Borscht Belt Revisited: Catskills’ Golden Era

Join us for a visual presentation and Q&A with photographer Marisa Scheinfeld, author of the book The Borscht Belt: Revisiting the Remains of America's Jewish Vacationland. This illustrated lecture features Scheinfeld’s photographs of abandoned sites where resorts, hotels and bungalow colonies once boomed in the Catskill Mountains. The images were made inside and outside locations that once buzzed with life as year-round havens for generations of people. In her talk, Scheinfeld discusses the rise, fall, and impact of the Borscht Belt along with the deeper, more layered meaning she finds in the series, as well as her current work with the Borscht Belt Historical Marker Project. 

This talk is presented in conjunction with Great Green Hope for the Urban Blues, an exhibition at Vassar’s Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center about two centuries of art and myths of the Hudson Valley, which includes one of Scheinfeld’s Borscht Belt photographs. Marisa Scheinfeld (b. 1980) is a Jewish-American photographer and author who was born in Brooklyn and raised in the Catskills. Scheinfeld received her B.A. from SUNY Albany and her MFA from San Diego State University. Her work is motivated by an interest in regional landscape and its myriad histories, both apparent and hidden, and a drive to use the medium of photography as an act of preservation.

Registration Required. Books will be available for purchase courtesy of Three Arts.