Today the Borscht Belt is recalled through the nostalgic lens of summer swims, Saturday night dances, and comedy performances. But its current state, like that of many other formerly glorious regions, is nothing like its earlier status. Forgotten about and exhausted, much of its structural environment has been left to decay. The Borscht Belt, which features essays by Stefan Kanfer and Jenna Weissman Joselit, presents Marisa Scheinfeld's photographs of abandoned sites where resorts, hotels, and bungalow colonies once boomed in the Catskill Mountain region of upstate New York.

The book assembles images Scheinfeld has shot inside and outside locations that once buzzed with life as year-round havens for generations of people. Some of the structures have been lying abandoned for periods ranging from four to twenty years, depending on the specific hotel or bungalow colony and the conditions under which it closed. Other sites have since been demolished or repurposed, making this book an even more significant documentation of a pivotal era in American Jewish history.

The Borscht Belt presents a contemporary view of more than forty hotel and bungalow sites. From entire expanses of abandoned properties to small lots containing drained swimming pools, the remains of the Borscht Belt era now lie forgotten, overgrown, and vacant. In the absence of human activity, nature has reclaimed the sites, having encroached upon or completely overtaken them. Many of the interiors have been vandalized or marked by paintball players and graffiti artists. Each ruin lies radically altered by the elements and effects of time. Scheinfeld s images record all of these developments.

In this first interpretive historical account of the American Orthodox Jewish experience, Jenna Weissman Joselit investigates the ways in which pious Jews reconciled the requirements of religious tradition with the freedoms of interwar America. Through its focus on representative American Jewish institutions such as the synagogue and the rabbinate and on the sacred ritual life of Orthodox women, New York's Jewish Jews reveals how a self-consciously modern, American, and decidedly middle class Orthodoxy evolved before 1945.

Our Gang provides a fascinating historical portrait of the Jewish criminal world from the era of mass immigration through Prohibition and beyond. Jenna Weissman Joselit traces the origins, nature, patterns, location, and impact of Jewish crime from the early years, when it was inextricably bound up with the East Side community as a whole, with criminals living among the more or less law-abiding citizens they preyed upon, to the post-World War I period and the gradual assimilation and absorption of Jewish crime into the mainstream of the American underworld.

Parallel with this theme is a broader one: the New York Jewish community's reaction to Jewish crime, evolving from disbelief to denial to concern and the establishment of a network of correctional and preventive agencies, and finally as the nature of Jewish crime changed, and as the community itself felt a growing sense of security a sort of acceptance."

Since the seventeenth century, millions of people from every continent have settled in America. Seeking a better life for themselves and their children, they braved deprivations, studied an unfamiliar language, adapted to a different way of life, and battled prejudices and hostility. Most of them held on to their faith as well, re-establishing churches and meeting-houses, synagogues and mosques, temples and cathedrals, and electing priests, rabbis, imams, and other spiritual leaders from among their number. Immigration irreversibly altered the face of the new republic, and it still moulds the political and spiritual fabric of the nation even to this day. Joselit surveys the history of immigration--which is actually the history of this country--and its effect on both political and religious issues through the centuries. The book explores the immigrant experience through case studies representative of all major newcomers' groups. The vividly rendered stories of courage and perseverance will alternately inspire and horrify.