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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.
—
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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The Iranian People Are Demanding Their Freedom; Where Is the Media?
Protesters demonstrate against poor economic conditions in Tehran, Iran, with some shopkeepers closing their stores on Dec. 29, 2025, in response to ongoing hardships and fluctuations in the national currency. Photo: ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters Connect
“What were the media doing when the regime led by Ali Khamenei finally fell?”
That is the question that will be asked if, as many Iranians now dare to hope, we are witnessing the final days of the Islamic Republic after more than four decades in power. It is also a question the Western press may struggle to answer.
How It Started
The current wave of unrest began in late December, when shopkeepers in Tehran went on strike amid growing fury over Iran’s collapsing economy. The rial hit record lows, while prices continued to soar under crippling inflation. Traders, wholesalers, and merchants took to the streets in protest, initially over economic mismanagement — but anger quickly turned toward the regime itself.
Within 48 hours, demonstrations had spread beyond the capital to major cities including Isfahan, Shiraz, Mashhad, Hamadan, Qeshm, and beyond. Videos posted by Iranians showed crowds chanting explicitly political slogans: “Death to the dictator,” “Mullahs must go,” and “This homeland will not be free until the mullah is gone.”
Iranian state-affiliated media have acknowledged several deaths. Independent estimates suggest the toll may be significantly higher. What is not in dispute is that the unrest has rapidly evolved from economic protest into a broad-based challenge to clerical rule.
The Story the Media Barely Told
And yet, on Friday, The New York Times ran not a single front-page story on the protests.
Not one.
This was unrest that — if it succeeds — could reshape Iran, the Middle East, and global security dynamics for decades. A regime that backs Hamas and Hezbollah, arms terrorist proxies across the region, threatens Israel’s destruction, and destabilizes international energy markets was facing its most sustained nationwide dissent in years. Still, the story barely registered.
The New York Times’ near silence was not an outlier. It was emblematic.
When the lack of coverage was challenged on social media, John Simpson, World Affairs Editor at the BBC, offered an almost comical defense: social media videos, he said, must be carefully verified before “reputable outlets” can use them.
That principle, in isolation, is uncontroversial. But its selective application is not.
This is the same BBC that has repeatedly broadcast unverified — or lightly verified — footage and photographs from Gaza. In Iran, however, verification suddenly became an insurmountable obstacle, even as dozens of videos from multiple cities showed consistent scenes, slogans, and patterns of unrest.
When Framing Does the Regime’s Work
Reports by the BBC and analyses from BBC Verify have repeatedly emphasized “cost-of-living protests,” despite verified footage of crowds chanting for the end of clerical rule and attacking regime symbols.
Where BBC Verify has undertaken the “verification” John Simpson said was so difficult, it has drawn criticism for focusing on debunking isolated instances of AI-generated imagery — rather than acknowledging the overwhelming volume of genuine footage documenting brutality against protesters.
Genuinely shocked to see BBC Verify have chosen now to be out there giving an impression we should not believe what we are seeing in #Iran based on one image (of a real event).
Amplification of this intensely organic revolution by Israeli social media accounts is making many…
— Omid Djalili (@omid9) January 2, 2026
Sky News, Reuters, FRANCE24, and others followed a similar pattern — leading with rising prices and economic stagnation while giving little attention to the unmistakably political slogans echoing through Iranian streets.
This framing matters. Protests about inflation suggest reform. Protests calling for the removal of the Supreme Leader suggest regime collapse.
In some cases, Western coverage has gone further, adopting the regime’s preferred framing outright.
When President Donald Trump warned that the United States would respond if Iranian protesters were massacred, Iranian officials condemned the remarks as “reckless.” Several outlets, including the BBC, led with that condemnation, centering Tehran’s outrage and implicitly casting the United States, rather than the Islamic Republic, as the destabilizing force.
Last week, The Guardian even published an opinion piece by Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, under the headline: “You’ll never defeat us in Iran, President Trump: but with real talks, we can both win.”
Put simply, this was The Guardian lending its pages to the propaganda of a senior official from the very regime Iranians are risking their lives to oppose — the same Islamic Republic that beat Mahsa Amini to death for allegedly wearing her hijab incorrectly, executed protesters, imprisoned dissidents, and ruled through fear for 45 years.
1/
Western media coverage of Iran’s escalating nationwide protests has been strikingly limited and cautious – despite widespread anti-regime demands across dozens of cities.Why the reluctance, when evidence is abundant?
pic.twitter.com/PWF9hgsdI3
— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) January 3, 2026
So Why Is the Media Reporting This Way?
Western journalists do not lack information about Iran. The evidence is abundant and often supplied at immense personal risk by Iranians themselves.
What appears lacking is not access, but editorial willingness.
Acknowledging an evolving anti-regime uprising would force uncomfortable conclusions: that long-standing assumptions about “stability,” “reform,” and diplomatic engagement with Tehran were misplaced; that the Islamic Republic is not merely flawed but fundamentally illegitimate; and that Western governments and institutions have spent decades accommodating a brutal regime now being openly rejected by its own people.
It is easier — safer — to frame unrest as economic grievance, to hide behind verification rhetoric, or to platform regime voices as “context.”
But if this uprising succeeds, history will not be kind to that caution. And the question will remain: When Iranians were demanding freedom, why did so much of the Western media look away?
The author is a contributor to HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.
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Palestinian Authority Police Commit Another Terrorist Attack
Illustrative: Israeli forces gather at the scene of a shooting attack near a Jewish outpost, near Nablus, in the West Bank, December 16, 2021. REUTERS/Ammar Awad
When Palestinian Authority (PA) police officer and Fatah’s Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades terror-wing member Younes Walid Shtayyeh shot at Israeli special forces and wounded an Israeli soldier near Nablus, it was not cause for self-scrutiny on behalf of the PA police.
On the contrary, two days later, PA Police Commissioner Allam Al-Saqqa elaborated on the “professional police establishment, which acts as a law enforcement body.” He stressed that the PA police force “maintains security, public order, and morality,” a message the official PA TV reporter summarized by claiming the PA police are “loyal … to the law:”
PA Police Commissioner Allam Al-Saqqa: “[Our progress] emphasizes the integrative relationship between the State Prosecutor’s Office and the [PA] Police, through participation in enforcing justice in the criminal field, which is being protected by a skilled State Prosecutor’s Office that is striving to strengthen the rule of law, alongside a professional police establishment, which acts as a law enforcement body, operates in coordination with the State Prosecutor’s Office and under its supervision, maintains security, public order and morality, and fulfills its role within the framework of the law” … [emphasis added]
[Official PA TV News, Nov. 22, 2025]
According to PA ideology, there really is no contradiction between trying to murder Israelis and maintaining the law. Fatah and Hamas alike glorified the “operation” of police terrorist Shtayyeh, and after he was killed by Israeli forces, social media overflowed with praise for him.
Palestinian Media Watch has documented the double role of the PA police and Security Forces as cops by day — and terrorists by night — many times, recently in the report, Terrorists in Uniform.
Fatah’s terror wing announced with “pride and glory” that Shtayyeh’s funeral was a “wedding” and stressed that the PA police officer died while “fulfilling the duty of struggle and engaging in armed confrontation with enemy.”
The Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades also used the opportunity to pledge to continue “the path of struggle” until “the removal” of the State of Israel:
Posted text: “A military statement by the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades
…
Martyr fighter Younes Walid Shtayyeh — one of the fighters of the Al-Aqsa [Martyrs’] Brigades — Nablus
Who ascended to Heaven as a Martyr on Friday, Nov. 21, 2025 … while he was fulfilling the duty of struggle and engaging in armed confrontation with enemy …
The Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, while accompanying the Martyr commander to the wedding, pledge before Allah that their fighters will continue … on the path of struggle and resistance, until the removal of the occupation from our land and our occupied holy sites.This is a revolution until victory!
The Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades – Palestine
The military wing of the Fatah Movement
Saturday… Nov. 22, 2025″ [emphasis added][Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, Telegram channel, Nov. 22, 2025]
Fatah political officials paid condolence visits to the family, while Fatah’s terror wing described the police terrorist as a “heroic Martyr”:
Posted text: “Fatah Movement Nablus District Secretary Muhammad Hamdan ‘Abu Al-Mutaz’ and members of the district committee in a visit of blessing and condolences on the ascent to Heaven of heroic Martyr Younes Walid Shtayyeh.” [emphasis added]
The terrorist’s father praised his death as a “Martyr,” saying it was “anticipated” and that Allah “chose him”:
Father of terrorist Younes Walid Shtayyeh: “Younes… there is no one who doesn’t love him… May Allah have mercy on him [and] be pleased with him … He asked for [Martyrdom] and achieved it.
We anticipated this … We consider him a Martyr with Allah. .. The [Israeli] army’s special forces besieged the area … He took his weapon and went out, he fought them outside and fell as a Martyr … All this is the decree of Almighty Allah. Our Lord chose him [to be a Martyr].” [emphasis added]
[“Nablus News,” Telegram channel, Nov. 22, 2025]
A Hamas-affiliated network honored the terrorist, sharing a video of him posing with and firing an assault rifle, while a song played in the background:
Song lyrics: “Do not mourn, for eternal life awaits us
Shed no tears, for Paradise is the appointed meeting place
I sacrifice myself to meet Allah, for the sake of life [in Paradise] and [Allah’s] satisfaction”Posted text: “Images of [PA] police officer Martyr Younes Shtayyeh, the one who carried out the shooting operation on the occupation soldiers while they were making arrests in Nablus a few days ago. [An operation] in which he ascended to Heaven while confronting an Israeli Yamam force.” [emphasis added]
[Quds News Network (Hamas), Telegram channel, Nov. 22, 2025]
The “Al-Quds Brigades – Grandchildren of Glory,” Islamic Jihad’s terror wing, posted pictures of the terrorist, pointing out he was a police officer:
Posted text: “[PA] police officer Martyr Younes Walid Shtayyeh, whom the occupation (i.e., Israel) accuses of shooting at its forces during the raid on Nablus yesterday”
[“Al-Quds Brigades – Grandchildren of Glory,” Telegram channel, Nov. 21, 2025]
Other groups applauded terrorist Shtayyeh as a “Jihad fighter” and stressed that he was “a son of the Fatah Movement. A son of the Palestinian Security Forces”:
The author is a contributor to Palestinian Media Watch, where a version of this story first appeared.
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An idyllic Jewish village, full of life and hope, just hours before its utter annihilation
A remarkable scene in Ady Walter’s film Shttl takes place in a Jewish Ukrainian village outside of Kiev on June 21, 1941, one day before the Nazi invasion, known as Operation Barbarossa.
The Rebbe, played by the always excellent Saul Rubinek is the voice of reason; he is a thoughtful, complex, contradictory and conflicted character. He does not raise his voice, he takes time to consider what to say as he himself struggles to respond to whatever factionalism arises within the community. His sad eyes are expressive. He repeatedly rubs his thumb across his fingers. This is a master class in consummate acting.
The mostly black-and-white Yiddish language film, currently playing in New York at New Plaza Cinemas, spans 24 hours in the shtetl, whose residents remain clueless of the impending doom despite the presence of the Russian Army that has already infiltrated the village. Nonetheless the cracks are surfacing within the community. Intense arguments abound on such issues as workers rights and whether to abandon religion or commit to a devoted life. One female character espousing the need for women’s rights, anticipates the future struggle of feminism in the face of patriarchy.
At its core, the film explores Jewish identity, unity and survival. The Rebbe understands factionalism yet remains implacable as he urges the townspeople to be Talmudic in their judgments, tolerant and compassionate. He describes true Jewishness as the color gray, allowing for and even respecting differences of opinion, purpose and worldview.
For, the Rebbe, Jews must always remain unified on some profound level. “Unity is the only thing that matters in the battle against evil,” he asserts. His second tenet is faith in God. Doubt can never enter the picture.
The central character, Mendele (Moshe Lobel in a nicely understated performance) is an aspiring filmmaker, who has long since left the shtetl to join the Red Army in Kyiv. But he returns home along with his best friend, a non-Jewish Ukrainian named Demyan (Petro Ninovskyi), so he can elope with his true love, Yuna (Anisia Stasevich), the child of The Rebbe.
But Yuna is already engaged through an arranged marriage to Folie (Antoine Millet), a cruel, autocratic Hasid who, despite his alleged religiosity, is petty, sly, cunning and ultimately violent.
Mendele remains torn between his ambitions embodied by the cosmopolitan outside world and the restrictive, confined shtetl where he is still deeply rooted. And he can’t help but feel connected to his estranged father, whom he holds responsible for the suicide of his late mother who, like Mendele, was also an outlier.
The film was shot in Ukraine in 2021 at the height of COVID-19 restrictions and at the very moment the Russian invasion was looming. The set, including a synagogue, was supposed to be converted into a museum honoring Ukraine’s Jewish past. But in the end, the Russian forces destroyed the whole shtetl set and the land was mined. Now that the president of Ukraine is a Jew at the very same time antisemitism is surging across the globe and Ukrainians and Jews are both under assault, the parallels and irony are almost implausible.
Walter, a documentary film director making his feature debut, has said his mission was to bring the shtetl universe that was totally wiped out during the Holocaust back to life. The title Shttl with its missing “e” references the 1969 novel, La Disparition by Georges Perec, whose mother died in Auschwitz. In Perec’s fictional work the letter “e” never appears in Shttl, its absence mirroring the emptiness, the void, the loss.
In this film, unlike such Holocaust classics like Schindler’s List, The Pianist, Son of Saul, death, despair, and hopelessness are not yet part of the collective experience. This is life prior to the Holocaust in an ethnically diverse community overflowing with purpose and hope for the future. Many Jews and gentiles enjoy camaraderie, and Yiddish and Ukrainian are both spoken.
Shtll’s cinematic technique is evocative, specifically the way scenes of recollection seamlessly morph into color — Mendele recalls his life as a yeshiva boy and the time his gentle mother gave him a baby rabbit as a pet. The colorful flashbacks suggest the past is so much more vivid than the black-and-white present.
Nevertheless, I found the film problematic. Though it has been praised for its one-shot cinematic approach, which purports to make the movie more immediate, real and immersive for the viewer, the set and the inconsistent performances made it feel more like a filmed stage play to me. And, more importantly, the characters don’t seem like actual human beings as they do spokespersons for various political, philosophical,and religious viewpoints. The quirky folkloric figures don’t help. There are two holy fools of various stripes — a beatific deceased mom who appears as a spectral figure, and my favorite, the butcher who has become a vegetarian.
Admittedly, my image of shtetl life is informed by a Fiddler on the Roof ethos and, by extension, the stories of Sholem Aleichem which presents a largely impoverished, insular and marginalized world, even if its residents don’t see themselves as disenfranchised. But in Shtll, the youthful characters are self-confident in their speech, gestures, and especially their wide-stride, swaggering gaits. They seemed jarringly secular and contemporary to me.
In one scene, our three protagonists, including Yuna, are happily passing back and forth a bottle of booze, each guzzling from the communal cap. The provincial virginal daughter of The Rebbe in a 1941 shtetl? Really?
In the end, though, the film makes a 180-degree turn that nearly eradicates its flaws. Mendele, Demyan, and Yuna have spent the night in the forest and have fallen asleep content in their certainty that at sunrise they will be embarking on their great adventure to freedom.
As dawn breaks and the sun begins to emerge over the trees. Mendele hears gunfire and spies the battalions of Nazis entering the shtetl en masse. The obliteration that will follow is clear. The respective politics, philosophies, not to mention petty jealousies, indeed, all the internecine fighting on the one hand and the moments of jubilation on the other have become totally meaningless. The realization is devastating.
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