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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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‘Spatial restructuring’ razes hundreds of residences in West Bank refugee camps
The Israel Defense Forces refers to the systematic demolition of hundreds of homes in the Jenin, Tulkarm and Nur Shams refugee camps as “spatial restructuring,” a bureaucratic euphemism for operations designed to create maneuvering space. For years, Israel has used house demolitions in the West Bank as a punitive measure against terrorists, but over the past 18 months, the purpose behind the policy has changed: Israel is now razing homes in order to widen roads inside the camps, which will allow for the easier passage of military vehicles.
The destruction is part of a trend whereby Israel is importing combat tactics it has used in the wars in Gaza and Lebanon to the occupied West Bank. The main difference is the Israeli settlers — who engaged in persistent efforts to expel Palestinian populations first from Israeli-administered areas of the West Bank, and now from zones under the control of the Palestinian Authority.
In the aftermath of Oct. 7, the IDF distributed thousands of firearms to the settlers, some of whom were recruited as “regional defense soldiers.” As a result, IDF weapons have been used in many of the violent clashes between settlers and Palestinians in the West Bank. Last month, N12 News reported that the IDF will scale back the number of regional defense soldiers — and that Shin Bet will vet the recruits.
But even without the settlers — looking solely from the perspective of the IDF’s military activity — a significant change is underway. From the IDF’s perspective, the West Bank is turning from a place that is home to millions of Palestinians who are not involved in any hostile activity, into a combat zone. And combat zones can be “restructured” according to the military’s needs, even if that includes the demolition of entire neighborhoods or population transfer.
According to the IDF, the change was actually sparked by the Palestinian side. Even before Oct. 7 2023, the army claims, Palestinian terrorist organizations were setting up battalions — larger fighting units that held training exercises and activities based on an organized military doctrine. In July 2023, the IDF responded by launching Operation Home and Garden in the Jenin refugee camp — the largest Israeli military operation since Defensive Shield in 2002. It was a short, targeted maneuver that lasted just two days.
In the aftermath of the Oct. 7 massacre, the IDF described an uptick in the activity of these battalions, which led, in August 2024, to Operation Summer Camps, during which the army entered the refugee camps in Tulkarm and killed the commander of a local battalion. The same month, as Israel Hayom reporter Amir Ettinger revealed, Israel Katz — then minister of foreign affairs and now minister of defense — made the IDF’s intentions quite clear: “The refugee camps are the root of the evil,” he said during a closed-door meeting with leaders of the Yesha Council. “They are not controlled by the Palestinian Authority, but by Iran. The Jenin refugee camp must be cleared of its residents and dealt with the same way we dealt with the Gaza Strip.”
In January 2025, Katz’s words became reality when the IDF launched Operation Iron Wall. According to figures issued by the military, 208 homes were destroyed in the Jenin refugee camp and 234 in the Tulkarm and Nur Shams camps. The goal was to allow armored Israeli vehicles to move within the camp. Satellite images leave no room for doubt as to the extent of the devastation.
The IDF currently has troops stationed permanently inside the refugee camps and is not allowing the tens of thousands of residents who left to return to their homes. Some Palestinians who were expelled have petitioned to Israel’s High Court of Justice, via the Association of Civil Rights in Israel and attorneys Hila Sharon and Reut Shaer. In February, the IDF told the court that it “does not intend to maintain a permanent presence in the refugee camps and, once the goals of the operation have been fully achieved, the current operation in the camps will be ended.” At the same time, the IDF added that “the necessary operational conditions have not yet been fully met.”
“We are a household of six people, including four children,” says Bassem — not his real name — who lived on the outskirts of the Tulkarm refugee camp and who was expelled around a year ago. “They gave us 10 minutes to leave. And that was that. Since then, we haven’t been home.”
According to Bassem, despite the IDF’s claim that it issues individual permits for residents to visit their homes, his request has been denied. He did manage to get access to the home one time — without permission — in the early hours of the morning. “All of the furniture was broken. The doors were open, there were cats and dogs inside, the trees in the yard had no fruit. Everything was dead. And I regret going to see it. I don’t have any security charges against me and I have committed no crime. Why would they do that to my home? And even if they do give me a permit — there’s no furniture left.”
Bassem and his family now live in rented accommodation. The financial assistance they got earlier is dwindling and he cannot see any kind of future. “UNRWA gave us some money at the start and a few cartons of oil, rice and things like that. Now, 80% of the aid has ended. In my opinion, there’s not even a 1% chance we’ll ever get back to our home.”
Delivering a message
“Spatial restructuring” is not a new concept, but, in the West Bank, its meaning has changed. In the past, it mainly referred to roadblocks designed to control the movement of Palestinian and Israeli vehicles and to allow the Israeli authorities to impose a military closure at will. In the past year it has taken on a new significance: the destruction of Palestinian homes and infrastructure.
For example, in August last year, Maj.-Gen. Avi Bluth, the head of the Central Command, ordered the uprooting of thousands of Palestinian olive trees from an area of about 300 dunams (74 acres) belonging to the village of Al-Mughayyir, following a shooting attack in which a Jewish Israeli was lightly wounded. “Every village and every enemy must know that if they carry out an attack against the [Israeli] residents, they will pay a heavy price. They will experience a curfew, they will experience a siege, and they will experience restructuring operations,” Bluth said. “We are now bearing down on this village, which has been responsible for quite a few attacks lately. We will also deliver this message to the village.”
Similar measures were also taken after the terror attack in May 2025 in which 30-year-old Tzeela Gez was shot dead while on her way to the maternity hospital to give birth. The IDF demolished homes in the adjacent village of Burkin overlooking Route 446 — including a four-story apartment block.
Another indication of the change in the IDF’s approach is the increase in the number of Palestinian fatalities in the West Bank since Oct. 7. According to data released by the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, 478 and 474 Palestinians were killed by IDF fire in 2023 and 2024 respectively. In 2025, that figure dropped to 221. These have been by far the most deadly years for Palestinians in the West Bank since the early 2000s, at the height of the second intifada. Figures issued by the IDF’s Central Command show a similar trend.
One of the reasons for this increase is the order issued by Bluth — which was revealed last year by Haaretz — that expanded open-fire orders in the West Bank. Here, too, the IDF is importing its operating tactics from the Gaza Strip. The instructions appear to reflect a broader change in the IDF’s combat doctrine, possibly influenced by the fact that many of its soldiers also fought in Gaza.
“A lot of things have changed,” says Meir — not his real name — an officer in the reserves who served for many months in the West Bank before and after Oct. 7. “I’m not sure whether this is something imported from another region, or rather that the security reality has simply changed. Once October 7 happened, it was understood that we can no longer just take it. So, we’re beefing up security: adding posts, bringing back patrols — every patrol that was ever cut has been brought back and every patrol that never existed before has been added.”
Meir claims that the rules of engagement have not been changed and insists that “no one is firing indiscriminately.” At the same time, he adds: “It’s true that there was an understanding that we have to respond more forcefully. Before October 7, people were less eager to use firearms; afterwards, the IDF suddenly remembered that you can’t fight terrorism with the foul odor of tear gas. We are given weapons so that we can use them. When there was a need — we used them. There was a long period of time when we were afraid to shoot, when even shooting in the air would mean that all hell broke loose. You shoot your gun — that’s what it’s for. We don’t walk around with our weapons slung over our shoulders just because it looks good.”
Meir also believes that the change is primarily a response to Palestinian terror. “The Palestinians responded very strongly to October 7. There were Hamas flags, rallies — even violence. It was something out of the ordinary. So, we used the means at our disposal to quiet it down. The Palestinians did things we hadn’t seen before — three armed men tried to infiltrate Adora [a settlement northwest of Hebron], for example, and there were bomb-making factories. We found crazy amounts of terrorist infrastructure.”
‘There’s a problem here. We’ll pay the price’
Maj.-Gen. (Res.) Gadi Shamni, a former Central Command chief, sees things differently. “It’s all a question of proportionality,” he tells Shomrim. “There has been a significant increase in the threat level — a lot of underbelly IEDs and all of that organization [of Palestinian battalions]. That said, October 7 and everything that’s happened since, along with the footage coming out of Gaza, ultimately mean that in a lot of places [the IDF] is sometimes using a ton of force — more than is always necessary. There are some sensitivities which, in the past, [the IDF] treated very seriously. Today, those sensitivities have disappeared — and that’s not a good thing.”
“I have spoken to soldiers and officers, young and old, who used to see things very differently,” Shamni adds. “Today, what they say is: ‘Take no chances — shoot at everything.’ This is a problematic approach and the IDF, at some stage, will have to take control of the situation — because we will end up paying a price. Once, officers dealt with these sensitivities, they briefed their soldiers on how to treat civilians, how to behave in sensitive areas. Today, the lower-ranking soldiers are unaware of any of this, because nobody talks to them. Everything is black or white. There’s no middle ground. And that’s a problem when you’re operating in a civilian environment.”
“[The principle of] proportionality has vanished,” he adds. “When you talk about proportionality, you are told, ‘Now’s the time to kick ass.’ There is also intense pressure from the settlements, the government, from [ministers] Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich. Ultimately, the IDF carries out the government’s policies. You can see what Smotrich is doing on the ground and it is incumbent on the IDF to execute those policies. We have a problem here.”
IDF: Freedom of action remains a necessary condition for regional security
The IDF submitted the following response: “The intensive efforts of the IDF to thwart terrorism in Judea and Samaria began before the outbreak of the war. Terrorist infrastructure developed in the refugee camps of the northern Samaria region, from which attacks were launched. In light of this, the IDF launched Operation Iron Wall in January 2025, during which operational and engineering activities were carried out to enable freedom of action for security forces, dismantle terrorist infrastructure and prevent terrorist organizations from establishing a presence.
“In addition to these operational activities, there has been a decrease of about 80% in the volume of terror attacks in northern Samaria recently. Most of the measures implemented during the operation, including the clearing of access routes and other engineering work, were also reviewed by the Supreme Court in response to petitions that were subsequently dismissed following the submission of a formal response and a hearing attended by all parties.
“Vegetation clearing is carried out according to established protocols, with the approval of relevant authorities in Central Command and based on operational requirements. These measures are designed to ensure the safety of road users, protect travel routes and prevent infiltrations and terrorist attacks. Every operation is preceded by a professional assessment. The IDF operates in accordance with the law and its decisions are subject to judicial review. Security forces act against structures built without authorization, prioritizing enforcement against illegal construction near roads that poses a security risk. Such enforcement actions are carried out under the planning and building laws applicable in the region.
“IDF forces continue to operate throughout Judea and Samaria, focusing on targeted counterterrorism efforts to ensure the safety of citizens. The freedom of action maintained by the IDF in terrorist hubs across northern Samaria remains a necessary condition for regional security.”
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Whether it’s viral dot cakes or Love Shack Fancy skirts, Chloe Hechter wants you to know that “Jewish-American Princesses did it first”
On the Upper East Side of Manhattan, Butterfield Market currently boasts hour-long lines for the viral “dot cakes,” which are entirely covered by tiny sprinkles. For influencer Chloe Hechter, however, these cakes are nothing new — she saw them at every college bed party, birthday and Bat Mitzvah she ever went to.
“Jewish-American Princesses did it first,” she claimed in a recent Tiktok.
Hechter, who is 25, regularly receives thousands of likes on her content which is centered around relatable modern Jewish experiences: summer relationships at Jewish summer camp, drama within Jewish sororities, coming home from college for Passover seder. She’s described her mission as reclaiming the “Jewish-American Princess” stereotype, which often brings to mind a girl who is spoiled, materialistic and boy-obsessed. Hechter hopes to present a different narrative.
“Jewish American Princess means a headstrong, confident Jewish woman who knows what she’s worth,” Hechter wrote in a February Substack post. “A girl who knows her place in the world as a woman and as a Jew, and who isn’t afraid to be exactly who she is in those spaces.”
The modern-day stereotype of a “Jewish-American Princess” is known for a dress code of sweat sets from Free City or Aviator Nation, Roller Rabbit pajamas and ruffly skirts from Love Shack Fancy. Before that, as Jamie Lauren Keiles discussed in a 2018 Vox article, the “JAP” uniform included Juicy tracksuits in the 2000s, Calvin Klein jeans in the ‘80s and cashmere sweaters in the ‘50s. But, as the ‘princess’ moniker suggests, these looks have always come at a price (Free City sweatpants currently retail for $168).
Keiles explains that JAPs’ historic reputation for dependence on “daddy’s money” stems from Jewish men in the 1950s, still seen by many as nouveau riche, who sought someone to blame. The Jewish-American Princess was encapsulated, Keiles writes, in Goodbye, Columbus’ Brenda Patimkin, who, though educated and beautiful, is also characterized as vain, demanding and uncompromising. It is this kind of portrayal that Hechter hopes to challenge. Though she acknowledges her own privileged background, she also argues that privilege doesn’t necessarily mean out-of-touch.
Hechter’s upbringing was “a gift I’ve been given,” she said. Although she didn’t discuss her background in detail, Hechter expressed her admiration for her parents, who run their own businesses and worked hard to make sure that she grew up in comfort. As opposed to the stereotypical Jewish-American princess, searching for a wealthy husband to provide for her, Hechter said that she uses her background as motivation to be self-sufficient — and as inspiration for her content.
Hechter started out as a child actor, and later went to high school at LaGuardia, the famed performing arts school in New York. At heart, though, she says she was also a writer. Even from a young age, she told me, she would write down funny or ridiculous situations she observed. For a Reform Jewish girl going to New York City private school, there was a lot of material — particularly during B’nei Mitzvah season.
“I’d be like ‘why am I in a party bus to a country club?,’” she joked.
For Hechter, Jewish experiences like these — along with her summers at sleepaway camp — were primarily cultural as opposed to religious. She observed the major holidays, but didn’t go to services regularly; she found the teachings of the Torah interesting but didn’t follow them to the letter.
After she graduated from Syracuse, Hechter began posting skits, which eventually began to go viral. Her first big video, currently at over 660,000 likes, was themed around getting ready for a camp social. In an interview with her college newspaper, she joked that she “would’ve put on makeup” if she had anticipated the video’s success.
Inspired that social media could be her calling, Hechter initially pushed herself to post five times a day, a pace that now seems inconceivable to her. It paid off, though; Hechter currently boasts over 186,000 followers on TikTok and 79,000 on Instagram.
In her videos, Hechter is dedicated to representing a version of her Jewish experience that is rarely shown on screen. Most Jewish characters in film, she says, tend to follow a limited set of archetypes: they’re deeply religious, there’s a depressing undertone or, like Shoshanna Shapiro from Girls, their religion isn’t discussed. When a funny, secular Jew appears on screen, he’s almost always a man.
“I love Adam Sandler and Larry David as much as the next girl, but I wish growing up that I had a cool, fun Jewish girl to look up to,” Hechter said.
Hechter explained that many of her skits draw from experiences she observed on the outskirts; as she tells it, she went to camp but wasn’t the mean girl, she attended lavish Bat Mitzvahs but didn’t have a party of her own, she was in a Jewish sorority but wasn’t super involved. Still, her characters are immediately recognizable.
“People either are experiencing these things firsthand and are like ‘oh my god, this is so me,’” she said. “Or they see it and they make fun of it, like ‘oh my god, this is so my daughter. Oh my god, this is so the people in my sorority.’”
Hannah Wiener, a high school senior from Oceanside, Long Island, is a longtime fan of Hechter. For Hanukkah one year, her sister gifted her a personalized Cameo video in which Hechter talked about their similarities and common interests.
Wiener said that she loves Hechter’s content because she finds it relatable. There are a lot of influencers who make similar videos about Jewish life, but Wiener feels like they make fun of it, rather than treat it “as a normal event like Chloe does.” For Wiener, who went to sleepaway camp herself, Hechter’s camp videos are her favorite. She said that she finds them “to be so funny and also just so heartwarming.”
Middle and high schoolers make up a large proportion of Hechter’s audience — she told me that summer “camp girls”, like Wiener, are her biggest fans. Hechter believes her younger self would have been one of them.
“I genuinely think I would have been my own favorite creator,” she said.
The post Whether it’s viral dot cakes or Love Shack Fancy skirts, Chloe Hechter wants you to know that “Jewish-American Princesses did it first” appeared first on The Forward.
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The Iran war ended terribly for the US, and even worse for Israel
A war that began with immense ambition has ended with profound setbacks for both the United States and Israel.
With an emerging U.S.-Iran peace agreement, what initially appeared to be a historic demonstration of military dominance evolved into a vivid illustration of the limits of both Israeli and American power. The conflict also exposed profound failures in strategic competence within that alliance. Washington and Jerusalem planned effectively for the initial decapitation strikes, but were unprepared for the economic and geopolitical consequences that followed.
The result is a war that may ultimately strengthen the Iranian regime politically, despite the damage it suffered militarily; has weakened international perceptions of American military might; and has diminished both Israel’s own strategic circumstances and its most important alliance.
The opening phase of the war appeared spectacularly successful. Israeli intelligence and airpower decapitated large portions of Iran’s military and security leadership with astonishing speed, including by assassinating Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Key military infrastructure suffered major damage, and for a brief moment, it seemed plausible that the Iranian regime might genuinely face collapse or surrender on terms dictated by Washington and Jerusalem.
That perception proved short-lived.
Iran shifted the battlefield away from conventional military confrontation and toward economic coercion. Its closure of the Strait of Hormuz exposed the extraordinary vulnerability of the global economy to relatively inexpensive forms of pressure. Energy markets panicked almost immediately. Governments across Europe, Asia, and the Gulf pushed urgently for de-escalation.
The central strategic reality became impossible to ignore: the U.S.could not tolerate sustained economic disruption, and the Iranian regime has a strong stomach for suffering. The overwhelming military superiority of the U.S. and Israel effectively ceased to matter.
That asymmetry changed the balance of the conflict. And the resulting agreement appears to preserve much of Iran’s architecture of mischief, which the regime’s many critics had hoped to see dismantled.
Iran’s ballistic missile capabilities have been harmed but can be rebuilt; long-term reductions to that firepower are reportedly not on the table in a planned 60-day negotiation. The regime’s regional proxy network — including Hezbollah, the Houthis, Iraqi militias, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad — survives, even though Hezbollah and Hamas have been battered.
And as Israel is not a party to the ceasefire, it cannot advocate for more stringent terms on this front.
The regime itself remains firmly in power and may receive enormous sanctions relief and renewed economic access. Demands for democratic reforms seem to have been set aside, as has any kind of punishment for the regime’s massacre of thousands — and by some reports tens of thousands — of domestic protestors in January.
The latter aspect is especially galling given that President Donald Trump was driven to intervene because of the January massacre, after he promised Iranians that “help is on its way.” Upon launching the war, he declared that it would enable Iranians to “take your country back.”
Ironically, Trump in his first term pulled out of former President Barack Obama’s 2015 nuclear deal over objections that it provided funds for the regime while allowing it to run riot. Now, he is settling for an effective reconstitution of that deal — except one with substantially less American leverage.
The implications extend far beyond Iran itself. The war demonstrated that Tehran can generate immediate global economic panic through relatively cheap tools and can leverage that panic into diplomatic concessions. Before the war, fears about Iran’s ability to blackmail the world economy remained somewhat theoretical. After the war, those fears became a demonstrated geopolitical reality.
There is little evidence that either the American or Israeli governments understood in advance the degree to which the global economy had become vulnerable to this form of coercion. This, even though the blocking of the Strait of Hormuz was completely predictable and indeed expected by every strategist I’ve spoken to for decades.
This outcome may be most devastating for the Iranian people themselves. Many Iranians who despise the regime interpreted the opening phase of the conflict as evidence that the dictatorship might finally face genuine collapse. Instead, the regime not only survived but also regained leverage. The machinery of repression remains intact.
But this result is damaging for every party to this war aside from the Iranian regime.
The war has transformed perceptions of American power. For decades, the U.S. has anchored a global system built on the assumption that Washington could manage regional crises with some strategy in mind. That strategy wasn’t always brilliant, but it was rarely clueless. With the Hormuz confrontation, the world watched the U.S. confront a regional adversary with vastly inferior capabilities and fail to control events.
For Israel, the alliance Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has spent years cultivating with the American right and with Trump personally has become dangerously fragile. As pressure mounted to stabilize energy markets and prevent wider regional escalation, Trump increasingly presented himself not as a partner coordinating with Israel but as a superior authority managing Israeli actions. He repeatedly framed Israeli military action as dependent on his approval. He cursed Netanyahu in public. He presented Israel as a vassal doing his bidding — something no U.S. president has previously done.
This will destabilize Israel, where much of the governing right previously viewed Trump as a uniquely reliable ally who would support Israeli military objectives without hesitation or conditions.
Previous American presidents pressured Israel privately while still preserving the outward presentation of a relationship between sovereign allies. Trump discarded much of that convention. The new perception weakens Israel’s deterrence dramatically. Plus, with bipartisan support for Israel in Washington even more completely collapsed than after the deleterious war in Gaza, and relations with much of Europe — Israel’s top trading partner — similarly deteriorated, Israel finds itself at a new peak of dangerous international isolation.
This strategic shipwreck bears no resemblance to the sweeping regional transformation that supporters of the war — myself included — initially envisioned. I assumed, partly because of the first days’ successes, that Trump and Netanyahu had a plan. This is not a mistake serious people are likely to make again.
The post The Iran war ended terribly for the US, and even worse for Israel appeared first on The Forward.
