Jewish Camps Are a Leadership Strategy, Not a Side Program

Reflections on Dan Senor’s Call Me Back and the Future of Jewish Camp Leadership

In recent commentary on Call Me Back, Dan Senor underscores something many Jewish communal professionals know instinctively but do not always say out loud. Jewish camps play an outsized role in shaping Jewish identity, leadership, and continuity.

They are often discussed nostalgically or operationally. Rarely strategically.

That is a mistake.

Jewish camps succeed where many institutions struggle because they are immersive. They create community through lived experience, not abstract values. Identity at camp is not theoretical. It is practiced daily.

For generations, camps have produced confident, connected Jews precisely because they operate differently from synagogues or schools. They are relational. They are intense. And they matter far beyond the summer.

From a leadership and organizational perspective, camps should be viewed as core Jewish infrastructure, not peripheral programming.

Behind the scenes, many Jewish camps are under real strain. Not because of mission drift, but because of leadership pressure.

We see it across the sector:

These challenges are not unique to camps. They are simply more visible there.

Camps compress leadership challenges into a short, intense window. That makes them an early indicator of what the broader Jewish nonprofit sector is facing.

One of the most overlooked truths in Jewish life is this. Camps are leadership factories.

Camp professionals manage people, budgets, crises, culture, and community, often by their late 20s or early 30s. Yet the field has not done enough to invest intentionally in leadership development, create clear professional pathways beyond camp, or treat camp leadership as preparation for senior communal roles.

At Merraine Group, many of the strongest Jewish nonprofit leaders we work with started at camp. That experience builds real operational muscle. The sector benefits when we acknowledge that and plan accordingly.

If Jewish camps are as influential as Senor suggests, boards and funders need to engage differently.

That means:

This is not about sentimentality. It is about organizational sustainability.

The takeaway from Call Me Back is not only about camps. It is about how Jewish institutions think about leadership.

Organizations that endure invest in people before there is a crisis. They take culture seriously. They understand that identity and belonging are built through experience.

Jewish camps have long understood this. The rest of the sector is catching up.

At Merraine Group, we believe this moment calls for more thoughtful leadership planning across Jewish life, starting with the institutions that have been quietly doing it right for decades.