Camp Jeff

An old New York Catskills hotel is converted into a Reeducation center for star #MeToo offenders in a story full of cunning and craft, double meanings and doppelgangers.

A finalist for the National  Jewish Book Award strikes again with another brilliant satire—a treat for readers of Philip Roth, Dara Horn, Nathan Englander, and others.

Somewhere in the Catskills there’s a camp, it’s called Camp Jeff. The place is named for Jeffrey Epstein, not that Jeffrey Epstein, this is the good Jeffrey Epstein, a benefactor who wants his name on the building, though the bad one’s not entirely irrelevant to this story. Tova Reich’s newest novel, on the heels of her award-winning Mother India is a raucous and biting tale of a reeducation camp for alleged sex offenders. Reich’s verbal blade is sharp and she slashes with it, but not without the sensitivity that such incisiveness requires. Camp Jeff is a work in Reich’s signature satirical mode, an unhindered indictment of both #MeToo and therapeutic culture, and at the same time is also a deeply considered work of psychological portraiture and an examination of love, faith, and affection in American culture.

TOVA REICH is the author of the novels Mara, Master of the Return, The Jewish War, My Holocaust, and One Hundred Philistine Foreskins. Her most recent novel, Mother India (2018) was longlisted for the South Asian Literature Prize and was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. Her stories have appeared in the Atlantic, Harper’s, Ploughshares, and in her collection The House of Love and Prayer (Seven Stories, 2023). She lives on the fringe of Washington DC.