The bungalow colonies catered to the working class and many offered the same recreational activities and communal R&R offered by the larger resorts. These places served as a seasonal refuge for the Jews, especially at a time when Jewish communities were often “restricted” from the larger society. Some families were recent immigrants to the US, and found acceptance among others in the Catskills who shared not only their faith but their daily habits and values. But some families, like the Adlers in Richard Greenberg’s The American Plan, did not fit in as easily. German Jews who had fled Europe and the Nazis were out of place in these resorts for working and business class American Jews. Often the Germans were the “cultured” Jews, who had enjoyed more privileged lives than the “shtetl” Jews of Eastern Europe. But for vast majority of Jewish families, the Catskills offered them the opportunity to relax while their children enjoyed the outdoors – an experience the Borscht Belt delivered for decades.

Comedian Myron Cohen

Nighttime entertainment offered vacationers the chance to watch first-class comedy. Catskills comedians, whose self-deprecating stand-up routines satirized Jewish life, became “Borscht Belt comics.” Myron Cohen was among such comedians, touting jokes that poked fun at Jewish types:

Son walks in on Old World, traditional father, who's watching a basketball game. Son is stunned: “Dad, I didn't know you liked basketball; what's the score?" Dad replies, “78 to 62." “Who's winning?" Dad says, “78."

Also popular was song parodist Allan Sherman, who was best known for the 1963 hit “Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh,” which chronicled summer camp misery. In his essay, “Shine on, Harvey Bloom: Why Allan Sherman Made Us Laugh,” Ken Kalfus remembers how Sherman “made Jewish humor about

Jewish people mainstream humor”: “[Sherman’s song parodies] expressed Jews' apartness from mainstream American culture, at a time when the culture itself was about to go counter....The fact that many listeners besides myself barely recognized the songs on which Sherman's parodies were based - including, for heaven's sake, ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’ - suggests how distant we found ourselves from the supposed center of the culture.”

While visitors to the Borscht Belt may have felt separated from the rest of the country, comics like Cohen and Sherman threw a more humorous light on the Jewish identity, bonding the Catskills guests further as a community. Ironically, vacationers came to the Borscht Belt less frequently as Jews became more assimilated into mainstream society in later decades, and eventually most resorts closed for good. But, for a brief period, the summers in the Borscht Belt represented more than just a vacation for the scores of Jews who came with their families. It was a place and time when they belonged.

AN EXCERPT FROM "THE PROFESSOR OF DESIRE," BY PHILIP ROTH

“Hey little Kepesh, come here,” say the guests. “Who do you want to be like when you grow up?” Temptation comes to me first in the conspicuous personage of Herbie Bratasky, social director, bandleader, crooner, comic and m.c. of my family’s mountainside resort hotel. When he is not trussed up in the elasticized muscleman’s swim trunks which he dons to conduct rumba lessons by the side of the pool, he is dressed to kill, generally in his two-tone crimson and cream-colored “loafer” jacket and wide canary-yellow trousers that taper down to enchain him just above his white, perforated, sharpie’s shoes. A fresh slice of Black Jack gum is at the ready in his pocket while another is being savored, with slow-motion sassiness, in what my mother derisively describes as Herbie’s “yap.” Below the stylishly narrow alligator belt and the gold droop of key chain, one knee works away inside his trousers, Herbie keeping time to hides he alone hears being beaten in that Congo called his brain. Our brochure (from fourth grade on composed by me, in collaboration with the owner) headlines Herbie as “our Jewish Cugat, our Jewish Krupa – all rolled into one!”; further on he is

described as “a second Danny Kaye,” and, in conclusion, just so that everyone understands that this 140-pound twenty-year-old is not nobody and Kepesh’s Hungarian Royale is not exactly nowhere, as “another Tony Martin.”...
...In summer, I am under the demon drummer’s spell. Then Yom Kippur comes and Bratasky goes, and what good does it do me to have learned what someone like that has to teach a growing boy? Our -witzes, -bergs, and -steins are dispersed overnight to regions as remote to me as Babylon – Hanging Gardens called Pelham and Queens and Hackensack.

Philip Roth is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of 26 novels, and is much admired by playwright Richard Greenberg.