"`We’re Going to the Shtetl for Decoration Day’: The Catskills as a Bastion of Jewish Culture in an Era of Assimilation, 1945-1964"

The end of the Second World War marked the beginning of a postwar prosperity that greatly benefited working-class American urban-dwellers, as well as the consequent growth of American suburbia. One consequence of this was a shift in the geography of the United States` Jewish population. Namely, the majority of American Jews left their homes in the country’s urban centers, whose Jewish insularity had resembled that of the shtetlach (all-Jewish villages and neighborhoods) in which their Eastern European ancestors had resided, now buying homes in the suburbs of American metropolitan areas. However, at the same time that American Jews were suburbanizing and consequently integrating into the suburbs’ perceived ethnic neutrality, the resorts of Upstate New York’s Catskill Mountains grew in popularity. There, American Jews could take vacations among other Jews in a culturally Jewish environment, albeit one whose activities and architecture, reflecting the growingly common bourgeois aspirations of American Jews, often mimicked those of the American elite. American hotels, too, could refuse to admit Jews, and many did so. Conversely, Jews could vacation in the Catskills knowing that a resort manager at a Jewish Catskills resort would never refuse to rent a room to a paying customer based on the fact that he or she was Jewish. The status of Catskills Jewish culture as a means of turning inward into a “Jewish” world despite rapid assimilation, rendered the Catskills the last regional bastion of American Jewish culture for the descendants of the “Ellis Island” generation that had immigrated from Eastern Europe.