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.