A New Borscht Belt?

On June 28, somewhere over the Atlantic, I celebrated the 100th birthday of the 2,000-year-old man by watching a documentary about him, made when he was 99. Of course, I am talking about Mel Brooks.

“Robin Hood: Men in Tights” was the first Mel Brooks movie I ever saw, and I have loved Brooks for as long as I can remember. In retrospect, I sometimes wonder if Rabbi Tuckman, the traveling rabbi in the movie, was the rabbinic voice in my head all along. The speed, the irreverence, the willingness to turn sacred cows into chopped liver. Brooks had a way of making almost anything, especially the things we were told to take seriously, fair game for a joke.

Brooks came up in the Borscht Belt. He worked the Catskills as a drummer and comic, eventually becoming a tummler, part social director and part entertainer, at Grossinger’s before Sid Caesar hired him in 1949. He was hardly alone. The resorts became one of the great proving grounds of American comedy.

The Borscht Belt became what it was in large part because Jews were excluded from much of the vacation world around them. Hotels advertised themselves as places where Jews were not welcome, so Jews built their own. The Catskills developed into miniature Jewish societies, places dense enough that accents, anxieties, humor, food, references and assumptions no longer needed explanation.

Brooks remembered the Borscht Belt as the place where he learned his craft. “The audiences were very tough,” he wrote. “They didn’t give it away. When you got a laugh, you really earned it.” Being Jewish did not get you the laugh. You still had to be funny. 

Brooks learned that lesson early. His first feature began life as “Springtime for Hitler.” When Joseph E. Levine agreed to help finance it, he told Brooks that Jewish movie-house owners would never put that title on their marquees. Brooks wanted the movie distributed, so he changed the title to “The Producers.” He did not change the joke. He knew the difference between getting through the door and letting the person at the door decide what you make.

Eventually, Jews could stay at the other hotels. The doors opened much more widely than the generation that built the Borscht Belt could have imagined. Jews entered universities and professions that had once limited their access. They moved through Hollywood, publishing, the arts, business and public life. The talent formed in places like the Catskills did not remain there. It moved outward and flourished in American culture.

American Jews did not merely survive here; we flourished. The American promise that inherited difference did not have to determine the possibilities of one’s life was revolutionary for a people accustomed to societies in which being Jewish could do exactly that. Jews became profoundly American while remaining recognizably Jewish. We helped make the country, and the country remade us.

But because exclusion had helped create the dense Jewish world of the Catskills, we came to treat that density as a temporary response to exclusion. Once the walls fell, the spaces behind them seemed less necessary. We confused the circumstances that produced the density with what that density made possible.

Acceptance also began to feel less like a historical achievement and more like a settled fact. America became remarkably comfortable with Jewishness as religion, ethnicity, memory and public identity. America was home. Israel could be loved, supported, visited, worried over and fought about from a distance without calling our Americanness into question. But acceptance, however genuine, is still something somebody else does to you.

Today, Jewish and especially Israeli artists are facing exclusion unseen in half a century. Musician Noga Erez has described festival and media appearances disappearing because she is Israeli. PEN America recently interviewed more than 30 Israeli and Jewish writers and literary professionals who described cancelations, disinvitations, new barriers to publication and pressure around the Jewish or Israeli content of their work. American cultural life has not closed itself entirely to Jews. But admission has again become conditional in places where many of us had convinced ourselves that the question had been settled.

We should want the doors open, and when exclusion is discriminatory, we should fight it. But even acceptance at its best does not become something a minority permanently owns.

The first time we built Jewish worlds that dense, we did it largely because we had little choice. Now we do. If a festival decides it does not want an Israeli singer, we can object and fight to reopen the door. But we can also build another stage, back the artist, find the audience and decide for ourselves whether the result is worth a damn.

That is not taking our toys and going home. It is closer to: to hell with you, we are building anyway. And you are invited. The point is not to retreat from the wider culture. It is to stop making somebody else’s invitation the condition on which Jewish cultural life depends.

Building another stage means more than finding a substitute venue. The Borscht Belt created an entire Jewish world for adults without pretending to be an educational intervention. People went to Grossinger’s on vacation. They swam, flirted, complained, watched shows, fought with their families, and ate too much. Jewishness was powerful partly because it did not have to keep insisting on its own importance. The point is not to recreate that world. It is to recreate the conditions that allowed great culture to emerge from it, so that something new can emerge from ours: recognizably Jewish, confident in its own references and good enough to travel.

We now have an example of that on a much larger scale. Israel is a Hebrew-speaking Jewish society of millions in which Jewishness is not a special feature added to the surrounding culture. It is the environment. A comedian can make a joke without first explaining the Jewish world that makes the joke possible. A musician can fill a song with Hebrew, religion, history and politics without first translating all of it for an outside audience. 

Israeli comedian and musician Tamir Bar’s recent song “College” begins with the life he would rather be worrying about: taking his son to the park, being a good husband, discovering that the milk has run out. Instead, as far as the world is concerned, his problem is that he is Jewish. Then he goes on living. He watches FC Barcelona. He listens to Roger Waters even though, as he puts it, Waters boycotts him. In London, he eats kebab and pretends to be surprised that the British have somehow discovered spices.

The refrain is ya Amalek, ani f—ing chai, “Amalek, I’m f—ing alive.” By the end, even Amalek has become Amaleki-beki, something closer to baby talk than a battle cry. A reference as heavy as Amalek is not placed behind glass. Bar can play with it, deform it, make it ridiculous. He doesn’t need to explain the reference before he can use it because the audience is already in the conversation.

In Brooks’ hands, “Hitler” became “The Producers.” He did not need Jewish history to become less terrifying before he could turn Hitler into material for comedy. He came from a culture confident enough in its own references to do more with them than preserve them.

Exclusion is a pathetic basis for a civilization. Jewish institutions should not become emergency shelters for artists rejected elsewhere. An Israeli novelist is not good because somebody refused to publish her. A mediocre Zionist play does not become less mediocre because the playwright was treated unfairly. If renewed exclusion teaches us only to become more protective of Jewish work, we will have learned the wrong lesson from the original Borscht Belt.

I keep kosher. Walk me into a grocery store and the first question I have about a babka is whether I can eat it. If there is only one kosher babka on the shelf, there is a decent chance I am buying it whether or not it is particularly good. Kashrut has already done most of the choosing for me. Put me in a kosher bakery where every babka is kosher, however, and the calculation changes. I no longer have to congratulate the babka for being kosher. Now I can ask the question I really care about: which babka is actually good?

I do not want institutions whose principal standard is that the work is Jewish and its creator deserves our solidarity. I certainly do not want a Jewish stage where affirmation earns applause the work itself has not earned. I want enough Jewish cultural density that Jewishness can become the condition rather than the achievement. Is the joke funny? Is the novel good? Does the music surprise me? Does the argument hold? Is there anything here another Jew might actually want 50 years from now?

Mel Brooks did not stay at Grossinger’s. The Borscht Belt gave him somewhere to become Mel Brooks, and then he walked straight into American culture and helped transform it. Hollywood did not make the Catskills worthwhile after the fact.

Ishay Ribo came from Israel to Madison Square Garden with music that is unmistakably Hebrew, Jewish and religious. About 15,000 people came in 2023, and he returned the following year. He did not make the music less Jewish before bringing it to New York.

This summer, Zusha traveled the other way. The band emerged from New York’s Jewish musical world and played three sold-out shows at the Barby in Tel Aviv. They were not bringing Israelis an imitation of Israeli music. They were bringing something formed here and discovering that Jews there could hear themselves in it.

A Jewish cultural world large enough to be interesting should contain different politics, religious commitments, aesthetics, arguments, and tastes. Density does not eliminate disagreement. It gives disagreement somewhere to happen.

The first Borscht Belt was built under conditions nobody should want to recreate. Exclusion pushed Jews together, and something extraordinarily generative emerged from that proximity. Then America opened, and we walked through the doors, as we should have.

We can fight to keep those doors open and still build Jewish worlds thick enough to create from within them. The mistake was not walking through the doors. It was assuming that once they opened, we no longer needed the room behind us. 

Rabbi Amitai Fraiman is founding director of the Z3 Project.