In Annie Hall Woody Allen's character Alvy Singer asks a woman if she is a "like New York, Jewish, left-wing, liberal, intellectual, Central Park West, Brandeis University, the socialist summer camps and the, the father with the Ben Shahn drawings, right, and the really, y'know, strike-oriented kind of, Red Diaper, stop me before I make a complete imbecile of myself." Were socialist summer camps actually a thing in America? If so, what were they like?
Yes, they were! But they were very very Jewish.
Basically, this goes back to when Jews started coming en masse from Eastern Europe to America (specifically the Lower East Side of New York) in the 1880s. They tried to organize themselves in a lot of different ways. Part of the reason for this was that if they didn't organize themselves, then the NYC government/Christian missionaries would do it for them, using settlement houses and missionary houses. Plenty of Jews were fine with this, but others became part of various movements which looked after their own. One of these, brought back from Europe, was a movement called the Bund. It was basically a Jewish socialist movement- something that people had to talk their way around because of course socialism wasn't meant to take into account racial and religious divides. But it became a massive movement in Jewish Europe, including school systems, and it was soon transplanted to America. It became even more popular after 1905, when a failed Russian Revolution caused many socialists, especially Jewish ones, to flee the czar and run to the US. The Bund had a lot of Jewish communal organizations, including the Arbeiter Ring (Workmen's Circle), which served as a mutual aid society, educational group, Yiddish promotional society, and socialist movement. One of their projects was actually one of these socialist summer camps!
Now if you know anything about the Lower East Side back then, you know why summer camps were a big deal. It was, according to my professors, one of the most crowded places in the Western world at its heyday. EVERYONE was starting summer camps for hygienic purposes, at the very least, as a charitable effort to get kids out of the disgusting and rank inner city. The socialists in their various forms were one of the groups which got on this, seeing these camps both as an expression of their socialist inclinations toward improving the lot of the Jewish poor on the Lower East Side and also as a way to indoctrinate the kids with socialist ideology. Some of these camps, such as Camp Kinderland, are still around today, though the socialist aspect is almost entirely gone.
Now, that was only one kind of Jewish socialist camp. The other kind, more common in the mid-20th century, was the Zionist camp. These were also socialist (because at that time, Zionism was largely socialist) and they had a very strong ethos of training the children to protect the State of Israel. Now THOSE were interesting camps. If you want to know more about one of these, read Yossi Klein Halevi's autobiography, Memoirs of a Jewish Extremist, and his account of the Betar/Revisionist camp which he attended.