“I was there in the glory days of The Catskills and the audiences were tough and demanding. They really sharpened your act. It was do or die. No Borscht Belt, no Mel Brooks.”
— Mel Brooks
“Great. Weird and Sad. ”
— Marc Maron
“The Borscht Belt: Revisiting the Remains of America’s Jewish Vacationland” featuring photographs by Marisa Scheinfeld, provides a vivid, bittersweet record of forsaken archaeological sites that were once beloved summer havens in the Catskills.”
— Sam Roberts for The New York Times
“Susan Sontag famously observed that “all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.” One could scarcely imagine a more observant and poetic testimony than Marisa Scheinfeld’s eerie photographic record of the crumbing remains of American Jewry’s mid-century Xanadu, the Borscht Belt. With an archaeologist’s attention to the accumulated layers of history and the passage of time, her melancholic images of ruins, detritus and festering vegetation are haunted by an unseen and undefined presence, providing a visual meditation on abandonment and absence. These photographs invite us to consider the rich history of American Jewish life, the legacy of the Catskills, and the ways in which this complex history is enduringly present and woven into the very fiber of the region.”
— Maya Benton, Curator, International Center of Photography
“Lord Action famously wrote that history is not a burden on the memory but an illumination of the soul. That sentiment comes alive in the photographs of Marisa Scheinfeld. This collection tells the fascinating story of the history of the once-vaunted Catskill resort industry that at its peak included more than 500 hotels and 50,000 bungalows. This is the story of a paradise lost, and these photos are an invaluable tool in preserving the past for those who were not fortunate enough to have experienced it. ”
