The Catskills: Its History and How It Changed America by Stephen Silverman

Companion book to the exhibit Echoes From The Borscht Belt, photographer Marisa Scheinfeld's exploration of what remains of the Catskills hotels and resorts in Upstate New York. On exhibit at the Yiddish Book Center Summer 2015. The Catskills (“Cat Creek” in Dutch), America’s original frontier, northwest of New York City, with its seven hundred thousand acres of forest land preserve and its five counties—Delaware, Greene, Sullivan, Ulster, Schoharie; America’s first great vacationland; the subject of the nineteenth-century Hudson River School paintings that captured the almost godlike majesty of the mountains and landscapes, the skies, waterfalls, pastures, cliffs . . . refuge and home to poets and gangsters, tycoons and politicians, preachers and outlaws, musicians and spiritualists, outcasts and rebels . . . Stephen Silverman and Raphael Silver tell of the turning points that made the Catskills so vital to the development of America: Henry Hudson’s first spotting the distant blue mou