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American Jews created historic summer camps. Or did summer camps create American Jews?
(JTA) — Among Sandra Fox’s most memorable finds during her years mining American archives for materials about Jewish summer camps was a series of letters about the hours before lights-out.
The letters were by counselors who were documenting an unusual window in the day when they stopped supervising campers, leaving the teens instead to their own devices, which sometimes included romance and sexual exploration.
“It was each division talking about how they dealt with that free time before bed in ‘age-appropriate ways,’” Fox recalled about the letters written by counselors at Camp Ramah in Wisconsin, the original iteration of the Conservative movement’s network of summer camps.
“I’ve spoken to Christian people who work at Christian camps and have researched Christian camps. There is no free time before bed,” Fox told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “That’s not a thing if you don’t want kids to hook up. So it was just amazing to find these documents of Camp Ramah leaders really having the conversation explicitly. Most of the romance and sexuality stuff is implicit in the archives.”
The letters are quoted extensively in Fox’s new book, “The Jews of Summer: Summer Camp and Jewish Culture in Postwar America.” Fox, who earned a PhD in history from New York University in 2018 and now teaches and directs the Archive of the American Jewish Left there, tells the story of American Judaism’s most immersive laboratory for constructing identity and contesting values.
Next week, Fox is launching the book with an event at Congregation Beth Elohim in Park Slope, Brooklyn. (Tickets for the Feb. 23 event are available here.) Attendees will be able to tour adult versions of some of the most durable elements of Jewish summer camps, from Israeli dance to Yiddish and Hebrew instruction to Color Wars to Tisha B’Av, the mournful holiday that always falls over the summer.
“I never considered doing a normal book party,” Fox said. “It was always really obvious to me that a book about experiential Jewish education and role play should be celebrated and launched out into the world through experiential education and role play.”
Sandra Fox’s 2023 book “The Jews of Summer,” looks at the history of American Jewish summer camps. (Courtesy of Fox)
We spoke to Fox about her party plans, how Jewish summer camps have changed over time and how they’ve stayed the same, and the cultural history of that before-bed free time.
This interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity. We’ll be continuing the conversation in a virtual chat through the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research Feb. 27 at 1 p.m.; register here.
Jewish Telegraphic Agency: Given how much Jews like to talk about camp, were you surprised that this book hadn’t already been written?
Sandra Fox: There’s been a lot of fruitful research on the history of various camps, but it’s usually been focused on one camping movement or one camp type. So there are articles about Zionist camps. There are certainly articles out there about the Ramah camps. A lot of camps have produced books — either their alumni associations or a scholar who went to let’s say, Reform movement camps have created essay collections about those camps. And there are also books about Habonim and other Zionist youth movements.
I don’t really know why this is the first stab at this kind of cross-comparison. It might be that people didn’t think there would be so much to compare. I think the overwhelming feeling I get from readers so far, people who preordered and gotten their books early, is that they’re very surprised to hear how similar these camps are. So perhaps it’s that scholars weren’t thinking about Jewish summer camps that came from such diverse standpoints as having something enough in common to write about them all at once.
Also distance from the time period really helps. You can write a book about — and people do write a book about — the ’60s and ’70s and have been for decades, but there’s a certain amount of distance from the period that has allowed me to do this, I think, and maybe it also helps that I’m generationally removed. A lot of the scholars who’ve worked on camps in the postwar period went to camps in the postwar period. It makes a lot of sense that it would be harder to write this sort of sweeping thing perhaps. The fact that I’m a millennial meant that I could write about the postwar period — and also write kind of an epilogue-style chapter that catches us up to the present.
What’s clear is that there’s something amazing about studying summer camp, a completely immersive 24/7 experience that parents send children away for. There’s no better setting for thinking about how adults project their anxieties and desires about the future onto children. There’s also no place better to think about power dynamics and age and generational tension.
I was definitely struck by the “sameyness” of Jewish camps in your accounting. What do you think we can learn from that, either about camps or about us as Jews?
I do want to say that while there’s a lot of sameyness, whenever you do a comparative study, there’s a risk of kind of collapsing all these things and making them seem too similar. What I’m trying to convey is that the camp leaders from a variety of movements took the basic structure of the summer camp as we know it — its daily schedule, its environment, its activities — and it did look similar from camp to camp, at least on that surface level.
If you look at the daily schedules in comparison, they might have a lot of the same features but they’ll be called slightly different things depending on if the camp leans more heavily towards Hebrew, or Yiddish, or English. But the content within those schedules would be rather different. It’s more that the skeletal structure of camp life has a lot of similarities across the board and then the details within each section of the day or the month had a lot of differences.
But I think what it says is that in the postwar period, the anxieties that Jewish leaders had about the future of Judaism are really, really similar and the solution that they found within the summer camp, they were pretty unanimous about. They just then took the model and inserted within it their particular nationalistic, linguistic or religious perspectives. So I think more so than saying anything about American Jewry, it shows kind of how flexible camping is. And that’s not just the Jewish story. Lots of different Americans have embraced summer camping in different ways.
So many people who have gone to camp have a fixed memory of what camp is like, where it’s caught in time, but you argue that camps have actually undergone lots of change. What are the most striking changes you documented, perhaps ones that might have been hard for even insiders to discern as they happened?
First of all, the Israel-centeredness of American Jewish education as we know it today didn’t happen overnight in 1948, for instance. It was a slower process, beyond the Zionist movements where that was already going on, for decades before 1948. Ramah and the Reform camps for instance took their time towards getting to the heavily Zionist-imbued curricula that we know.
There was considerable confusion and ambivalence at first about what to do with Israel: whether to raise an Israeli flag, not because they were anti-Zionist, but because American Jews had been thinking about proving their loyalty to America for many generations. There were some sources that would talk about — what kind of right do American Jews have to raise the Israeli flag when they’re not Israeli? So that kind of Israel-centeredness that is really a feature of camp life today was a slower process than we might think.
It fit camp life really well because broader American camps used Native American symbols, in some ways that are problematic today, to create what we know of as an iconography of camp life. So for Jews, Israel and its iconography, or Palestine and iconography before ’48, provided an alternative set of options that were read as Jewish, but it still took some time to get to where we are now in terms of the Israel focus.
One of the reasons I place emphasis on the Yiddish summer camps is to show that in the early 20th century and the mid-20th century there was more ideological diversity in the Jewish camping sphere, including various forms of Yiddishist groups and socialist groups and communist groups that operated summer camps. Most of them have closed, and their decline is obviously a change that tells a story of how American Jewry changed over the course of the postwar period. Their legacy is important, too: I have made the argument that these camps in a lot of ways modeled the idea of Yiddish as having a future in America.
What about hookup culture? Contemporary discourse about Jewish camps have focused on sex and sexuality there. What did you observe about this in the archives?
I think people think of the hookup culture of Jewish camps today and certainly in my time in the ’90s and 2000s as a permanent feature, and in some ways I found through my research and oral history interviews that that was the case, but it was really interesting to zoom out a little bit and think about how Jewish summer camps changed in terms of sexual romantic culture, in relationship to how America changed with the sexual revolution and the youth culture.
It’s not it’s not useful to think about Jewish hookup culture in a vacuum. It’s happening within America more broadly. And so of course, it’s changed dramatically over time. And one of the things I learned that was so fascinating is that Jewish summer camps were actually their leaders were less concerned in a lot of ways about sexuality at camp in the ’40s and ’50s, than they were in the late ’60s and ’70s. Because earlier premarital sex was pretty rare, at least in the teenage years, so they were not that concerned about what happened after lights out because they kind of assumed whatever was going on was fairly innocent.
In the late 1960s and 1970s, that’s when camps have to actually think about how to balance allowance and control. They want to allow campers to have these relationships, to have their first sexual experiences, and part of that is related to rising rates of intermarriage and wanting to encourage love between Jews, but they also want to control it because there’s a broader societal moment in which the sexuality of teenagers is problematized and their and their sexual culture is more public.
There’s been a real wave of sustained criticism by former campers about the cultures that they experienced, arguing that the camps created an inappropriately sexualized and unsafe space. There’s been a lot of reaction to that and the broader #MeToo moment. I’m curious about what you can speculate about a future where that space is cleaned up, based on your historical research — what is gained and what, potentially, could be lost?
Without being involved in camping today — and I want to really make that disclaimer because I know a lot of change is happening and lot of organizations are involved to talk about this issue better, to train camps and camp leaders and their counselors to not create a pressured environment for camper — I think what the history shows is that this hookup culture did not come about out of nowhere. It was partly related to the broader changes in America and the sexual revolution.
But it was also partly created because camps really needed to have campers’ buy-in, in order to be “successful.” A huge argument of my book is that we think about the power of camps as if camp directors have campers as, like, puppets on strings, and that what they do is what happens in camp life. But actually, campers have changed the everyday texture of life at camp over the course of the decades in so many different ways by resisting various ideas or just not being interested.
So hookup culture is also part of making campers feel like they have freedom at camp and that’s essential. That’s not a side project — that is essential to their ability to get campers to come back. It’s a financial need, and it’s an ideological need. If you make campers feel like they have freedom, then they will feel like they freely took on the ideologies your camp is promoting in a really natural way.
The last part of it is rising rates of intermarriage. As rates of intermarriage rose in the second half of the 20th century, there’s no doubt in my mind from doing the research that the preexisting culture around sexuality at camp and romance at camp got turbo-boosted [to facilitate relationships that could potentially lead to marriage between two Jews]. At that point, the allowance and control that camp leaders were trying to create for many decades leans maybe more heavily towards allowance.
There are positives to camp environments being a place where campers can explore their sexualities. There’s definitely a lot of conversation about the negative effects and those are all very, very real. I know people who went through horrible things at a camp and I also know people who experienced it as a very sex-positive atmosphere. I know people in my age range who were able to discover that they were gay or lesbian at camp in safety in comparison to home, so it’s not black and white at all. I hope that my chapter on romance and sexuality can maybe add some historical nuance to the conversation and give people a sense of how this actually happened. Because it happened for a whole bunch of reasons.
I think there’s a consensus view that camp is one of the most “successful” things the Jews do. But it’s hard to see where lessons from camp or camp culture are being imported to the rest of Jewish life. I’m curious what you see as kind of the lessons that Jewish institutions or Jewish communities have taken from camp — or have they not done that?
Every single public engagement I do about my work has boiled down to the question of, well, does it work? Does camp work? Is it successful? And that’s been a question that a lot of social scientists have been interested in. I don’t want to oversimplify that research, but a lot of the ways that they’ve measured success have been things that are not necessarily a given to all Jews as obviously the right way to be a Jew. So, for instance, in the ’90s and early 2000s, at the very least, a lot of research was about how, you know, “XYZ” camp and youth movement were successfully curbing intermarriage. A lot of them also asked campers and former campers how they feel about Israel, and it’s always if they are supportive of Israel in very normative ways, right, giving money visiting, supporting Israel or lobbying for its behalf — then camps have been successful.
I’m not interested in whether camps were successful by those metrics. I’m interested in how we got to the idea that camp should be successful in those ways in the first place. How did we get to those kinds of normative assumptions of like, this is a good Jew; a good Jew marries a Jew; a good Jew supports Israel, no matter what. So what I wanted to do is zoom out from that question of success and show how camp actually functions.
And then the question of “does it work” is really up to the reader. To people who believe that curbing intermarriage is the most important thing, then camps have been somewhat successful in the sense that people who go to these heavily educational camps are less likely to marry out of the faith.
But I am more interested in what actually happened at camp. And in terms of their legacies, I wanted to show how they changed various aspects of American Jewish life, and religion and politics. So I was really able to find how camping was essential in making kind of an Israel-centered Jewish education the norm. I was also able to draw a line between these Yiddish camps over the ’60s and ’70s that closed in the ’80s and contemporary Yiddish. The question of success is a real tricky and political one in a way that a lot of people have not talked about.
And is camp also fun? Because you’re creating a camp experience for your book launch next week.
Camp is fun — for a lot of people. Camp was not fun for everyone. And so I do want to play with that ambivalence at the party, and acknowledge that and also acknowledge that some people loved camp when they were younger and have mixed feelings about it now.
The party is not really a celebration of Jewish summer camp. People will be drinking and having fun and dancing — but I want them to be thinking while also about what is going on and why. How is Tisha B’Av [the fast day that commemorates the destruction of the ancient Jewish temple in Jerusalem that falls at the height of summer] commemorated at camp, for example?
Or what songs are we singing and what do they mean? I think a lot of people when they’re little kids, they learn songs in these Jewish summer camps that they can’t understand and later they maybe learn Hebrew and go, whoa, we were singing what?! My example from Zionist summer camp is singing “Ein Li Eretz Acheret,” or “I Have No Other Country.” We were in America and we obviously have another country! I don’t think anyone in my youth movement actually believes the words “Ein Li Eretz Acheret” because we live in America and people tend to kind of like living in America and most of them do not move to Israel.
So at the party we’ll be working through the fun of it, and at the same time the confusion of it and the ambivalence of it. I want it to be fun, and I also want it to be something that causes people to think.
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The post American Jews created historic summer camps. Or did summer camps create American Jews? appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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How Jim Bakker sent a rabbi’s son to 52 churches
Jim Bakker convinced me to go to church.
Bakker died Monday at 86. For a stretch in the 1980s he and his wife, Tammy Faye, were on television every day, praying, singing and weeping, her in waterproof mascara, in front of as many as 13 million people. Then came the sex scandal, the hush money and the fraud trial.
And yet, he became my gateway into Christianity.
I’m an Orthodox rabbi’s son who grew up in the Bible Belt, which made me a spiritual window-shopper. My bedroom window looked out across the street at Cokesbury Methodist Church. Every Sunday morning, I watched the families climb out of their minivans in khakis and pastels, smiling like people who had never once wondered whether turning on a light switch counted as work on Shabbat.
We didn’t have cable. Regular TV in our house was already a negotiation, and a channel devoted to Jesus wasn’t even up for discussion.
Then I went off to college, moved out on my own, and one of my first acts of rebellion was ordering basic cable. I flipped on the Cartoon Network, a channel that showed animated classics around the clock, and wondered if this was what the Messianic age felt like.
On Sunday mornings, on channel after channel, I stumbled across pastors preaching to their congregations. What hooked me wasn’t the theology; the sermons seemed more like self-help seminars. It was the production. Where I came from, worship was a closed-door affair, in Hebrew, for members only. Here it was a show, with a band and cameras.
The format Bakker perfected inspired others: the tears, the house band, the host who knew exactly where the camera was. I couldn’t look away.
Heaven, with a gift shop
Bakker was born in Michigan in 1940 into a Pentecostal family, and he met Tammy Faye at Bible college. They married in 1961, after three dates, which, as a rabbi’s son who spent years in the dating trenches, I find both reckless and enviable. They drifted into television through Pat Robertson’s network, where they hosted a children’s show, and in 1976 they started their own ministry: PTL, short for Praise the Lord. At its peak, PTL drew as many as 13 million viewers a day and took in more than $100 million a year. Critics said PTL stood for “Pass the Loot.”
On 2,500 acres in Fort Mill, South Carolina, the Bakkers built Heritage USA, a Christian theme park with a hotel, water slides, skating and Bible study. They sold shares in it and offered lifetime vacations there to donors.
I’ll confess: I was jealous. Christians had a place you went to bring your family closer to God, with a gift shop and cotton candy. We had the Catskills and a very long buffet. I took this about as well as a kid whose neighbors have a swimming pool.
Then it all fell apart. In 1987 came the revelation of Bakker’s encounter with a church secretary, Jessica Hahn, and the $265,000 paid to keep it quiet. Fellow preachers lined up to condemn him, Jerry Falwell took over the ministry, and a federal inquiry followed. He was convicted of fraud in 1989 and sentenced to 45 years. He served five. Tammy Faye divorced him while he was in prison.
Bakker left prison in 1994, chastened. In a 1996 book called I Was Wrong, he wrote that Jesus had nothing good to say about money, a lesson he learned, as so many of us do, only after losing the water park. In 2003 he resurfaced in Branson, Missouri, hosting a new show from a café and selling viewers buckets of emergency food for the end of days.
The Jew on the Jumbotron
Soon, I had a plan of my own. I would spend a year going to 52 churches over 52 Sundays. Jewish tradition teaches that it’s verboten to go to church, especially during services. I planned to go as a journalistic endeavor and write a book about the experience.
Yet, I was still riddled with the guilt of my ancestors, so I went to my synagogue’s rabbi and asked his permission. To my surprise, he granted it on two conditions: I had to wear my press badge, so worshippers knew I was there to take notes and not to take part in prayer. The second condition was that I had to wear a yarmulke. People needed to know I was Jewish, the rabbi said. As if being short, bespectacled and named Benyamin Cohen didn’t already give that away.
Jim Bakker had put church on television. I was going to find out what happened when you stepped through the screen.
My wife, Elizabeth, a Christian minister’s daughter who had converted to Judaism, was still dripping wet from the mikvah and not exactly thrilled that her husband was going to spend a year in churches. She pointed out that I was about to become the first Orthodox Jew in history to qualify for a church loyalty card.
I started in the deep end, at New Birth Missionary Baptist Church, one of the country’s largest megachurches, home to 15,000 people on a typical Sunday. The sanctuary looked like a sports arena. A camera operator found me in the pews. Within seconds my shayna punim was 20-feet tall on Jesus’ Jumbotron for all to see. I had been there for all of five minutes and I was already outed as the Jew.
“Oh God,” I thought. “What if my dad could see me now?”
Watching church was Bakker’s big idea. At New Birth, the cameras roamed the pews and the congregation cheered at itself on the big screens. After years of watching church from my couch, I was the one in the shot.
I’d spent my childhood sure the grass was greener at the proverbial church across the street. It wasn’t. It was just better lit. Once the cameras and the choirs were gone, what I found were people trying, like me, to figure out how to believe, and some of them were doing it better than I was.
Hanging out with Jesus made me a better Jew, a sentence I never expected to write, and one my father never expected to hear.
The other Bakker
There was another Bakker I felt I knew.
I was born the same year as Jay Bakker, the son of Jim and Tammy Faye. He was 12 when his father was indicted. By 18, he’d co-founded Revolution, which eventually opened a branch in Atlanta, my hometown. The New York Times once described churches like it as meeting in “warehouses, bars, skate parks, punk clubs,” which is, to put it plainly, not where my synagogue held services.
In 2006, the Sundance Channel made a six-part series about him called One Punk Under God, and I was hooked. The camera was back on the Bakker family business, only now it followed the son, who seemed to be building the opposite of his parents’ church.
I felt a kinship with Jay that I couldn’t have explained then. We were both preachers’ kids, which meant your father’s job was also your religion, so you couldn’t be mad at one without it messing with the other. He titled his memoir Son of a Preacher Man, which is also what I called a chapter in mine.
His choices were harder than mine. My father never lost his congregation to a federal grand jury. While Jim Bakker went to Branson to sell apocalypse buckets and political prophecy, Jay went toward a gentler, more inclusive faith.
As I learned throughout my journey, a church built for television is only as strong as its ratings. The Jewish service I understand best would make terrible TV. On Yom Kippur we fast for 25 hours and act somberly. In the prayers, we confess in the plural, a whole congregation beating its chests together: we have sinned, not I.
Jim Bakker got me into church, and church sent me back to synagogue. Praise the Lord, as they used to say on his show. And, as we say in mine, amen.
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As voting nears, Israeli democracy is not healthy
When Israel’s Supreme Court upheld the right of Arab parties last week to run in the country’s Oct. 27 election, they didn’t only provide Israel’s 2 million-plus Arab citizens a reason to vote. They also sent yet another signal in the incredible noise of these elections: Israeli democracy is not healthy.
Every time Israel has held elections in the last two decades, this cycle repeats: The Central Elections Committee — a body mostly made up of politicians — bars Arab parties or candidates, the Supreme Court puts them back on the ballot, and the country congratulates itself that its democratic guardrails held up to the pressure. But when Israel’s political representatives think democracy means disqualifying parties representing 20% of its electorate, the guardrails are not holding. When that 20% of the electorate is told its voices are unwanted and its opinions suspect enough to ban, it is nearly impossible to call Israel a healthy democracy.
And there’s a deeper story here, too — one that came to a head in 2023, connected to the decades-long march of the populist far-right in Israel against the Supreme Court. Recall that one of the first things that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government did upon taking power was to announce a “judicial overhaul plan” built on the populist claim that the elected politicians are the only true representatives of the people, and the unelected, elitist, liberal-leftist Supreme Court ought to be subservient to them.
Since then, they have tried to eliminate the Court’s ability to review the quasi-constitutional Basic Laws, left the court’s top positions unfilled and languishing, and managed to pass a bill putting judicial appointments in political hands. In short, the Court is not simply a neutral referee in the fight over whether Arab parties can run. Its independence and authority are themselves at the center of Israel’s political struggle.
When the court restored Arab parties to the ballot, and liberals breathed a sigh of relief, the right went to work. It is telling its base that the Court, by simply upholding the most basic tenet of a democratic system — that parties be allowed to run regardless of their political positions — is in bed with the enemy: Arabs. In other words, it weaponizes the court ruling as proof of what it has been saying all along: that this is not the court of the Israeli people, it is the Arab’s court, the left’s court, and it must be brought to heel.
This is the double bind the Israeli Supreme Court has existed in for years. It is more hostage than guardrail. I have spent my career in Israeli civil society, and now lead an organization that funds a good deal of it, which is a long way of saying I have watched this cycle from close enough to know that the relief is a trap.
The court recognizes the part it plays in this game of political football, and it is caving to pressures and changing its own internal approach. The discussions it held last week were not limited to the Elections Committee’s decision to disqualify all the Arab parties. It went further. The court recommended Sami Abu Shehadeh of the Balad party withdraw his candidacy so that it would not have to disqualify him. Yes, Sami wrote an appalling article on Oct. 8 — one that I find deeply repugnant. But for many years, the court held that disqualification required extensive and consistent evidence of support for terrorism or opposition to democracy. On that basis, it allowed both Jewish and Arab candidates to run, even when they had written or said things that were unpopular, racist, or dangerous. And when it came to Abu Shehadeh, there was no solid evidence of a sustained pattern showing that he supported violence or opposed democratic principles. The court did not want to depart from its own precedent, but it could not withstand the pressure of public sentiment, so it asked Sami not to run. He withdrew.
It is clear to me that if Sami were Jewish, he would never have been disqualified. Jewish politicians have said things just as horrifying as he has, and they are consistently allowed to run. People fighting for Israeli democracy — both here in the U.S. and in Israel — can’t go to the mat for Israel’s democratic institutions without dealing with the essence of what democracy is.
In a democracy, the majority does not extend equality to the minority as a kindness. And for members of the minority, democracy is a bargain: You choose to live with the outcome because you had a real chance to shape it — by voting for politicians who represent your interests. With these bans, Israel asks two million citizens of the country to hold up their end of this bargain — to pay taxes and vote— while informing them every few years that the state’s end of the bargain is actually negotiable. That equality is not assured. That their parties could be barred from running.
Democracy is only more than a word if every citizen has both the right to vote and the right to govern. Israel simply is not a democracy if it fails to offer Palestinian citizens full participation. Period. Israel’s Palestinian citizens are not a test Israeli democracy has to pass, where the Supreme Court is a cheat code. Israel’s Palestinian citizens and their rights are what Israeli democracy ought to be made of.
Yes, it is a relief to know that Israel’s Supreme Court restored the Arab parties to the ballot, but we ought to notice what we are relieved about: that judges had to stop Israel’s elected representatives from cutting out a fifth of the electorate just five weeks before a general election. A democracy that has to be rescued from its own politicians on a regular basis is not a healthy one.
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‘Remember 7.10.23’: In Israel, Hostage Square bears few remnants of a national crisis – but trauma lingers
(JTA) — TEL AVIV – In the days following the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks, the families of the hostages held in Gaza turned the plaza next to the Tel Aviv Museum of Art into what became known as Hostage Square.
Filled with “Bring Them Home” signs and hostage posters, yellow ribbons and yellow balloons, the square hosted demonstrations and press conferences.
It was here that the families created a replica of a Hamas tunnel and established the Empty Shabbat Table, a haunting art installation to remind visitors – and especially the Israeli government – that their loved ones still languished in Gaza. And it was here, two years later, that the families and thousands of other Israelis gathered to watch the last of the living hostages return to Israel.
Three years after the attack on Simchat Torah, there are few remnants of the hostage families’ encampment: the tunnel replica, a few yellow ribbons and a sign bearing the words “Remember 7.10.23.” During the days leading up to the third anniversary, some paid respects to the few hostage families who set up a sukkah on the square, but the plaza was nearly empty.
By all outward appearances, Israelis have moved on.
Yet beneath the surface, many are still grappling with the trauma of Oct. 7 and the multifront war the attack triggered.
In a Channel 12 TV poll in June, 74% of respondents said they fear that terrorists will carry out another large-scale attack, and 66% said they want the Oct. 7 attack to be investigated by a state commission of inquiry.
Last month, in an Israel Democracy Institute survey, 68% of Jewish Israelis and 32% of Arab Israelis said the Oct. 7 attack is a “central factor” in deciding which party to vote for, behind security and the high cost of living.
In the café at the edge of Hostage Square, Isaac Badra, a 33-year-old realtor, recalled how he and his wife opened their home to their upstairs neighbors because the Badras live on the “safer” ground floor and their Tel Aviv building has no bomb shelter. The trauma persists, he said.
He vividly remembered the air-raid sirens, reserve soldiers rushing to base on Simchat Torah and the frantic phone calls with his wife’s family near the Gaza border as Hamas attacked Sderot, where they live.
“My wife’s mother said she saw terrorists in the street, but I couldn’t grasp what she was saying,” he recalled. When he turned on the TV, he realized the scale of the attack. “I locked all of our doors and our windows and prayed.”
Three years later, Badra said, “When I hear noises outside, I jump. When Arab construction workers shout out to each other, I jump. And now I doubt whether my friends abroad really have our back.”
Roni Shoval, a defense industry worker from northern Israel not far from the Lebanon border, said the trauma of the past three years “is still inside me.” He called the attacks “a modern Holocaust for Israel.”
Even three years later, “I’m not ready to visit Nova,” he said, referring to the memorial at the site of the music festival where Hamas murdered 378 people and abducted dozens more. “Look, I’m getting goosebumps now just talking about it.”
Shoval, 54, is still doing IDF reserve duty, years beyond the maximum age because the IDF needs his expertise. He doesn’t want the same for his children.
“My son will be drafted soon,” he said. “Back in the day, I served in Gaza and Lebanon. I don’t want him sent to Gaza and Lebanon.”
At a nearby table, 24-year-old Yael Meyer sat with classmates from Tel Aviv University. The attack the previous day aboard a flydubai flight bound for Tel Aviv, they said, only reinforced the trauma of Oct. 7 and the war that followed.
“I’m always aware that there could be another terror attack. But I always had the sense that the security services would protect us.” Since Oct. 7, that trust in the government is gone, she said.
Her friend Talia Zecler, also 24, said she felt “helpless” after the attack. “I was angry at my country. Entire families were killed or kidnapped,” she added. “It feels like we’re living in an endless war.”
Her heart races when the sound of a passing motorcycle resembles an air-raid siren. But at the same time, she still marvels at the bravery and solidarity of ordinary Israelis in the months after the attack.
“People became more connected after Oct. 7. They volunteered everywhere, including at Hostage Square,” she said. “There was a sense of unity, that we’re in this together, and we saw it on the flydubai flight.
“This is the Israeli spirit.”
Sitting in the café with her parents, S., a 19-year-old IDF soldier, said the trauma she experienced on Oct. 7 at her home in Jerusalem “is minuscule” compared to the experience of those whose families were directly harmed by the attacks on the Gaza border and, later, attacks by Hezbollah, Iran and the Houthis.
“Sure, when I hear a plane flying in the sky, I think, will there be another war with Iran? I immediately go there,” said S., whose name could not be published due to military protocol.
But as the country prepares to vote for the next government on Oct. 27, she plans to channel her hopes and dreams in the voting booth.
“The most important things for me right now are to have a national investigation of what happened on Oct. 7 and to repair our relations not only with our immediate neighbors but everywhere. We don’t live in a vacuum,” she said.
The post ‘Remember 7.10.23’: In Israel, Hostage Square bears few remnants of a national crisis – but trauma lingers appeared first on The Forward.
