Join the Museum of Jewish Heritage for Summer Thursdays! This month, grab a drink and watch Dirty Dancing while learning about the history of the Catskills and enjoying incredible views of New York Harbor.
5 PM – 7:30 PM Craft Making
Come decorate sunglasses and color in hamsas!
6:45 PM Talk with the Forward’s Archivist Chana Pollack about the Catskills
Summer in the Catskills made a big impression on readers of the Forverts, the Jewish immigrant community’s Yiddish paper of record, with subscribers jamming the newspaper’s switchboards, scrambling to switch addresses so that their beloved daily would be delivered to their Borscht Belt boarding houses, bungalow colonies and resorts upon arrival.
Loaded with classified Yiddish ads for Catskills farmland, boarding houses, hotels and even Yiddish summer camps, Forverts readers and writers found a home in the Borscht Belt for well over a century. Come take a dip back into the historic Forward archives and see what the tumult was all about.
7:30 PM Screening of Dirty Dancing
An innocent teen vacationing with her upper-middle-class parents at an upscale resort in the 1960s Catskills gets a jolt of culture shock when she crushes on the hotel’s slick, handsome dance instructor. The soundtrack yielded the Oscar-winning Best Song “(I’ve Had the) Time of My Life.”
The Museum is free and open to all on Thursdays from 4:00 to 8:00 PM, and LOX will serve Jewish and Russian fare throughout the night. Currently on view: The Holocaust: What Hate Can Do, Courage to Act: Rescue in Denmark, and Andy Goldsworthy’s Garden of Stones.
