The Jacobs blog

Who Knows One? host, Micah Hart, Leads Podcasting at HSJ

It’s been 20 years since I have last been to Jacobs in the summer. It’s truly amazing how the time passes – in many ways it feels like I just left, and in others I am well aware of how much has gone by.

Over the past two decades I have been jealous of my more professionally accomplished camp friends who were able to return to camp as doctors, clergy, and other staff positions. I had no particular skills that were of use to a summer camp as far as I knew – I’ve worked in social media for a long time, but honestly the kids these days probably understand it better than I do.

In the past few years, however, it seemed like I might actually have a path to being useful – I started hosting a podcast about summer camp memories called Campfires and Color Wars, which then led to starting a game show about Jewish Geography called Who Knows One?.

This summer I have had the pleasure of traveling to several camps around the country to do podcast programming and put on shows for campers and staff, but no visit has been as meaningful as the one I had at Jacobs for Shabbat last weekend.

Camp is the place where I learned to perform, to put on skits and be creative, so getting to come back home and teach a new generation of campers the joys of creativity and production was very satisfying. Saturday afternoon during Shabboptionals, I led a podcasting activity for two hours, inviting kids to come and learn a bit about how podcasts are made and telling their favorite camp stories to help make a podcast of our own.

It was all of the things I love about camp storytelling – seeing the smiles on their faces, the knowing giggles amongst friends as they recalled a shared experience and the delight they felt in retelling it, all things I’m familiar with from every episode of Campfires and Color Wars.

In the end we had about two-dozen campers come through to participate, and while not all of their stories are represented here (we’ll save the scatalogical humor for a different podcast), we got a nice variety of stories that wouldn’t feel out of place for me and my friends to have told when we were campers. Except for the one about Nadav and the Blob, I guess I’m a little too old for that one.