Closing Night: We Met at Grossinger’s
San Francisco Jewish Film Festival
Saturday August 1, 7:30 pm, Piedmont Theatre, Oakland
Use discount code KLEZSFJFF46 for $2 off each ticket.
If your knowledge of mid-century Jewish resorts in New York’s Catskills mountains — fondly known as the Borscht Belt – stems mainly from The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and maybe a couple of Seinfeld references, then treat yourself to this loving celebration of one of the most influential cultural institutions in Jewish American life: Grossinger’s Resort Hotel. Amid bucolic lakes just 100 miles from New York City, Grossinger’s began in 1919 as a necessary haven — welcoming vacationing Jewish families shut out of most restrictive resorts – but was built by three generations of Jewish women entrepreneurs into a leisure-time juggernaut that launched the careers of entertainers from Milton Berle to Joel Grey to Joan Rivers.
Rich with home movies, archival recordings and anecdotes from former headliners, tummlers, waiters, and guests, the documentary establishes not only how central Grossinger’s was in defining a certain kind of Jewish American identity — the lox! the Yiddish humor! — but also how it came to symbolize a century of Jewish American progress: when Eleanor Roosevelt arrived at Grossinger’s in 1950, maybe so had the Jews. —Peter Stein