Camp Conformity

I Was Sent to Bond With My Fellow Jews. I Failed.

Last month, for the first time since I was 15, I returned to summer camp. Some friends were getting married and had rented out a YMCA in upstate New York to put on a camp-themed wedding. It was the union of a bride who loved camp and a groom who had never been. He probably accepted her story about camp being a summer idyll because he had no way to know better. He had never had his bunkmates ignore him for the summer for having committed a breach of bed-assignment …