No longer sleeping on the top bunk. We shine a light on an alum who no longer does nikayon because it’s on the schedule but because they actually got their act together.
From the Agam to the Concert Hall: A Conversation with Josh Jacobson (Kerem 1964)
Let’s start at the beginning. What was Yavneh like when you first arrived in 1958?
I was ten years old, and honestly, my first summer was tough. But by the second summer, something clicked. After that, the ten months between summers felt like torture. We couldn’t wait to get back.
I kept every Eshkol, camp yearbook, for all nine years I was there. I still have them.
Nine years is a long commitment. What kept pulling you back?
Yavneh was a place where you could be freely Jewish, and that meant something. There were kids from every background, Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, non-affiliated, and somehow it all worked. You could be yourself, but also connected to something bigger.
And the Hebrew was real. You were not allowed to speak English. Not in the dining hall, not at activities, not in public announcements. Counselors couldn’t speak English either. If you got caught during Maccabiah, your team lost points. It sounds intense now, but we learned Hebrew because we had to and it stuck. Then there were the Israeli songs, the plays performed entirely in Hebrew, Shabbat services under the open sky.
The first time I went to Israel, in 1968, I stepped off the plane and thought: this is just like Yavneh. Of course, it was supposed to be the other way around. Yavneh was meant to feel like Israel. But that’s how deeply it had taken hold.
Tell us about the different directors you had during your time there.
The first two years we had Walter Ackerman, everyone called him Ackie. He was this image of the chalutz: muscular, strong, Hebrew-speaking, and everyone loved him. He set the tone for the whole camp.
Then Baruch Levine came. He was an experimenter. He tried removing competition from the camp which, as you can imagine, was not well received. No Maccabiah with competition just doesn’t make sense. One experiment he did though that had a great impact on me was he ran this exercise where he divided campers by eye color to teach us what it felt like to be discriminated against. Brown eye kids and blue eyed kids were separated and had to sit from one another in the chadar ochel. That experience has stuck with me to this day.
And then Moshe Avital arrived, and he was a game changer. He brought a whole cast of extraordinary counselors: Stanley Sperber for music, Tzippi Kriger for drama, Carmie Margolis at the waterfront, his wife Adina with dance. Smart, cool, inspired people. Avital himself led Havdalah every Saturday night, which was always an event. Friday nights we had Israeli dancing on the tennis courts, learning the newest dances. And then they’d give you a half hour after dancing before you had to be back in the bunk—Zoog time, as we liked to call it.
Music seems to have been at the center of your Yavneh experience. How did that unfold?
My love of music started at home. We sang on long car trips, we sang on Shabbat. But Yavneh accelerated everything. Those early years we had guitar-playing song leaders who taught us the great repertoire of Israeli folk songs: Dodi Li, Erev Shel Shohsanim, HaYoshevet Ba-ganim, etc. We’d get a little booklet at the end of each season with the lyrics. We sang them constantly, and I brought them home and kept singing them all year.
Then when I was fourteen, Stanley Sperber arrived with Moshe Avital’s group from Camp Masad. He wasn’t just teaching us songs—he started choirs at every level, and we weren’t singing simple harmonizations. We were performing Lewandowski, Salamone Rossi, four-part choral works in a professional style that he demanded. My eyes opened wide. I played guitar at the time, I thought I could harmonize with anyone. And here was something so much richer than anything I’d imagined.
Stanley took me under his wing. He started teaching me to read music. When I was older, he’d take me to New York and introduce me to the scene. He had already started what would become the Zamir Chorale in New York in 1960. Years later, in 1969, he wrote to me: would I like to start another Zamir in Boston?
And that’s how the Zamir Chorale of Boston was born?
Essentially, yes. I gathered some friends who had sung in the Yavneh choir over the years, plus two close friends, Jerry Halpern and Lou Garber, and we started rehearsing at Boston University’s Hillel House in October of 1969. We didn’t audition anyone—whoever wanted to sing was welcome.
Our first concert was in January of 1970, for the New England Jewish Music Forum. I performed a piece I had written. From there, we got more opportunities. And it was the perfect moment—the chavurah movement was taking off, there was Genesis Two, the alternative Jewish newspaper, a whole wave of young people wanting to express Jewish identity in new ways. People were thinking about their roots. We took off.
Interested in learning more about Zamir? Head to www.zamir.org
How did running the Zamir lead you into academia?
I knew that if I wanted to make a living as a choral conductor, I needed a university position. I’d been getting friends together informally, playing them Stravinsky and Bernstein and Beethoven, and realized I enjoyed teaching. So when Northeastern University advertised a part-time position teaching intro to music, I applied.
I had to be there at eight in the morning. I had never woken up that early in my life. But apparently it worked—they offered me a full-time job, and they were also looking for a new choral conductor. I was hired for both. That was 1972, and I stayed for 45 years.
What kept it fresh was that Northeastern grew alongside me. When I arrived, it was known as an engineering school, mostly commuters, music barely on the radar. Over the decades it became something else entirely. More selective, more global, a real music program. The position itself changed too. I served as department chair, conducted masses and requiems and oratorios, works I never could have done with a Jewish chorus alone. I was named the Stotsky Professor of Jewish Studies for a time, which led me into years of research and performance focused on music in the Holocaust—how Jews expressed themselves through music even under the most devastating circumstances, how the Nazis used and suppressed music. Dark material, but important.
Later I also started teaching at Hebrew College, where I had been a student in Prozdor as a teenager. There I helped train cantors at the graduate level. These were students for whom this was a calling. That brought a different kind of joy entirely.
Do you still keep in touch with people from camp?
Some of my deepest friendships were forged at Yavneh. Josh Kieval, we met as eleven-year-olds because someone told me there was another kid named Josh—unheard of back then. We became a singing duo, performing publicly for years. He’s in Florida now and I make a point of seeing him whenever I’m down there. Lou Garber was a dear friend who passed away in 2002. He introduced me to his cousin, who became my wife. And Jef Labes, a brilliant pianist who became Van Morrison’s keyboardist—if you’ve heard “Moondance,” that’s him.
My closest friend today is Jake Kriger, younger brother of Tzippi Kriger, the drama counselor. We met when we were fourteen.
There’s something about a shared experience that creates bonds that simply don’t fade.
Any favorite Yavneh memories you’d like to leave us with?
Friday night Kabbalat Shabbat outdoors. Nothing compared to it. And Tisha B’Av in the Beit Am, candles everywhere, then going outside where they built a frame, soaked rags in kerosene, and set it alight spelling out something in fire.
But the song I remember most vividly isn’t a Hebrew one. It was the last night of camp, every year. A kitchen staff member—likely a Holocaust survivor—would lead the whole camp in singing: “Camp is over, camp is over, and tomorrow we go home.”
