In a recent posting on his silly blog, Little Dickie Silverstein waxed on melodramatically about his nostalgia for his time as a whipper-kapo in the Camp Ramah summer camp system.
There he writes:
Anyway, the problem is that in an earlier posting, the very same Silverstein downright accused the very same Camp Ramah of subjecting him to acute "child abuse" back then. Here he writes:
There he writes:
I am a product of the Jewish summer camp movement. I attended Camp Ramahs in New England (Palmer, MA), American Seminar (Nyack, NY) and Glen Spey, NY between 1967 and 1970. They played a formative role in the development of my Jewish, spiritual and intellectual identity. My teachers and counselors taught me to think, they taught me to pray, they taught me to make friends, they taught me to develop myself creatively. To this day names like Louis Hartman, Stuart Kelman, Alan Mintz, Joseph Lukinsky, Robert Cover, Neal Kaunfer, Joseph Riemer, Jonathan Fenster, Daniel Matt, Raphael Artz and many others are etched fondly in my mind...Dickie claims he was taught to think? What a surprise for us to hear that? So what happened afterwards?
Anyway, the problem is that in an earlier posting, the very same Silverstein downright accused the very same Camp Ramah of subjecting him to acute "child abuse" back then. Here he writes:
So which is it - tears of nostalgia for his Ramah days or another case of Dickaling being an "aggrieved victim?"A senior rabbi on the camp staff (and a distinguished Jewish educator)
ejected me from the chadar ochel during a meal, proceeding to yell at me about
my behavior. I had (unintentionally) forgotten to don my kipah during the
meal. As I returned to my bunk alone with the rest of the camp behind me
at the dining hall, I was humiliated, shamed, mortified. I thought about leaving
camp, but then I would've been forced to abandon all the good friends I had made
at camp...