Back in the days of my youth (read: the early 2010s), I had my first celebrity encounter. I was surfing Twitter, undoubtedly way late at night, on the laptop my parents got me as a bat mitzvah present, when Jewish comedian Iliza Shlesinger tweeted something to the effect of, “What’s the name of the game you play at summer camp in a pit? Does anyone know what I’m talking about?”
I knew what she was talking about. Despite my parents never actually sending me to Jewish summer camp, I had spent a few weekends at a Camp Harlam in the Poconos with my synagogue youth group. There, I’d learned how to play gaga (also known as gaga ball or ga-ga), the fast-paced, dodgeball-like sport where players gather in a walled court (better known in gaga parlance as a pit) to try to eliminate others by striking them with a ball on the knee or lower legs.
I replied to Iliza almost immediately with just the word, “Gaga!!” Soon after, she responded to thank me and liked my response. I was starstruck. A comedian I had seen on Netflix and followed on Twitter actually responded to me! But more than anything, I felt deep satisfaction that a niche piece of cultural information that I was privy to came in handy.
Fast forward to today, I don’t think that interaction would’ve occurred in the same way, namely because gaga isn’t niche anymore. In fact, dare I say it: I think gaga has made its way into the mainstream.
Starting just around the time of my interaction with Iliza, gaga pits began popping up in not exclusively Jewish contexts all over the United States. “Young people are playing gaga this summer with fervent devotion, from this sunny day camp in Silicon Valley to Lake Beauty Bible Camp in Long Prairie, Minn., to the 20,000-square-foot Ultimate Gaga arena in Syosset on Long Island,” a 2012 article in the New York Times proclaimed. The Forward added in 2013, “Elementary schools from Washington to New Jersey are replacing jungle gyms with Gaga pits.”
For more recent context, my colleague at Kveller Daci Platt told me she was aware of multiple school yard gaga pits in the Twin Cities, as well as at the schools of her friend’s kids across the southern United States. A testimony to how normal gaga has become in American culture? As of 2023 the Scouting America website has an entry about how to play it. And the sport has broken through into pop culture, appearing in the 2026 summer flick “The Floaters” as well as a season 8 episode of “Bob’s Burgers” called “Y Tu Ga-Ga Tambien.”
There doesn’t seem to have been one clear moment when gaga transformed from Jewish summer camp activity to secular sport. But it’s not really a mystery why non-Jews have gravitated towards it. “Gaga Ball is more than just a game—it’s a movement!” LifeIsBetterOutside.com proclaims, and they’re not wrong. Gaga is accessible; the rules are fairly straightforward and you technically don’t even need a pit to play it. It’s high energy and physical, while still being safer than dodgeball. Ultimately, per top gaga pit manufacturer Sport Resource Group, “the matches promote physical activity, social and life skills, and acceptance in sport.”
But where did gaga come from? The answer to that question is less simple.
There are many theories about the origins of gaga. The most popular one seems to be that gaga, which means “hit hit” or “touch touch” in Hebrew, was created in Israel in the ’50s or ’60s. Then, when American Jewish summer camps hired Israelis as counselors, they brought the game with them. At some point in this cultural exchange, gaga also made it to Australia, perhaps also through Israeli camp counselors.
But there are also multiple theories that the sport was American-born.
“There was a man named John Crosley who owned a sleepaway camp in the Northeast U.S. and invented the game,” Caroline Fasulo of the Gaga Center in New York told Tablet Magazine in 2016. Former campers of Crosley’s Camp Idylwold, which closed in 1987, also back up this claim. Then, the game was called “Crosleyball” and by the account of former camper Harley Spiller, it could’ve been played as early as the late ’60s. “The story goes that John got tired of campers not burning off energy on rainy days and created this activity. In my day, the ‘sport’ was codified with rules that look remarkably like ga-ga,” former camper Josh Lisman explained.
However, a former camp counselor at the now-closed Baltimore JCC Camp Milldale by the name of Steve Steinberg claims that he invented gaga. According to Steve, like the invention of Crosleyball, it began to keep campers busy on rainy days. The year was 1975 and the then-17-year-old would take his group of young campers to a covered but wall-less outdoor structure at the camp to play a game a la dodgeball. Then, to avoid the ball rolling down a nearby hill, Steinberg and his charges would lay benches on their sides to create a surface for the ball to ricochet off of and back towards them.
He also claims that he coined the name — and it’s not even Hebrew. Per Tablet, “Steinberg says that during a moment of frustration, he told his campers that they ‘all look like a bunch of babies’ — at which point some of the kids began chanting “goo-goo, ga-ga,” which soon became the name of the game. When Steinberg had to fit the name on a written activity schedule, it was shortened to ga-ga.”
Steve’s tale is backed up by a 1992 Baltimore Jewish Times article, but in 2018 he told Tablet that he didn’t doubt that others, like John Crosley, had similar ideas on their own. “It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to come up with a game like this,” he exclaimed. Nor does he doubt that Israeli camp staff had something to do with the sports’ migration across the globe, as Camp Milldale had Israeli counselors during the summer of 1975.
So where did gaga come from? Take your pick from these theories! Regardless, it doesn’t seem like this Jewish summer camp favorite is going away any time soon.
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