Kurt K. Field Film Collection

Kurt K. Field Tapes, 1939-1966

Kurt K. Field filmed the majority of this footage in the years after World War Two. American Jewish life in the post-war era was characterized by prosperity, acceptance, and a decline in anti-Semitism. In fact, historians of American Jewry have referred to this time period as "A Time for Healing," and even "A Golden Age."¹

Field's tapes capture a group of Jewish family-members and friends enjoying vacations, parades, and other outings. These activities were typical of middle-class Jewish Americans of the time, who enjoyed unprecedented affluence in the years after the Second World War. New Yorkers of any ethnicity would have shared in some of these activities, such as trips to the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade or the Cloisters Museum. Other leisure behaviors filmed by Fields, like the excursions to Jewish resorts of the Catskills, were particular to American Jews.

Field's footage of the Catskills offers viewers rare and valuable images of small Jewish hotels in the years after World War Two. The history of Jewish resorts in the Catskills begins at the turn of the century, when some Jewish immigrants moved to the Catskill Mountains with the intention of becoming farmers. Many of these farmers - barely able to eke out a living on the stony, infertile soil - supplemented their income by taking in borders over the summer. Jews from the Lower East Side made the arduous journey to these farms in order to escape the polluted air of the city, to avoid urban epidemics (or to recover from them), and to eat farm-fresh produce, milk, eggs, and poultry.²

During the prosperous 1920s and even throughout the depression of the 1930s, thousands of Jews vacationed in the Catskills. But it was not until the 1950s, once the depression lifted and the soldiers returned home, that the Catskills hotels reached their peak in both luxury and popularity. About 1000 individual hotels and bungalow colonies catered to guests at any given point between 1950 and 1970. The region offered a variety of vacation choices, from mammoth, luxury resorts like Grossinger's or the Concord to smaller, more intimate, full-service hotels, or mellow, rustic bungalow colonies. Every year during this period, between half a million to a million guests stayed in the Jewish Catskills.³

Field recorded his family's experiences at these hotels, capturing such activities as baseball and volleyball games, rowboating, and sunbathing. His footage provides a window into how many American Jews of the post-war era spent their precious leisure hours.

References:

¹ For instance, Lucy Dawidowicz entitles her post-war chapter "The Golden Age in America," On Equal Terms: Jews in America, 1881-1981, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1982; Arthur Goren, "A 'Golden Decade' for American Jews: 1945-1955," A New Jewry: Studies in Contemporary Jewry VIII, Peter Y. Medding, ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992; Edward Shapiro, A Time for Healing: American Jewry Since World War II. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992

² Lavender and Steinberg, Jewish Farmers of the Catskills. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1995

³ Phil Brown, "A Movable Community in the Catskills." The Other Promised Land: Vacationing, Identity and the Jewish American Dream. The Jewish Museum of Maryland, 2005

Suggested Bibliography:

Aron, Cindy. Working At Play: A History of Vacations in the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999

Brown, Phil. Catskill Culture. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998

Diner, Hasia. The Jews of the United States. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004

Richman, Irwin. Borscht Belt Bungalows. Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 1998

Shapiro, Edward. A Time for Healing: American Jewry Since World War II. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992