The concept of a vital “living” Judaism remains at the philosophical core of southern Jewish camps today. Camp Blue Star’s contemporary “Living Judaism” program “integrates Jewish values, culture, and traditions” that “teach as well as uplift.” Miles Kuttler, a former staff member at Blue Star, explains: “You’d see one thousand Jewish kids in the hills of North Carolina singing Hebrew songs.” With emotion in his voice, Kutler concludes, “There’s no way to describe it.” Southern Jewish denominational camps with similar educational missions include Camp Judaea, Hendersonville, North Carolina (est. 1960), a program of Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America, and Camp Ramah Darom (Ramah of the South) in north Georgia (est. 1997), affiliated with the Conservative Movement in Judaism. Camp Ramah Darom has a Center for Southern Jewry that provides adult and family programs throughout the year for local Jewish families. Camp Darom in Wildersville, Tennessee, is a modern Orthodox Zionist camp supported by the Baron Hirsch Congregation in Memphis and described as “the only Orthodox sleep away camp in the entire south.”7
Camp Blue Star, the “oldest, family-owned, private, kosher Jewish camp in the southern United States,” was founded in 1948 on 740 acres in the mountains of western North Carolina, the same year as the founding of the state of Israel. Sarna describes this era as a “crucial decade in Jewish camping,” in which Jewish education was both an expression of “cultural resistance” after the Holocaust and an American promise to build and uphold the Jewish people. Brothers Herman, Harry, and Ben Popkin were leaders in Atlanta-based Zionist and B’nai B’rith youth organizations who hoped to build a private Jewish summer camp in the South when they returned from service in World War II. While conducting research for their business venture, Herman and Ben Popkin consulted with owners of non-Jewish camps in north Georgia. Jane McConnell of Camp Cherokee was “honest and straightforward” and gave the Popkins this advice: “You boys ought to do it. There’s a need for a camp like the one you propose, especially for older children. Most private camps down south won’t accept Jewish children, and those that do, do so on a strict quota basis.” As historian Eli Evans, a former Blue Star camper, described in The Provincials, his classic memoir of the Jewish South, “Herman and Harry Popkin . . . built a veritable camping empire in the postwar era.” It was a southern Jewish mountain paradise for young boys like Evans—a magical world of bonfires, hiking, Israeli folk dancing taught by actual Israelis, Jewish girls, and deep discussions about God and Jewish identity. “For the rest of our days, it seemed,” wrote Evans, “one sure way that Jewish kids all over the South could start a long conversation was by asking, ‘What years were you at Blue Star?'”8
“One sure way that Jewish kids all over the South could start a long conversation was by asking, ‘What years were you at Blue Star?'”
Although their Jewish educational methodologies differed—Camp Blue Star’s commitment to Jewish education was front and center in their daily programming, while Camp Wah-Kon-Dah’s Jewish ideology was expressed in “values,” rather than overt curriculum—the two camps are joined by their founders’ commitment to providing the highest quality, private camping experience for Jewish children. Wah-Kon-Dah’s founder, Ben Kessler—”Uncle Benny” to his campers—was born in 1903. He came from a family of ten that included his four brothers and three sisters. His eastern European parents, Jenny and Jacob Kessler, worked in the fruit and produce business in St. Louis, where they lived in the working-class neighborhood of Kerry Patch, named for the many Irish-Catholic families who lived there. According to their nephew, Thom Lobe, the Kessler brothers were “all big guys” and fine athletes. They were award-winning boxers and football players in high school. Ben Kessler refereed fights, including one with boxer Rocky Graziano, and Ben’s brother Harry Kessler, known as “the millionaire referee,” worked in the ring with boxing champions Joe Louis, Jack Dempsey, and Muhammad Ali. With his passion for athletics, coaching, and community recreation, camping was a natural profession for Ben Kessler. His first boys’ camp in Brumley, Missouri, closed when Kessler joined the armed forces during World War II. In 1945, he re-opened the camp on a spacious peninsula on the Lake of the Ozarks, a lake created in the early 1930s with the construction of Bagnell Dam on the Osage River. The dam provided electric power for the region and, equally important, thousands of jobs soon after the Depression began.9
The name Ben Kessler chose for his camp, Wah-Kon-Dah, referred to ‘the Great Spirit” of the Omaha tribes. Why did a nice Jewish man like Ben Kessler choose an Indian name for his camp? Early leaders in Jewish camping adopted the same American Indian folklore and heritage that so deeply influenced American camping at the turn of the twentieth century. Folklorist Rayna Green argues, “One of the oldest and most pervasive forms of American cultural expression . . . is a ‘performance’ [called] ‘playing Indian.'” It began with Pocahontas saving Captain John Smith, the first Thanksgiving, and Squanto saving the Pilgrims. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Hiawatha (1855) helped to solidify the image of the Indian in the American imagination. Victorian-era societies like the Elks, the Lions, and the Kiwanis introduced the idea of “playing Indian” to the white middle-class by embracing nomenclature that suggested the power of the natural world. Pseudo-Indian language like “Kiwanis” reinforced Native American values. For the Boy Scouts, founded in 1908, Indians represented the scouting ideal of manly independence. These themes were perpetuated in summer camps, and Jewish camps, too, embraced this celebration of Native American culture, frequently adopting the names of local Indian tribes for their institutions or using initials or even a Hebrew word to create an Indian-sounding name with a Jewish backstory. (Jewish comedians have speculated whether Native Americans might give Jewish names like “Camp Whitefish” and “Camp Kreplach” to their summer camps.)10