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Seven Stories Press

Works of Radical Imagination

Book cover for Camp Jeff
Book cover for 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 Jewish National 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 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.

Book cover for Camp Jeff
Book cover for Camp Jeff

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“Reich is a fierce satirist, tackling the traditions and contradictions, humor and trauma of Jewish American life. Her seventh novel, following the short-story collection, The House of Love and Prayer (2023), is a fuming, fulminating, and wily response to the pitfalls of the #MeToo movement. Appalled by the convicted sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein, a different wealthy Jeffrey Epstein converts an old Catskills hotel and resort into an upscale center “for the re-education of #MeToo offenders.” Camp Jeff attracts “true celebrities,” including the narcissistic “literary powerhouse and public intellectual” Gershon Gordon. . . . As COVID-19 and new arrivals complicate the camp's mission, and Gershon foments an insurrection, Reich slyly takes on misogyny, hypocrisy, trendy therapies, genuine trauma, and antisemitism, the "oldest hatred in the world.” An audacious and righteous torrent of wisecracks and ironies that coheres into a whirlwind of “divine apocalyptic madness.””

Tova Reich

TOVA REICH's most recent novel, Mother India (2018), was longlisted for the South Asia Literature Prize and a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award.  Other novels include MaraMaster of the ReturnThe Jewish WarMy Holocaust, and One Hundred Philistine Foreskins.  Her stories have appeared in the Atlantic, Harper’s, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the National Magazine Award for Fiction, the Edward Wallant Book Award, and other prizes. She lives on the fringe of Washington, DC.