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How I Went to Jewish Summer Camp on the Cow Plan

JL;DR SUMMARY In this nostalgic piece, Fern Reiss recounts how a fortuitous encounter with Camp Tel Yehudah in the 1970s steered her and her sister toward a deeper connection with their Jewish roots. A way out west there was a fella, fella I want to tell you about, fella by the name of Jeff Lebowski. At least, that was the handle his lovin' parents gave him, but he never had much use for it himself. This Lebowski, he called himself the Dude. Now, Dude, that's a name no one would self-apply where I come from. But then, there was a lot about the Dude that didn't make a whole lot of sense to me. And a lot about where he lived, likewise. But then again, maybe that's why I found the place s'durned innarestin'.

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Tags

Jewish IdentityZionismJewish Summer CampAliyah1970sJewish UpbringingCultural ImmersionCamp Tel YehudahKibbutz Experience

Places mentioned

Goshen, New York, United States
"My sister, Sue, and I grew up on that dairy farm in Goshen, N.Y., about 65 miles northwest of Manhattan."
Barryville, New York, United States
"Except that one day, in the late 1970s, my father got a call from Mel Reisfield, who ran Camp Tel Yehudah, a Zionist summer camp in Barryville, N.Y."
Ulrichstein, Hesse, Germany
"In 1934, before some people were worrying about Hitler, my Opa, a dairy farmer in Ulrichstein, Germany, heard from an army buddy who was blunt."
Israel
"Nor did we have any Israel connection. As a teen, Im not sure I could have found Israel on a map."

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This item was indexed and curated by Cairo, JL;DR's web crawler.
Cairo Item ID 84477
Cairo Source ID 44
Retrieved 2026-06-10 05:30:57 UTC
Curated 2026-06-10 08:31:26 UTC