Borscht Belt

Based on Wikipedia: Borscht Belt

Where Jewish Comedy Found Its Voice

In the sweltering summer of 1959, at a sprawling resort called the Shawanga Lodge in the Catskill Mountains, a group of scientists gathered for what would become one of the most consequential conferences in the history of physics. They were there to discuss laser beams—a technology that would eventually revolutionize everything from surgery to supermarket checkout lines. The lodge burned to the ground fourteen years later, but by then it had already secured its footnote in scientific history.

This was the Borscht Belt: a place where world-changing ideas could be hatched between rounds of bingo, where future comedy legends cut their teeth telling jokes to audiences stuffed with brisket, and where an entire culture found refuge from both the August heat and the casual cruelty of American antisemitism.

The Geography of Exclusion

The Borscht Belt wasn't really a belt at all. It was a constellation of resorts, bungalow colonies, and summer camps scattered across the southern foothills of the Catskill Mountains, primarily in Sullivan and Ulster counties in New York State. At its peak in the 1950s and 1960s, the region boasted over five hundred resorts, fifty thousand bungalows, and a thousand rooming houses.

The name itself tells a story. Borscht is a beet soup, deep reddish-purple in color, that originated in Ukraine and became a staple of Ashkenazi Jewish cuisine. When Eastern European Jewish immigrants arrived in America, they brought the recipe with them. Abel Green, who edited the entertainment trade publication Variety starting in 1933, coined the term "Borscht Belt" as a playful echo of other American regional nicknames like the Bible Belt and the Rust Belt.

There was also an alternate name: the Yiddish Alps. Larry King used this term, and it perfectly captured the self-deprecating humor that would become the region's signature export. These weren't the Swiss Alps or even the Appalachians—they were modest mountains with Jewish delis.

But why did Jewish vacationers concentrate in this particular corner of New York in the first place?

The answer is uglier than the scenery was beautiful. In the early 1900s, many hotels and resorts in the Catskills—and across America—openly discriminated against Jewish guests. Their advertisements made this explicit with phrases like "No Hebrews or Consumptives." The juxtaposition was telling: Jews were grouped with tuberculosis patients as undesirable guests.

Faced with this rejection, Jewish families created their own hospitality infrastructure. As early as the 1890s, Tannersville in the Catskills was described as "a great resort of our Israelite brethren." By the 1920s, hundreds of hotels catered specifically to Jewish guests, offering not just rooms but an entire ecosystem of cultural and religious accommodation. The larger hotels provided Friday night and holiday services alongside kosher cooking, allowing observant families to vacation without compromising their practices.

An Economy of Abundance

If you've ever wondered where the stereotype of the Jewish grandmother insisting you eat more came from, the Borscht Belt is a reasonable place to look.

Food wasn't just a feature of these resorts—it was practically a competitive sport. The historian Jonathan Sarna explained it simply: "To understand the emphasis on food, one has to understand hunger. Immigrants had memories of hunger, and in the Catskills, the food seemed limitless."

This wasn't merely nostalgia or cultural preference. Many of the guests at Borscht Belt hotels were first or second-generation immigrants whose families had survived pogroms, poverty, and the precarious journey across the Atlantic. The sheer abundance of the hotel dining rooms—the mountains of smoked fish, the endless baskets of bread, the dessert tables that seemed to regenerate as quickly as they were depleted—represented something profound. "Too much was not enough" became an operating philosophy.

The accommodations ranged across economic classes. At the top were the grand hotels like Grossinger's, the Concord, and Kutsher's, which offered golf courses, entertainment, and the kind of amenities that rivaled any resort in America. In the middle were smaller hotels and the famous bungalow colonies, where families would rent simple cottages consisting of a kitchen-living room combination, a bedroom, and a screened porch. The communal center, called the casino, offered modest entertainment: bingo games, movie screenings, folk dancing.

For the most budget-conscious vacationers, there were the kuchaleyns—a Yiddish term meaning "cook it yourself." These self-catered boarding houses allowed working-class and lower-middle-class Jewish New Yorkers to escape the city without breaking the bank. You brought or bought your own food and prepared it yourself, but you still got the mountain air and the community.

The Marriage Market

The Borscht Belt served a social function that extended well beyond recreation.

For young, unmarried Jewish adults in mid-century America, finding a suitable spouse was a serious undertaking. The resorts understood this and capitalized on it brilliantly. Hotels deliberately hired young male college students not just for labor but to attract single women of similar age and background. One book on the era put it bluntly: "The Catskills became one great marriage broker."

This wasn't subtle. Parents would bring their eligible daughters to the resorts with matrimonial intentions barely concealed. Young men knew that a summer job at Grossinger's or the Concord meant access to a concentrated pool of potential matches, all pre-vetted by virtue of being from the same cultural milieu. Romance bloomed between shuffleboard games and comedy shows.

The Comedy Factory

The entertainment tradition of the Borscht Belt traces back to the early twentieth century, when the Yiddish theater star Boris Thomashefsky built the Paradise Garden Theatre in Hunter, New York. But it was the hotel entertainment circuits of the 1920s onward that turned the region into what might be called America's comedy academy.

The list of comedians who honed their craft in the Catskills reads like a hall of fame: Henny Youngman, Rodney Dangerfield, Don Rickles, Mel Brooks. Joan Rivers, Jerry Seinfeld, Billy Crystal. These performers didn't just happen to pass through—the Borscht Belt was their training ground, the place where they learned to read audiences, handle hecklers, and refine their timing.

The style that emerged became known as Borscht Belt humor, and it had distinctive characteristics. The delivery was rapid-fire. The content was often self-deprecating. The themes circled around a recognizable set of concerns: bad luck, physical ailments (particularly digestive), nagging relatives, and marital discord.

Consider Henny Youngman's famous one-liner: "Take my wife—please!" The joke works on multiple levels. The setup sounds like he's about to use his wife as an example of something. The punchline reveals he's actually asking you to literally take her off his hands. It's a three-word masterpiece of misdirection.

Or Rodney Dangerfield's signature complaint: "I told the doctor I broke my leg in two places. He told me to quit going to those places." The humor lies in the absurd literalism of the doctor's response, but underneath it runs a current of genuine grievance—a sense that the world is fundamentally indifferent to your suffering.

This style wasn't invented in a vacuum. It grew from Yiddish theatrical traditions, from the gallows humor that had sustained Jewish communities through centuries of persecution, and from the particular anxieties of immigrant life in America. The Borscht Belt comedians were funny, but they were also processing something real about the experience of being Jewish in a country that hadn't always welcomed them.

The Three A's

By the late 1950s, cracks were beginning to show in the Borscht Belt's foundation. Official Sullivan County historian John Conway would later summarize the decline with a memorable formula: "the three A's: air conditioning, assimilation, and airfare."

Air conditioning seems almost too mundane to be historically significant, but consider what summer in New York City was like before it became widespread. The streets baked. Tenement apartments became unbearable. Escaping to the mountains wasn't just pleasant—it was practically a medical necessity for families with elderly members or young children. Once air conditioning spread through homes and workplaces, the urgency of escape diminished.

Assimilation worked more subtly. The explicit antisemitism that had forced Jewish families to create their own resort infrastructure began to fade in the postwar decades. "Anti-Semitism declined, so Jews could go other places," as one account put it. The Catskills were no longer the only option; they were just one option among many. And for a younger generation that felt more fully American, the specifically Jewish character of the Borscht Belt might have felt less like community and more like constraint.

Airfare delivered the coup de grâce. Cheap air travel transformed the vacation calculus entirely. Why spend a week at a Catskills resort when Miami Beach was just a few hours away by plane? Why vacation in upstate New York when Florida or the Caribbean or even Europe suddenly seemed accessible? The same transportation revolution that had built the Borscht Belt—the railways that first brought city dwellers to the mountains—was now being superseded by jet engines.

The railways themselves had already begun to retreat. Passenger service on the Ontario and Western Railway mainline ended in September 1953. Just a decade earlier, the railroad had published a vacation travel guide listing hundreds of establishments near its stations. Now those stations fell silent.

There was also a change in women's lives that rarely gets mentioned. In the classic Borscht Belt pattern, mothers and children would relocate to the Catskills for the entire summer, with fathers commuting up on weekends. But as more women remained in the workforce after marriage, this extended summer relocation became impractical. You couldn't take two months off from your job to move to a bungalow colony.

The Long Goodbye

The decline of the Borscht Belt was not instantaneous. It played out over decades, in waves.

The bungalow colonies went first. Without the grand infrastructure of the hotels, they were more vulnerable to changing tastes. Many fell into disrepair; some were converted into housing cooperatives.

The smaller hotels followed. The economies of scale that had allowed the big resorts to offer endless entertainment and bottomless buffets were impossible to replicate at a modest operation with fifty rooms.

The glitziest resorts hung on the longest, but even they couldn't outrun the arithmetic of decline. The Concord Resort Hotel, which had outlasted most of its competitors, went bankrupt in 1997 and closed in 1998. Its buildings were eventually demolished to make way for a possible casino development. Grossinger's, perhaps the most famous name in the Borscht Belt, had closed in 1986, even though by the early 1960s a quarter to a third of its guests weren't even Jewish—a sign of how the resort was trying to broaden its appeal as its traditional base eroded.

By the 2010s, the landscape had transformed almost completely. Ruins photographers roamed through decaying lobbies and overgrown golf courses, documenting the detritus of a vanished culture. The Grossinger's complex was partially demolished in 2018, though a remaining structure was destroyed by fire in August 2022. The Pines Hotel, closed since 1998, sat in progressive decay until a fire claimed it in June 2023.

Yet something curious happened alongside this decline: a new population discovered the region.

The Orthodox Revival

As secular Jewish families drifted away from the Catskills, Orthodox and Hasidic communities moved in.

This wasn't entirely new—religious Jews had always been part of the Borscht Belt's clientele. But as the mainstream resorts closed, Orthodox communities saw opportunity. The infrastructure was there: large buildings designed to house families, dining facilities capable of producing kosher food in quantity, landscapes suited to summer camps.

The transformations were often dramatic. The former Homowack Lodge in Phillipsport became a summer camp for Hasidic girls. The Stevensville Hotel in Swan Lake, after a brief stint as the Swan Lake Resort Hotel offering Asian cuisine and tennis facilities, was purchased in 2015 by the ultra-Orthodox Congregation Iched Anash and converted into the Satmar Boys Camp, a religious summer school. The Flagler Hotel, Nemerson, Schenk's and Windsor Hotels in South Fallsburg all became Jewish religious summer camps.

In 1984, the Catskills division of Hatzalah was founded. Hatzalah—the name means "rescue" in Hebrew—is a volunteer emergency medical service that operates primarily in Orthodox Jewish communities. By 2020, the Catskills division had grown to 450 volunteer rescue workers and paramedics operating eighteen ambulances, a testament to the size of the summer population they were serving.

In Fleischmanns, Oppenheimer's Regis Hotel continues to serve an Orthodox clientele in a building dating back to the original Borscht Belt era. It's one of the few direct continuities with the region's past.

The Buddha Belt

Orthodox Jews weren't the only ones who saw potential in the abandoned resorts.

Buddhist and Hindu communities, drawn by the same qualities that had attracted Jewish vacationers a century earlier—the beautiful landscapes, the proximity to New York City, the availability of large properties at reasonable prices—began establishing retreat centers on former resort land. As more temples and meditation centers arrived, they drew still more, creating a self-reinforcing cluster.

This led to new nicknames for the region: the Buddha Belt, the Bhajan Belt (a bhajan is a Hindu devotional song), the Buddhist Belt. The alliteration echoed the original Borscht Belt name, a linguistic tribute whether intentional or not.

The transformation is striking if you think about it. Land that once housed exclusively Jewish clientele, in part because Jews were excluded from other resorts, now hosts practitioners of Eastern religions who found their own reasons to gather in these particular hills. The buildings have changed hands, but the underlying function—providing space for spiritual and communal renewal away from the city—persists.

What the Borscht Belt Made

In August 2025, a music festival called Yamim Ba'im took place at Bethel Woods Center for the Arts. The headliner was Ishay Ribo, an Orthodox Israeli superstar. The venue was the same site where, fifty-six years earlier, Woodstock had been held.

This detail almost feels too neat to be true, but it captures something essential about the region's layered history. The 1969 Woodstock Festival happened on Max Yasgur's dairy farm in Bethel precisely because Max Yasgur, himself Jewish, was willing to rent his land to the festival organizers after other venues fell through. The counterculture happened on land that had been shaped by Jewish agricultural settlement in the early twentieth century. Now Orthodox Jewish music was being performed on that same ground.

The Borscht Belt's most enduring legacy, though, is probably the comedy.

The style that emerged from those hotel showrooms—the rapid-fire delivery, the self-deprecating wit, the mining of family dysfunction for laughs—didn't disappear when the resorts closed. It migrated. It showed up on late-night television, in sitcoms, in stand-up specials. Seinfeld, arguably the most influential sitcom in American history, was a direct descendant of Borscht Belt sensibilities: Jewish, observational, obsessed with the minor indignities of everyday life.

When you watch a comedian work a room today, you're watching techniques refined in the Catskills. The timing, the callback, the willingness to go to uncomfortable places for a laugh—all of it passed from performer to performer in those hotel showrooms, a tradition transmitted not through formal instruction but through observation and imitation and the unforgiving feedback of live audiences.

Marking the Past

In 2022, a photographer named Marisa Scheinfeld, who had spent years documenting the ruins of Borscht Belt properties, founded the Borscht Belt Historical Marker Project. Scheinfeld had noticed something surprising: despite the region's cultural significance, there were no historical markers explaining what these places had been.

The project aimed to place twenty vertical interpretive highway markers at strategic locations throughout the former Borscht Belt, telling the story of specific sites while also explaining the broader history. The markers would be double-sided and enhanced with QR codes linking to more detailed information. A self-guided audio tour was in development.

It's the kind of project that matters more than it might seem. Physical markers create a different kind of memory than books or websites. They catch you when you're not expecting it, while you're driving through a region and wondering about the abandoned building you just passed. They turn landscape into text.

The Borscht Belt was never just about hotels or comedy or kosher food. It was about a community creating space for itself in a country that hadn't always made room. It was about abundance after scarcity, laughter after hardship, belonging after exclusion. The resorts are mostly gone now, but what they made—a particular style of American Jewish culture, a comedy tradition that influenced generations, a template for how communities can build institutions to serve their needs—that remains.

The beets have been chopped, the soup has been eaten, but the flavor lingers.