there was a sense that ‘too much was not enough '', according to one source. One report states that the larger hotels provided 'Friday night and holiday services as well as kosher cooking.' Īt the hotels, 'food was of primary importance. This discrimination led to a need for alternative lodging that would readily accept Jewish families as guests. In the 1920s and 1930s, some hotels and resorts' advertisements refused to accept Jews and indicated 'No Hebrews or Consumptives' in their ads. The name the Yiddish Alps was used (possibly coined) by Larry King and is satirical: a classic example of borscht belt humor. The name is a play on existing colloquial names for other American regions (such as the Bible Belt and Rust Belt). The name comes from borscht, a soup of Ukrainian origin, made with beetroot as the main ingredient giving it a deep reddish-purple color, that is popular in many Central and Eastern European countries and brought by Ashkenazi Jewish and Slavic immigrants to the United States.

Grossinger's Catskill Resort Hotel closed in 1986 and the Concord Resort Hotel struggled to stay open until 1998, and was subsequently demolished for a possible casino site. By the late 1950s, many began closing, with most gone by the 1970s, but some major resorts continued to operate, a few into the 1990s. These resorts, and also the Borscht Belt bungalow colonies, were a popular vacation spot for New York City Jews from the 1920s through the 1960s. Ī 2019 review of the history is more specific: 'in its heyday, as many as 500 resorts catered to guests of various incomes'. was 'a great resort of our Israelite breathren '.from the 1920s on hundreds of hotels'. A source interviewed by Time magazine stated that visits to the area by Jewish families were already underway 'as early as the 1890s. state of New York, straddling both Upstate New York and the northern edges of the New York metropolitan area.

The Borscht Belt, or Yiddish Alps is a colloquial term for the mostly defunct summer resorts of the Catskill Mountains in parts of Sullivan, Orange, and Ulster counties in the U.S.

Areas of upstate New York that constituted the Borscht Belt

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