In 1902, 10-year-old Isidore Itzkowitz accepted a scholarship to attend an overnight camp in upstate New York. “Izzy,” an orphan raised by his grandmother in a dingy tenement-house basement, fit the profile of children the Educational Alliance, a settlement house, was looking to help. The animating idea of its camp was to take working-class Jewish boys off the hot and congested Lower East Side streets and introduce them to “the great outdoors in a wholesome and beautiful atmosphere away from home.”
The experience profoundly affected Itzkowitz, who would later become known as Eddie Cantor – one of the most popular entertainers of the mid-20th century.
