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When Comedy Went to School
Although I am sure that just about everybody will be as enchanted by “When Comedy went to School”—a documentary on stand-up comedians of the Borscht Belt that opens today at the IFC in NY—as me, I...
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Utopia in the Catskills
In assembling still photos to be included in a video I am doing on a trip up to my hometown in the Catskills in August, I could find nothing on the net that showed Woodridge in its prime. A visit to...
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Sid Caesar, legendary comedian, dead at 91
Sid Caesar died yesterday at the age of 91. The N.Y. Times obituary (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/13/arts/television/sid-caesar-comic-who-blazed-tv-trail-dies-at-91.html) pays tribute to his...
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Hometown news
Chances are that if you grew up in a small town like me, you keep up with online versions of the local newspapers. For me that means bookmarking the Middletown Times Herald-Record and the Sullivan...
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The Mighty Atom
Back in 2007 I wrote a piece titled “Jews and American Popular Culture” that was based on a lecture Paul Buhle gave to the Institute of Jewish History in New York occasioned by the publication of the...
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The Rise and the Fall of the Borscht Belt
A while back FB friend Maxene Diamond Spindell, who posts a lot of interesting material to the Memories of the Catskills group, posted a ten minute excerpt from Peter Davis’s “The Rise and Fall of the...
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The Shawangunk Ridge
When I was 12 years old or so, my parents moved into a new house on Maple Avenue in Woodridge, a tiny village in Sullivan County, NY that had a jaw-dropping view of the Shawangunk Mountains from our...
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Chester’s Zumbarg
Yesterday’s NY Times Sunday Book Review had an article on Stephen M. Silverman and Raphael D. Silver’s “The Catskills: its history and how it changed America”. As someone who grew up in the southern...
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Camp Woodland
Joan Roelof wrote a comment yesterday on my post about Chester’s Zumbarg: “I wonder if you know about Camp Woodland. It was a major influence in my life.” As it turns out the book on the Catskills...
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Woodridge characters
Yesterday when I was walking down Third Ave. with my wife for some exercise, we spotted a man walking his Pomeranian dog, a pet that has become trendy lately as a result of its exposure on the “Real...
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Socialism in the borscht belt
From pages 89-93 of Catskill Culture: In the Catskills, comics often made jokes about college activists, and the guests seemed to share negative opinions about those antiwar groups, such as Students...
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A weekend in Hudson
Louis Proyect and Lucas Jedrzejak My primary purpose in going to Hudson, NY was to attend a screening of Lucas Jedrzejak’s documentary “Ketermaya” on Sunday, August 6th, a film I first saw at the...
View ArticleThe Mighty Atom
COUNTERPUNCH, NOVEMBER 17, 2017 When I was about ten years old, my mother took me to see the Mighty Atom’s legendary strong man act at the Panoramic Health Farm, a bungalow colony he owned in...
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Yitzy the Pupa photographer
On Wednesday and Thursday, I was up in Sullivan County—once the home of the now mostly defunct resort hotel industry—to work with a drone pilot I had hired to capture the sights of the Catskills from...
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Silver Lake in Woodridge, NY. Filmed by Jeremy Hansen of Devotive In March, 2017, I covered a number of films being shown at the Socially Relevant Film Festival including “Ketermaya”, a really...
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In the Spirit of the Departed Munsees
COUNTERPUNCH, AUGUST 10, 2018 Four years ago the Stockbridge-Munsee Indians decided to cancel plans to build a gambling casino in Sullivan County since Gov. Andrew Cuomo had approved another...
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Left, Gay, and Green
From my comic book memoir: COUNTERPUNCH, JANUARY 18, 2019 Just over five years ago an article I had scanned from the July 20, 1947 PM newspaper titled “Utopia in the Catskills” appeared in...
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Review of Allen Young’s “Left, Gay, and Green: a Writer’s Life”
The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics and Culture Volume 11, 2018 A New Dawn for the New Left: Liberation News Service, Montague Farm, and the Long Sixties By John McMillian, For many years –...
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A Child’s Christmas in Woodridge
No matter how old I get, I’ll always have vivid memories of being a small boy in Woodridge, NY and doing all the things small kids do. Like walking in the woods, swimming in the ponds and rivers,...
View ArticleA Walk on the Moon
I confess that I have not watched all the films about the Borscht Belt but I am sure that nothing will ever top the 1999 “A Walk on the Moon” (universally available as VOD) since it captures the...
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