a vehicle for remembering histories of diaspora and reimagining Jewishness beyond Zionism. Summer camps proliferated in the United States after the Shoah, using the Zionist invention of the “muscular” Jew, to cultivate Jewish continuity. Camp Doikayt proposes an alternative modeled after the Jewish Labor Bund’s concept of “hereness.” In the form of a guidebook, the camp's design unfolds through a set of rules that ritualizes a land ethic of solidarity and participation. As camp wanders year to year to different abandoned Jewish sites in the Catskills, we reconfigure the materials, adapt ecological remnants, and reinterpret Jewish cultural memory.