Borscht Belt Roadtrip

We can as well rename the podcast to “The Jews,” since we can’t stop talking about them. This week we first talk about the country life and our utter incompetence at it. Then we go on and on about the Jews — mostly the ones in the Catskills, where New York Jews used to spend their summers in their own little vacation ghettos until the 1970s when they became “white” and joined the mainstream. Now a whole new wave of Jews is taking over the region: neo-trad religious types that are creating their own shtetls. —The RussiansA few notes.A few books on Jews in America that we like: An Empire of Their Own, which charts how low-class junk peddlers found themselves building Hollywood and controlling the movies. Then there’s one called Followers of the Trail, a book of interviews with people who attended a Jewish communist family camp in the Hudson Valley set up by Jewish workers and which is now a liberal vacation spot stripped of its old radical history. Also, back when Bernie Sanders was still a thing, Yasha wrote about the old Jewish world that used to exist here in New York  — a world that produced Bernie, a politician not very much liked by most American Jews today. Also, the last WYSK has a bit more on the religious trad takeover of Upstate New York. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit yasha.substack.com/subscribe