A major Jewish philanthropist recently asked me a serious question: Should our next dollar go to day schools or to summer camps? The money is finite, the needs are not, and the two compete for the same donors. 

It is a fair question — and it is the wrong one. Day school and camp are not rival answers to the same problem. They do two different jobs, and a Jewish future needs both.

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A living tradition needs both breadth and depth. It needs a wide population that carries a real Jewish identity — enough belonging, pride, and attachment to stay inside the Jewish people and to want a Jewish future at all. It also needs a core group formed deeply enough not merely to feel Jewish but to carry Judaism: to read its texts, defend it, teach it, lead its institutions and pass it on. Both camp and day school build Jewish identity, but the difference is that camp builds it broadly, while day school builds it deeply and continuously. 

Camp does the breadth

Camp is the wide net. It asks little: a few weeks, a lower cost and no year-round commitment. It reaches children day school never will. Fewer than 5% of non-Orthodox Jewish children attend a Jewish day school; camp reaches a far broader range of them, open to families across the whole spectrum of engagement, including many whose ties to Jewish life are otherwise thin and for whom a few summers may be the main Jewish education they ever receive. That reach is the point — and research on Jewish camping has found that its impact is often greatest precisely on those children, the ones who arrive with the least.

What camp builds in them is a durable Jewish identity rooted in belonging — friendships, joy, the felt experience of being part of a people rather than the only Jewish kid in the room. And the effect lasts. The 2011 “Camp Works” study found that as adults, former campers are markedly more engaged: 55% more likely to feel very emotionally attached to Israel, 45% more likely to attend synagogue monthly, and 37% more likely to light Shabbat candles regularly — even after accounting for whether they also attended day school. The pattern holds in current cohorts: in the Foundation for Jewish Camp’s 2024 field census, 96% of overnight-camp families reported that camp made their child proud to be Jewish, and 94% said it connected their child to the global Jewish people. This is Jewish continuity produced at scale. Camp is what keeps the broad base of the Jewish people together.

Day school does the depth

If camp is the wide net, day school is the deep one. It reaches a narrow slice and stays with them every day for years, building what no summer can: literacy, the ability to read a Hebrew text, argue with a source, and know the story of one’s people from the inside rather than as a feeling.

You cannot love what you do not know. And, more decisively for a civilization, you cannot transmit what you do not know. Belonging keeps a people present; only knowledge lets it carry the tradition forward to the next generation. That is why continuity finally rests on depth: a generation can pass on only what it has been given.

None of which means day school neglects belonging. It builds the same Jewish friendships and the same social confidence camp does, only continuously rather than for a few weeks a year — and the results are not subtle. In the 2020 Metropolitan Chicago Jewish Population Study, day school alumni were more than twice as likely as other Jewish adults to feel “very attached” to Israel: 65% versus 27%. The years since the Oct. 7 attacks have reinforced the same lesson under pressure. On campus — the decade’s hardest proving ground — day school alumni have engaged in Jewish life at more than double the rate of their peers (53% versus 23%). A crisis rewards fluency. Deep formation is what supplies it: the capacity to explain and defend Jewish life, not only to feel attached to it.

Consider what it means to lose either one

Breadth without depth produces a population that feels Jewish but steadily loses the tools to transmit Judaism. The attachment is real and the commitment sincere, yet each generation inherits a little less than the one before, until identity becomes memory, memory becomes sentiment, and sentiment fades. A people can be wide and warm and still vanish, because warmth cannot be handed down by anyone who can no longer say what it is made of.

Depth without breadth is the opposite remnant: a small, learned core with no people gathered around it — a library no one enters, knowledge perfectly preserved and attached to almost no one.

The two are not separate programs but parts of one ecosystem. Camp widens the circle of Jews who feel connected enough to remain inside the story; day school forms the educators, leaders, and transmitters who give that story its substance. Each depends on the other. Without breadth, there are fewer people left to teach. Without depth, there are fewer people capable of teaching them.

That is the argument that should reorganize a funding strategy, because a civilization survives only if it can reproduce its leadership class: its rabbis and educators, its communal and campus leaders, its advocates and its next generation of philanthropists. Those people come disproportionately from the intensive end of the whole ecosystem. The deep formation of day school and the immersive experience of camp are alike. Roughly 7-in-10 young Jewish leaders attended Jewish overnight camp, and the same leaders were shaped by more Jewish experiences, and more intensive ones, than the community at large. You are not funding a school or a camp. You are funding whether the Jewish people can still produce the people who will lead it.

A people therefore needs both: the many who keep the circle wide and the few who keep the tradition deep. The impact of each is essential, and the impact of each is different. That is precisely why the two cannot be ranked against each other, and cannot be substituted one for the other.

The real question

No single funder can underwrite an entire civilization, and concentration is a fair strategy when resources are scarce. But even on a tight budget, the trap is treating breadth and depth as rivals for the same dollar. A funder who cannot do both alone can still build the partnerships — with other funders, and with affordability programs like One Happy Camper grants and day school tuition subsidies — that keep both functions alive. The unit of investment is not the institution. It is the people it forms.

So look again at the original question. “Day school or camp?” assumes the two options on the table do the same thing, when they do two different things for the whole people. One is broad, one is deep — both are indispensable.

The real question, the one worth putting to every funder in this field, is harder: Which half of a civilization are you prepared to let go?

David Zalik is the co-founder of the Zalik Foundation, which has invested more than $200 million in Jewish education, thriving Jewish communities, Israel and families in need.