The Borscht Belt: How a Mountain Resort Circuit Invented American Comedy

The Catskill Mountains, two hours north of the city, are not particularly dramatic as mountains go. They rise to modest elevations, their peaks rounded by age and ice, their slopes covered in second-growth forest. What they had, from the eighteen forties onward, was accessible distance from the city: close enough to reach by train or, eventually, by car, remote enough to feel like escape.

For the second-generation Jewish immigrants of the Lower East Side, escape was exactly the point. In the nineteen twenties through the nineteen seventies, the Catskill resort circuit served New York City's Jewish working and middle class at a time when Jews were excluded from most mainstream American vacation destinations. The Adirondack resorts said 'restricted clientele' in their advertisements. The Hamptons were not welcoming. So the Borscht Belt, named for the beet soup associated with Eastern European Jewish cooking, built its own world.

Hotels like Grossinger's in Liberty, Kutsher's Country Club in Monticello, and the Concord Hotel in Kiamesha Lake hosted hundreds of thousands of guests annually at their peak. They were total resorts: dining rooms with three meals a day, swimming pools, tennis courts, nightclubs, and theaters. They were explicitly Jewish spaces, where Yiddish and English coexisted, where the immigrant generation and their American-born children negotiated the distance between them, where the food was familiar, and where no one had to explain themselves.

The entertainment was where the culture did its real work. The tummler, a Yiddish word for someone who makes noise and keeps the energy up, was the all-around in-house entertainer who kept guests engaged between meals and acts. The tummler was the incubator of American stand-up comedy. Virtually every major American comedian of the mid-twentieth century worked these rooms: Mel Brooks, Jerry Lewis, Danny Kaye, Woody Allen, Don Rickles, Joan Rivers, Henny Youngman, Sid Caesar. They refined their timing, tested their material, found their voices on stages in Sullivan and Ulster County.

The Borscht Belt declined in the nineteen seventies and eighties as the assimilation it had helped produce made other destinations available. Grossinger's closed in nineteen eighty-six. The Concord closed in nineteen ninety-eight. The buildings are mostly ruins now, returning to the mountains. The comedy they incubated went everywhere.