LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Borscht Belt
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The Borscht Belt was about 100 miles northwest of New York City in Sullivan and Ulster counties in the foothills of the Catskill Mountains. Sometimes known as the "Jewish Alps," it covered an area of about 250 square miles. Jewish farmers, encouraged by the Jewish Agricultural Society, started settling this rural area beginning in the 1820s. Prefiguring the "back-to-the-earth communes" of the 1960s, some Jewish settlers founded socialist agricultural communities, and some of the bungalow colonies fomented much left-wing activity. In the Mirth Bungalow Colony, for example, "entertainment" included political discussions and poetry readings.
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Borscht Belt is an informal term for the summer resorts of the Catskill Mountains in Sullivan and Ulster Counties in upstate New York which were a popular holiday spot for New York Jews. (Borscht is a kind of beet soup popular with people of Eastern European origin.) The term Borscht Belt can ... refer to the Catskill region itself. In late August each summer, the Catskills Institute (based at Brown University) holds a two-day conference examining Jewish culture in the Catskills.
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The names "Bagel Aristocracy," "Sour Cream Sierras," and "Borscht Belt" did not just happen by chance. Jewish entertainers and comedians like Al Jolson, Fannie Brice, Paul Whiteman, George Jessel, and Sophie Tucker parodied every aspect of Jewish life in the mountains, especially the food. Entertainers at the hotels continued the jokes, and newspaper columnists sharpened their pencils with new ways to characterize the Catskill resorts. Copious amounts of food, not necessarily borscht, have always been central to life at the Catskill resorts. To escape the heat and the "workers' disease," tuberculosis, Jews came to the Catskills for fresh air and fresh food at kosher boardinghouses. For about sixty dollars a season a whole family could rent a bedroom in a large house with cooking and food-storage privileges.
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Despite exaggeration, the Borscht Belt birthed innumerable nationally known figures, especially in the entertainment world. Many Jewish entertainers started in the Borscht Belt because of anti-Semitism that excluded them from working in other venues. Additionally, their work included Jewish cultural references, not understood outside the Jewish world. However, as these entertainers became nationally popular, the Jewish content of their work became more familiar and understood in the mainstream and their work became more mainstream--with less specific Jewish content. Jewish life became known and integrated into American life and vice versa, often because of Borscht Belt entertainers.
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During National Jewish Book Month in November, writers of all stripes will be trekking from coast to coast on the literary equivalent of the Borscht Belt, as more than 1,000 Jewish book fairs take place. This is one case where the size of a city doesn't necessarily indicate the size of its fair. For instance, there aren't any book fairs in some major cities with large Jewish populations, such as New York City, Chicago or Los Angeles. But the one sponsored by the Jewish Community Center of Metropolitan Detroit, November 5–16, is among the biggest in the country, now in its 52nd year.
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Coarse, tired old Borscht-Belt comedian Nappy Kane is a dinosaur—his career is a shambles and his bank balance anemic. Then his wife of less than a year, a Chinese mail-order bride, disappears, taking most of whatever money he had left. Saxon, hired to find her, winds up in a small town near Sacramento, where the wife of a love-connection mail-order agency is found dead in the river. When too many different people end up wanting to kill him, Saxon stays busy trying to save his own skin and that of his adopted son, Marvel.
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Borscht Belt