Jackie Tohn and Aya Cash as Nomi and Rabbi Rachel. Courtesy of K180 Studios
By Mira Fox
July 2, 2025
I never went to Jewish summer camp, which means I am not the target audience for The Floaters, a new movie set at the fictional Camp Daveed that’s clearly aimed at people with deep nostalgia for the camps of their youth.
For many Jews, their years at Jewish summer camp defined their childhood. Friends of mine still talk about the color wars at whichever Camp Ramah they grew up attending, or the Debbie Friedman songs they learned during Shabbat at the URJ’s Camp Emunah.
These people are likely to love The Floaters, which follows Nomi (Jackie Tohn), a musician who takes a last-ditch job as a counselor to the camp’s group of The Breakfast Club-style misfits. But it’s hard to imagine a viewer without personal nostalgia for Jewish summer camp finding The Floaters’ details so heartwarming, thanks to its background assumption that Israel is a core part of Judaism.
The movie is largely a classic tale of self-discovery among outcasts, but there’s a lot of Jewish icing on that cake. The Maccabiah games against the rival Camp Barak (led by Seth Green at his most delightfully annoying)! The persnickety chef who freaks out after the fleishig spoons get served with his homemade ice cream! The camp dances after Shabbat! The constant references to Fiddler on the Roof!
Yet there’s somehow not much Judaism. Camp is supposed to help connect kids to their Jewish identity. But there’s no class on cooking Jewish food or playing klezmer or Yiddishkeit; the most we get of religious education is a quick havdalah.
What there is, however, is a lot of Israeli culture.
There are Gaga dance classes based on the Israeli dance troupe Batsheva’s famous techniques, and sessions of Krav Maga, the hand-to-hand fighting technique developed by the Israeli army. One of the movie’s main plot points revolves around Israel’s lunar rocket, which contained a time capsule filled with Holocaust memoirs. A dance night at camp has kids singing along to Israeli pop songs.
This is, as I understand it, accurate: Jewish summer camps have long focused on Israel. Campers used to army crawl alongside IDF soldiers, reenact the Entebbe kidnappings and practice fleeing Nazi soldiers. Most of these traumatizing games may today be the stuff of the past, but the focus on Israel continues.
It’s hard to imagine a viewer without personal nostalgia for Jewish summer camp finding the way in which The Floaters engages in that focus to be heartwarming. There is a large and growing generational divide between Jews on their relationship to Israel, and particularly since Oct. 7, many younger Jews have felt lied to about the nation’s history, especially by institutions like Jewish camps or Hebrew school.
In a 2024 op-ed in the Forward, a parent recalled learning at camp that Israel was “the ultimate place to experience Jewish history, language and culture” and “a place of delicious food and fun dancing” but never about the occupation or displacement of Palestinians. In the recent documentary Israelism, which explores the centrality of Israel in American Judaism, numerous millennial Jews describe feeling betrayed when they discovered how little they were taught at Hebrew school, Hillel or camp about Palestinians.
Israelism went viral after Jewish parents tried to block screenings of the film on college campuses in the wake of Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Israel, claiming that it presented Jewish education as brainwashing and propaganda. But the version of Jewish camp shown in The Floaters illustrates the documentary’s point: American Jewish institutions can be so focused on teaching kids to love Israel that even a silly teen movie can’t help but make camp out to be a place undergirded by the tacit assumption that everyone shares a love of the Jewish nation.
To be fair, The Floaters is not a work of propaganda or brainwashing. Most of it is a coming-of-age story that has nothing to do with Israel; it’s a cute, formulaic teen summer movie, and it’s good at that part. As much as people love to claim that Jewish camp is its own, specific cultural experience, I’m fairly sure it’s mostly the same thing as any other summer camp. And while I didn’t go to Jewish summer camp, I did go to orchestra camp — which is not the same as band camp — so I can vouch for the fact that The Floaters captures that specific camp potpourri of teen hormones and humidity. You can feel that weird way that time stretches in camp, causing everyone to act as though that year’s power couple has been together for years instead of four and a half days. One counselor recalls drama from her own camp days over “giving Joel Ruben a hand, uh…massage.” Universal stuff!
And there are even a few brief moments of political awareness, like when the camp’s rabbi pushes for discussions about “the hard stuff” — she suggests seminars on Israel and “all the ways that Torah has excluded or offended you.” (The head of camp, played by Sarah Podemski, vetoes these ideas due to all the angry emails she would get from parents — a detail that is clearly accurate.)
But outside of that one, throwaway line imagining, and then dismissing, the idea of having a tough conversation about Israel, all of the movie’s references to the country are strikingly uncritical given the current tensions around antisemitism and anti-Zionism, both inside and outside Jewish communities.
Rachel Israel, the film’s director, said in an interview with The Direct that she wanted the movie to show “diversity in every way, and diversity of thought and background,” adding that “my experience as a Jew is that there’s no one way of being a Jew.” And the movie does showcase a range of Jewish experiences. There are Asian Jews, gay kids, and a female rabbi; some campers are so secular that they’ve never heard of tefillin, and others keep strictly kosher.
But the one diversity that’s missing is a breadth of politics on Israel. Not a single camper feels left out because, say, their parents have filled them in about some of the more problematic parts of Israel’s history, and now they feel uncomfortable screaming the words to Omer Adam’s club banger about partying in Tel Aviv. No one is even worried for the safety of their relatives living through the conflict. Israel is ever-present in the movie, but purely as a saccharine element of fun.
Maybe it doesn’t really matter if The Floaters’ treatment of Israel is so flippant; the camp’s Jewishness is really the backdrop for a heartwarming, if trite, coming-of-age story, not a serious part of the movie. But for teens currently feeling alienated from Judaism because of their lack of relationship to Israel, The Floaters’ version of camp is not one where they’ll connect to their Jewish identity, but where they’ll become even further alienated from it.
