[LINK] The New Republic on tourism in the Jewish Catskills

[rfmcdonald]

Jason Diamond's "Magic Mountains" does a great job introducing, to a non-Jewish reader like me, the story of the largely Jewish tourism resorts in New York's Catskill mountains.

Although there had been Jews living and owning property in the region since 1773, when a lessee known as “Jacob the Jew” took control of land near Woodstock, it wasn’t until the nineteenth century that those who had escaped the shtetls of Eastern Europe made their way first from Ellis Island, then through crowded New York City streets, and finally to the region’s peaceful farms, an area similar to their homeland. In 1883, the Hungarian-born Charles Fleischmann, founder of Fleischmann’s Yeast, (“the present-day equivalent of an industrial, biotech empire,” explains a Fleischmann descendant) purchased 60 acres of land, thinking the mountain air would be good for his respiratory problems. While the Catskills boasted plenty of mountaintop hotels that were popular among people of means, they were reserved for “the Wall Street and Tammany Hall power brokers who partook of the rarefied Victorian elegance at the Christian resorts.” The gentile hotel owners banded together, producing a sort of gentleman’s agreement summed up in 1877 by the owner of the Grand Union Hotel, Judge Henry Hilton (no relation to the hotelier), instituting the rule that “no Israelites should be permitted to stop at this hotel.” Several more hotels followed suit with similar slogans: “No Hebrews Need Apply” and “Jews and Dogs Are Not Welcome.”

By the turn of the century, a new sign would start to appear outside of up-and-coming hotels: “Dietary Laws Observed.” As Jews slowly started to buy up inexpensive property in the area, families realized they could make a living by entertaining fellow Jews who couldn’t afford to move out of the city, but who wanted a little time to relax in the country. The Grossingers owned a popular Lower East Side restaurant that served kosher food, and like Fleischmann before him, Selig Grossinger, suffered from fatigue living and working in the city and saw the Catskills as the perfect place to resettle. Grossinger was of more modest means than the wealthy Fleischmann, and he purchased 35 acres of land in the town of Ferndale, moving his entire family to a landscape that looked just like his birthplace in the Austrian Empire.

When Prohibition ended in 1933, the Catskills had been developed in large part by a number of Jewish gangsters and bootleggers, some of whom, like Waxey Gordon, filtered the money they made into new resorts and hotels. During the World War II, Grossinger’s would become the gold standard, other resorts, including The Concord, Hotel Brickman, and many others, prospered as a playground for upwardly-mobile Jews who came to enjoy fresh air, golf, dancing, great food, and most of all, entertainment. The list of comedians who tested their material out on the notoriously tough crowds is like a who’s who of twentieth-century American comedy: Jack Benny, Joan Rivers, Shecky Greene, Woody Allen, Phyllis Diller, and nearly every big name from the vaudeville circuit, radio, the early days of television, and the Yiddish theater.