Tablet Magazine has a really interesting article about Notre Dame head football coach Brian Kelly’s Jewish past and the mini camp reunion that took place between he and one of his former campers when Notre Dame played the University of Miami recently:

The 1987 yearbook of Camp Mah-Kee-Nac, an all-boys sleep-away camp in the Berkshires, commemorates the best summer of everyone’s lives. There are stories about the production of Guys and Dolls, a trip to Cooperstown, and how the Olympics broke out. There’s also a brief clip introducing one of the camp’s new head counselors, a recent graduate of Assumption College, a Catholic school in Worcester, Mass., who was about to start as a football coach at Grand Valley State College. The byline on that piece belonged to “Jedd Fisch, Navajo 21.” The counselor’s name was Brian Kelly.

Twenty-five years later, Brian Kelly is the head football coach for the University of Notre Dame, the most prominent Catholic institution this side of Vatican City, which plays its games under the shadow of a mural called Touchdown Jesus. And Jedd Fisch, his former camper, is the offensive coordinator for the University of Miami—perhaps the most accomplished Jew in football today outside of the owner’s box. So, when the two embraced after their teams played each other on Oct. 6, their old Mah-Kee-Nac friends watching the game on NBC realized they were witnessing one of the unlikeliest events in recent football history: a primetime college game that was also a miniature camp reunion.

Read more at http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/114865/notre-dame-coachs-jewish-past

Remember last year when liberal bloggers were having a field day with the so-called Tea Party-inspired “indoctrination” summer camps that were being organized and funded, at least in part, by Glenn Beck? GQ associate editor Lauren Bans spent some time at one of the camps in Pennsylvania over the summer to see for herself what it was all about and wrote a piece about it for the magazine that gives a glimpse into the kind of things kids do at Patriot Camp.

The focus of the piece is mostly on the political viewpoints that drive the camp, which comes off sounding kind of like an update on the not-really-about-summer-camp documentary Jesus Camp:

Maybe this was just a camp. Albeit a camp that taught, instead of archery or the wedgie arts, a conservative take on American history—the nerd-bait equivalent of summer school for Lincoln-Douglas debaters or prepubescent water colorists. After three days here, I can tell you the vast majority of Patriot Camp was harmless. But on the few occasions it wasn’t all dodgeball and kiddie-pooling, it really, really wasn’t. And in those moments, the fact that this was a camp for little kids never stopped being, to use Beck’s word, disturbing. Like 9-year-olds-joking-about-assassination disturbing. And yet Miss Deb and Yvonne had invited me—a stranger who they must’ve assumed believes the exact opposite of everything they do—to bear witness to how innocent it all was. Only I kept thinking: Do they really, truly believe this camp has nothing to do with politics?

Read the rest HERE.

The first rule of Fight Club is to not talk about Fight Club, but fortunately the camp managers at Camp Ernest W. Brown in Maryland broke that rule when they discovered a summer camp version of the fictional club from the movie and book reportedly happening at the Boys and Girls Club sleepaway camp.

Now it’s been reported that one of the ring leader counselors was charged with second-degree assault and a probe is continuing to look into the activities that led to eight firings and a voluntary shut-down of the camp for the remainder of the summer.

The Washington Post has more on the story.

That story about Rivers Cuomo from Weezer wanting to start a summer camp I shared last week has made quite a stir online with hundreds of blogs and Twitter folks weighing in on what was otherwise a passing side comment in an interview.

CBC Music has gone beyond just reporting the story and come up with a list of what you might expect should a Weezer Summer Camp happen.

Check it out here.