Tonight is meant to be the first Shabbat of the season at Camp Eisner. My son, Lev, should be spending the afternoon fighting for a good shower time and pulling out the white polo shirt I ironed his name into, the evening singing himself hoarse and trying to avoid getting his feet stomped during Israeli dancing. He should be lazing away this long summer Saturday having late breakfast  in his pajamas and doing various forms of nothing with his buddies. He should be savoring Shabbat Shabrownies.

Sha-what? Apparently this is not one of the special camp things you tell parents about in cryptic three-sentence letters home or when they pick you up weeks later, tanned and tired and happier than you've ever been but sad, too, because it's over 'til next summer -- or, in the case of coronavirus, not.

But when I asked my kids what they'd miss most, what they love, about Shabbat at camp, "Shabrownies!" was the first thing both of them blurted out. Shabrownies, I learned, are served at Eisner each week between Kabbalat Shabbat and the famously raucous song session. They are thin and cut small, and you sometimes have to scramble to get more than crumbs. And, yes, they're the most delicious thing in the whole world. 

Intrepid journalist that I am, I reached out to top executives at the Union of Reform Judaism, which runs Eisner and 14 other now-shuttered summer camps, in search of the secret recipe, to maybe surprise my son with a little taste of Camp Shabbat. My high-placed sources tapped their high-placed sources -- Eisner's director and assistant director -- who revealed that, as should have been obvious, one does not make Shabrownies to serve 1,000 people from scratch, and the mix is not the kind one can get at the local supermarket.

The secret ingredient, of course, is camp itself: Shabrownies are only Shabrownies when you scarf them down surrounded by hundreds of other hoarse Jewish kids, the breeze of a Berkshires evening blowing through, the promise ahead of trip days and color war, swimming and sneaking kisses, pranks and pajamas at breakfast. 

I made brownies for this Shabbat anyhow, from a mix I got at the local supermarket. Actually my daughter, Shayna, made them, in the nifty square pan we just bought ($12.99 on Amazon Prime). She threw peanut-butter chips and walnuts and crushed Pringle's into a few -- if we can't have the real secret ingredient of Shabrownies, we might as well make them our own.







I suppose that's the challenge of this campless summer -- not to recreate what is lost, but to reinvent, make new traditions. It's the challenge, too, for synagogues reimagining high-holiday services with "Car Nidre," "Shofar flash mobs" and other creative touches, as Irene Katz Connelly reported this week. That's one of the stories you can download and print via the blue button below, along with remembrances of Milton Glaser and Carl Reiner, two legends we're also going to have to live without this summer. 
 

You'll also find there two of the numerous Opinion pieces we published about Israel's pending possible annexation of parts of the occupied West Bank (by our contributing columnists Ari Hoffman and Joel Swanson); a look at Rep. Ilhan Omar's primary challenge; an article about the mounting campaign against Mort Klein of the Zionist Organization of America; Carly Pildis's #TweetYourShabbat column featuring peach hand-pies; and the latest edition of the Bintel Brief, with advice on brit milah and makeup.    

Alongside these and many other great stories we published this week on forward.com, we also hosted a fascinating Zoomversation about Pride Month (watch the video), and over on Urban Archive, we unveiled a new summer story, about how Pride of Judea, Brooklyn's Jewish children's home, bused kids to the beach back in the day.  Coming up on Wednesday, I'll be doing an Exit Interview with Amb. Dani Dayan -- who is leaving after four years as Israel's Consul General in New York -- in conjunction with the editor of the Jewish Week: sign up here to join that conversation, .

Shabbat Shalom, and Happy Fourth,


Jodi Rudoren
Editor-in-Chief
[email protected]