Shtick

Project Overview

The Jewish people have a love-hate relationship with sleepaway camp. Shall we explain why?
In Europe in the 1930s and 1940s, our parents and grandparents packed their bags and boarded trains to terrible places – that story’s been told. But after the war, having escaped those camps, we established these camps – places where we could laugh, connect to our roots, and enjoy our culture without fear… but still with plenty of anxiety, shtick, and dark humour. That story? It’s never been told.
In Shtick – an episodic comedy about growing up Jewish across generations – campers, counselors, a burnt-out, peacenik program director, a Holocaust survivor cook, and a gentle, gentile nurse make life-long memories at Camp Shtick, a less-than-picturesque summer retreat in Manitoba, right across the highway from a “public” beach where – until recently – no dogs and no Jews were allowed.
So they created their own oasis. A place to be Jewish while beading friendship bracelets, swatting tether balls, learning to swim, and performing. At Shtick, with hand-built stages and hand-me-down costumes, counselors produce, and the kids act, in epic, one-night-only productions (Fiddler on a Hot Tin Roof, Kosher Pygmalion, Oyklahoma!). The performative spirit isn’t limited to the auditorium.
Every day, the dining hall thrums with Hebrew jingles and impromptu dances to mark every occasion. Drop a plate? Sing the dropped-plate song. Your cabin gets to shower? Do the splish-splash shuffle. At Camp Shtick, every kid gets their moment in the spotlight, whether they asked for it or not.
Waiting in the wings are future stars like Ronnie Stein, a 2,000-year-old man trapped in a Bar Mitzvah boy’s body; Zoe Heifetz, an 11-year-old violin virtuoso; and the Kalamazoo Kid, a mysterious drifter from… elsewhere. Campers and counselors wade through adolescence, slow-dancing to Stairway to Heaven as they dream beneath the Northern Lights. Every felt marker signature on the cabin walls is a
coming-of-age story shaping a peoples’ history. Combining ageless traditions of Jewish entertainment and campfire storytelling, Shtick offers comedic, serious-minded insights into Jewish history and culture while reflecting the challenges of growing up as outsiders in the shadow of antisemitism and intergenerational trauma.
Shtick draws on its co-creators’ experiences at Jewish summer camp across several decades. In the 1980s, Winnipeg chemistry teacher, stand-up comic and background actor Marshall Carroll (CBC Canada’s 4th Smartest Person) and Jewish Manitoba social historian, journalist and writer Sharon Chisvin met and fell in love as summer camp counselors. During their heyday at camp, the program director was the mother of National Newspaper Award-nominated Winnipeg Free Press arts journalist and theatre reviewer Ben Waldman, who attended that same camp for 15 summers in the 2000s.
Each year, approximately 28 million children in Canada and the U.S. attend summer camp. It isn’t just a Jewish thing, of course, but as television audiences gravitate toward religiously adjacent comedies (Nobody Wants This, Long Story Short) and collective coming-of-age tales (Reservation Dogs, Big Mouth, Son of a Critch, Less Than Kind) remain as popular as ever, we are confident that this multi-generational love letter will be worth writing home about.