Starting on Friday with a mixer, and then from Saturday to Sunday, the weekend will be filled with food, comedy, and music. But the history of the Borscht Belt actually goes back many decades, says Andrew Jacobs, board president of the Catskills Borscht Belt Museum.
“The name the Borscht Belt was sort of a playful riff on the the Bible Belt, which is you know sort of the American South, a religious American South, and it was you know referring to this beet, you know this nourishing beet soup that you know favored by Eastern European Jews and other other people in Eastern Europe, but so it was sort of a play, a playful way to to mark themselves,” Jacobs said.
Jacobs explained that from the 1920s to the 1980s, the Catskills region was a magnet for leisure for millions of people from New York City escaping the city during the summer. Almost 1,000 hotels, resorts, bungalow colonies, and boarding houses pocketed the mountains.
“You know, at the time, Jews were not were sort of openly barred from hotels and other kind of establishments up in upstate New York,” Jacobs said. “So, they had to create their own leisure world. So it was kind of born of of bigotry.”
In spite of the bigotry, it became a center of culture into itself.
“So the castles became sort of proving ground for stand-up comedy, and like all the greats of you know American comedy, kind of had honed their craft up up here in the Catskills,” Jacobs said.
Jamie Anson, the director of events for the Borscht Belt Fest, said the festival is about celebrating this history that many New Yorkers don't remember.
“Joan Rivers and Rodney Dangerfield and Frank Sinatra perform there. You know, there are so many famous people that came from there,” Anson said.
Anson said there will be events for people of all ages. These include a live Jewish dating game open to anyone, an archivist and former building inspector who collected Catskill's memorabilia, and food and music events. On Sunday, more than 100 vendors will take over Canal Street with more food and live music.
“I have an expanded children's area, and just wait for this. We have princesses and fairies coming, and there's going to be a fairy forest set up for the kids to enjoy,” Anson said.
