Route 17 cuts through Sullivan County, leading the way to the remains of the storied Jewish-owned hotels and bungalow colonies that once defined the Catskills, a mountainous region that encompasses four counties in southeastern New York. Many of the old resorts, first opened in the early 20th century to welcome Jewish vacationers barred from country clubs and mainstream hotels in the state, are now piles of stone. A few have been transformed and still welcome guests, and some bungalow colonies still thrive.

“We may not inhabit a place, but the place inhabits our spirits forever,” said artist Annice Jacoby, who helped create and narrate a short documentary film, Jacoby’s: A Retrospective, about the bungalow colony founded by her grandfather in Woodbourne and streaming on the Borscht Belt Historical Marker Project website. For her, the colony was a true paradise. “I didn’t want that history to disappear.”

Which is why many of us keep going back to the Catskills. This summer, a full-length documentary, an Off-Broadway play and an exhibition at a local museum evoke the spirit of the area’s heyday.

A musical adaptation of A Walk on the Moon, a 1999 film set in a bungalow colony, is playing at the Laura Pels Theatre through August. The musical, like the film, follows the story of Pearl Kantrowitz (played by Talia Suskauer), a restless Brooklyn mother of a rebellious teen. Pearl is vacationing with her daughter at a bungalow colony during the momentous summer of 1969, when the nearby Woodstock music festival and the moon landing collide with the tightly knit world she has always known.

Pamela Gray, who wrote the screenplay for the movie as well as the musical (and some of the lyrics), spent her childhood summers at bungalow colonies and vividly remembers the summer of 1969 and being at the pool and “watching hippies through a chain link fence, walking to Woodstock,” she said in an interview. Then 13, she wanted to tag along.

Now playing at film festivals and other venues is another Catskills film, We Met at Grossinger’s. Paula Eiselt’s new documentary is an homage to the landmark hotel, which was run by generations of Grossinger women, and highlights many of the comedians who launched careers there, including Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner, Jerry Lewis and Joan Rivers. 

People had amazing experiences creating communities at Grossinger’s and other hotels, observed Eiselt. “They were very physically present places. From the moment you woke up until you went to sleep, you were socializing with other people,” she said in an interview. “Now, especially post-October 7, people long for those places of safety, where they were able to be themselves.”

Comedian and actor Jackie Hoffman, a series regular on Only Murders in the Building, feels the same, noting in the documentary that if Grossinger’s “were reincarnated in this moment, I’d be there in a hot minute.”

Susan Etess, a retired private school administrator from New York and the granddaughter of famed hotel hostess and manager Jenny Grossinger, grew up at her family’s hotel. After school, she said in an interview, she would help the switchboard operator or alphabetize reservation cards in the office.

“I’m thrilled to have this movie, which captures the hotel, especially the women who ran it,” Etess said. Beginning with her immigrant Great-Grandmother Malka, matriarch of the family who founded the hotel with her husband, she noted, “They all felt fortunate to be in this country.”

Also this summer, the Catskills Borscht Belt Museum in Ellenville is opening a new exhibition, “Catskills Romance: Love and Desire in the Borscht Belt,” highlighting the relationships, both conventional and illicit, that developed in the resorts and bungalow colonies, with the cupid-like help of the resort owners, maître d’s, social directors (tummlers), dance instructors and other staff. It also explores the courtship rituals and social scenes that defined a Catskills summer: the “Flirtation Walks” and poolside schmoozing as well as the mambo nights, elaborate singles weekends, free honeymoon and golden anniversary dinners.

Andrew Jacobs, the museum’s board president and longtime observer of Catskills culture, points to the “growing appreciation for the unacknowledged role that the Catskills had in shaping American culture, from comedy to food to architecture and design.”

“It’s not just nostalgia,” he said. “This is very much an American story about people who were disenfranchised, not allowed in, who went and created their own leisure world.”

“What started as a response to bigotry,” he said, “blossomed into a triumph.”

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Sandee Brawarsky is an award-winning journalist, editor and author of several books, most recently of 212 Views of Central Park: Experiencing New York City’s Jewel From Every Angle.