As you may have noticed I’ve been schooling myself on the history of the Jews in the Catskills. Jews (in small numbers) have been in the Catskills as long as any other white man. But as time passed the Jewish religion took on a larger local role. In the late 19th century more Jewish immigrants arrived from Eastern Europe, forming communities and congregation. They were communists, leftists, intellectuals, business owners and chicken farmers. That community grew, assimilated and after World War II and the Holocaust, the Catskill Jewish population exploded. From the 1940’s into the late 1960’s the boarding houses, bungalow colonies and hotels thrived. But times changed. Woodstock was the end of the Jewish heyday, the era of the “worldly Jew” in the Catskills. Air conditioning, cheap airfares, changing cultural tastes and nostalgia come too late doomed the Jewish hospitality industry in the Catskills.
I got the term “worldly Jew” from Isaac Bashevis Singer’s book The Hasidim. It’s a slim 24 pages of text. The rest of the book is taken up with Ira Moskowitz’s drawings of Hasidic men. The drawings aren’t very good. There’s a lot of beards, prayer shawls, and closed eye praying in the stilted charcoal sketches. But Singer’s short history of Hasidim is great. I’m not pretending to be an expert after 24 pages. It’s a start.
Written in 1973, the Nobel Prize winning author starts by drawing parallels to the Williamsburg Hasidic, in their long coats and fur hats, and the beards and long hair sported by the hippies of the time, four years after Woodstock. It’s true—similar styling. They both harken back to another era. Also, like the hippies, Hasidim is nothing if not contrary to the “worldly Jew” (capitalism). They are both countercultures.
Soon after the hippies of Woodstock went home and got jobs, Hasidim began moving into the Catskills. Land was cheap and the large families needed room. A migration of paneled Ford station wagons hit Rt. 17 in the summer months. Only 100,000 strong when I.B. Singer wrote his short history, Hasidim has since outgrown Williamsburg, Monsey and Kiryas Joel. The Catskills are next. This is the most recent Jewish diaspora to move into the neighborhood. From 1973 to the present Hasidim has been a regular summer presence in the mountains and that soon may change. The population of Sullivan County skyrockets in June, July and August. It seems that this population will begin taking up more permanent residence in the near future. Roads and homesites are already waiting for further development. The memo just has to go out.
Singer defines a luftmensch as “literally, one who lives on air; one without a trade or gainful employment.” It’s Yiddish. The context is the almost missionary zeal with which “enlightened” Judaism was pushing assimilation in 18th Century Europe, and ultimately wanted to “put an end to the existence of the luftmensch”- the Jewish religiopath. Hasidim with their mystical fundamentalism, obvious choice of dress, grooming and insistence on an insular community, was an active response to the “worldly Jew” and proposed assimilation of the enlightenment. Two centuries later Nazism was born. The final solution didn’t differentiate. All Jews were to be exterminated…..not just the pious ones. Assimilation protected no one.
Anti-Semitism never goes out of style. It’s like racism. And in the Catskills it’s a tradition. Because Hasidim actively desires to both co-exist and remain insular, protecting a theopathic way of life, they can also serve as the convenient “other,” an easy target for stereotype. To be “anti-Hasidic” is not seen as anti-Semitism in the Catskills. Even Jews can rag on Hasidim. It’s common ground for the country gentile and Jew alike. I try not to play into it, except when it comes to driving. Then I’m the most rabid, anti-Hasidic, hillbilly at the local, “worldly Jew” pig roast. There’s got to be a DMV intervention. How does anybody get a license? But, driving aside, I have no problems whatsoever with Hasidim. I welcome them. I’m insular also. Neither of us want to be bothered by goy or Jew. We have much in common. The fact that they wear their faith (and beards) so blatantly in public, as a badge of honor, makes me feel we are kindred souls, “living on air…without a trade or gainful employment.” religiopaths in kind. I think I understand.
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