What’s with Those ‘Socialist Summer Camps’ Anyway? Here’s the Truth
At The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg called it “good old old-fashioned Red-baiting,” and he kidded about how the camp was supposedly part of the Jewish fraternal organization The Workman’s Circle:
The Workmen’s Circle! The most harmless organization in America! This is what they’re worried about? You should have seen my Jewish summer camp, Camp Shomria, a Socialist Zionist outpost in the Catskills. Kinderland was for bourgeois pantywaists. We, on the other hand, almost succeeded in forcibly collectivising Grossinger’s.
The only problem is that the camp was run originally by The International Worker’s Order, the fraternal organization for Jewish Communists, and had no affiliation with the anti-Communist social democrats of The Workmen’s Circle. And indeed, the defenders of the camps are quite proud that they were indeed created to forge a future generation of Reds. One left-wing historian even wrote an entire book proving this.
At Huffington Post, one of the camp’s major boosters tried to have her own field day. Katie Halper, who is making a documentary film about the camp, writes the following:
This country cannot afford to have a woman whose kids went to Kinderland lead the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Who knows how her children brainwashed their mother with the values of the camp. For starters let’s look, at the people the bunks at Kinderland are named after: Harriet Tubman, Anne Frank, Emma Lazarus, Roberto Clemente. With heroes like these, who knows where these campers could end up! Anywhere from attics, to forests, to the Statue of Liberty, to a baseball diamond, bashing the ball of the American republic with each swing of the unpatriotic bat.
Somehow, she forgot to include “The Paul Robeson Playhouse,” or to show all those widely available photos of the stage bedecked with the Soviet flag and hammer and sickle during World War II.
She also carefully refrained from citing the camp’s own webpages and newsletters, all available on the internet. One quick look and you will find that last year the campers went en masse to Zuccotti Park to participate in Occupy Wall Street.
Wow. Never heard of these before.
And “the stage bedecked with the Soviet flag and hammer and sickle during World War II.”
SO much hidden history. Only those initiated into the Mysteries know.
Thanks, Mr. Radosh!
Let’s see, 69 Jamat-al-Fukrah camps, 24 Shahab camps, 8000 mosques (most built after 9/11)… and Columbia School of Journalism! So much hope for the future of administrative management.
thank you, Mr Radosh, for explaining why movies about camps with scrubby, anarchic little kids triumph over the camp with cared for, clean, tall, well-loved children.
and thank you for writing about the camps at all.
and, my, what lying. what lying, what wrapping in darkness, their deeds.
I send my kids to a religious camp. I expect it to help form them into religious adults. I know they sing hymns all day, I know they pray all over the place. Why wouldn’t camp songs to communism shape those youngsters, as well?
This makes them commies?
“Kinderlanders protesting pipelines, fracking, illegal frisking, Kinderlanders promoting fair wages, health care reform, union and workers rights.”
Wow! Got thru the PJM censors with my incendiary comment on only my 3rd try!
Nobody’s going to censor you; your idiocy is too entertaining.
She sent her children to Camp Kinderland. It was never alleged that she was subjected to the Camp that retains the vision of its communist founders (according to their own website)
Obviously, she wanted her kids to experience being enveloped in a “progressive” indoctrination camp, which leads any reasonable person to believe that she shares those values.
Imagine if it had been a camp founded by the KKK? Do you think anyone would be defending her decision to send her children there?
“Imagine if it had been a camp founded by the KKK? Do you think anyone would be defending her decision to send her children there?”
Who needs the KKK when you have the Boy Scouts?
My late, beloved father, for 46 years a superb professor
of chemistry at Brooklyn College, had been a
counselor at Camp Woodland and later one of
four partners at Camp Tunis Lake. At Tunis he
had a business partner named Brickman: any
relation to Marshall?
Disgusted by Stalinist groupthink and anti-
Semitism, my father left the CPUSA in the
late 1940s. Ever scholarly, in retirement he
taught himself enough serious economics to
read Keynes, Hayek and Friedman. And to appreciate
the refusal of postwar British Hong Kong
authorities to assemble too much data on
the economy: less temptation to intervene.
Just to be clear:
Jesusland = The evil heart of middle-America brainwashing innocent children to become racist haters of science.
Kinderland = Sunshine, s’mores and song.
“If Ms. Groshen is good enough for Furchtgott-Roth, she’s good enough for me.
That is a problem. It matters not whether Ms. Furchtgott-Roth is a card carrying Republican nor that the BLS is a vast bureaucracy that supposedly cannot be twisted to the whims of the director.
What matters is that anyone with an outlying ideology is in control of said agency will by subconscious action twist said agency to such out of control ideology. She is wholly unfit for the office.
Quit putting the fox in charge of the hen house.
People think that socialism is that bad. I really don’t think it’s THAT bad.