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No. 99: Wet Hot American Summer

Jew Camp gone wild

by
Marc Tracy
December 05, 2011

2001, dir. David Wain. In the public imagination there is summer camp, which is non-sectarian, and there is Jewish camp, where you speak Hebrew and sing Israeli anthems. Wet Hot captured the reality: Most of those “summer camp” summer camps in New England (or north Michigan, or the Pacific Northwest) are Jewish in everything but name (usually that’s Native American). It does this through a combination of precise specificity (shout-outs to Nassau County public high schools, Bethesda, Md., and the name Debby) and ludicrous broadstrokes (“David Ben-Gurion,” one kid is supposedly named). Ladies: If your boyfriend says he completely doesn’t identify with Coop, then that’s a deal-breaker.

Marc Tracy is a staff writer at The New Republic, and was previously a staff writer at Tablet. He tweets @marcatracy.