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‘Dirty Dancing’ be damned. A new musical shows another side of the Borscht Belt
When the Woodstock Music and Art Fair defined a generation, Pamela Gray was on the outside looking in — literally.
She was 13 and summering at Dr. Locker’s Bungalow Colony in Mountaindale, New York. She remembers sitting by the pool with her little brother while the moms and bubbies played mahjong and glimpsing some long hair or fringe through the chainlink: hippies headed to Yasgur’s Farm.
“Looking back now, it’s like I literally was on the wrong side of history,” Gray said.
That moment was stamped in her memory for years, along with her attachment to the bungalow colony, where she got her first taste of nature away from the Flatlands in Brooklyn. Since around the time Dirty Dancing came out in 1987, she had struggled to explain to people the working-class version of the Borscht Belt she grew up with, a far cry from the resorts favored by dentists and lawyers.
In the early 1990s, Gray was in film school at UCLA and interning in the writers room on Star Trek: The Next Generation when she endeavored to capture the disappeared world of her youth in a screenplay. She recalled thinking, “I want to be the first person to set a movie in a bungalow colony.’”
I met Gray, a high school friend of my father’s, at a cafe steps away from where her Off-Broadway musical A Walk on the Moon, based on her 1999 film, is in rehearsals. She wore a cat-themed Catskills t-shirt and a Nova Festival dog tag.
She told me she’d seen a documentary about the colonies — narrated by an Attenbourighian Brit, with the same nature doc detachment — and glimpsed one in South Fallsberg in Enemies: A Love Story, but knew she wanted a more substantial tribute.
The script, with a working title of The Blouse Man, became A Walk on the Moon, directed by Tony Goldwyn and starring Diane Lane as frustrated young housewife Pearl Kantrowitz, Liev Schreiber as her TV repairman husband, Viggo Mortenson as Pearl’s goyische hippie lover and a 15-year-old Anna Paquin as Pearl’s teenage daughter. It features a pivotal Woodstock sequence, and a glimpse of naked hippies trespassing at the bungalow’s lake.
Gray said there was resistance to the material when the script was being shopped around. She was told films centering women lost money. Some asked if it had to be Jews in the Catskills in the 1960s. For the musical, she’s amped up some of the Jewishness both in casting and content.
Directed by Sheryl Kaller and starring Talia Suskaauer and Max Chernin, the show has been in the works for over a decade, and had a previous run with a different score at the George Street Playhouse in New Brunswick. It’s set to open in a climate Gray thinks is in need of Jewish stories. Not a Holocaust story, not a story of antisemitism (though some of that has been added) but one about a family, and, importantly, one without much money.
Gray was first approached to sell the rights to her film for a musical adaptation in the 2010s. A librettist and songwriter prepared a presentation to convince her, but she decided she wanted to take the project on herself. She had, in a sense, written musicals before.
Technically, Gray, whose other films include Music of the Heart starring Meryl Streep in a singular non-horror outing by director Wes Craven and the legal drama Conviction (also with Goldwyn and starring Hilary Swank), began her life in the theater in middle school.
She wrote The Girl from A.C.N.E. — a parody of The Girl from U.N.C.L.E. — for her hygiene class in sixth grade and later, while editor of the yearbook at James Madison High School, penned A Log Day’s Journey into Night an evident sendup of Eugene O’Neill.
Her first brush with an audience hearing her words came when she worked on Sing!, a student-run musical competition for outer borough high schools, which was a stealth incubator of talents like Paul Simon, Neil Sedaka and, at James Madison, where Gray and my dad are alumni, Carole King and Gerry Goffin.
Gray and my dad, Mark a retired optometrist who also writes screenplays, wrote parody lyrics, and probably fought a fair bit as script co-chairs. Gray remembers one year’s production, themed around clothing throughout history, had her kitted out in a French Revolutionary outfit and smacking my dad in the face while he was dressed like Napoleon.
Sing!, had a Borscht Belt Bungalow quality to it. When director Michael Greif was discussing the musical with Gray several years ago, they bonded over Sing!, which he directed at Abraham Lincoln High School on Ocean Parkway.
Music was central to Gray’s film, with needledrops from the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane and Janis Joplin and Big Brother and the Holding Company’s cover of Gershwin’s “Summertime.” The ending has Pearl and her husband, Marty (Schreiber), transition from Dean Martin’s version of “When You’re Smiling” to trying their best to groove to Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze.” (Gray said it was supposed to be “Light My Fire,” but Ray Manzarek wanted too much money.)
The musical’s new score by AnnMarie Milazzo, a vocal designer and arranger for shows like Spring Awakening and Next to Normal, captures the trapped-in-amber quality of the bungalows, with inspiration from the 1950s in the scenes with adults and, in a sequence with Pearl’s teenage daughter Alison and her summertime beau, a protest song.
“We’re living in a time right now where musicians and music artists are speaking out and talking about politics and talking about women’s rights and talking about antisemitism,” said Kaller, the director, whose parents took her to Catskills hotels as part of their temple bowling league. The show, she says, is “reminding audiences that in 1969, we were doing the same thing.”
A love letter to her parents’ generation and her own coming of age, Gray says the project may be even more personal in this iteration. Scenic and video designer Tal Yarden has incorporated Gray’s home movies into his projections. Also new to the musical is a moment when Alison learns the history of the Catskills, where Jews weren’t always welcome.
Gray said the addition came with “Trump 2,” a reference to his second term, that could also serve as an allusion to the film’s 1999 premiere, where the future president was in attendance.
“I still remembered the exact moment,” Gray said. She was on the aisle, and across from her was my father, their friend Karen and, next to Karen, Donald Trump and a blonde woman who was his date.
“The first thing he did was he ripped all the reserved signs off,” Gray recalled. “When your dad went to go to the bathroom, Trump put his leg up, and he had to climb over him. Is that your dad’s story?”
Not exactly. My dad now maintains that he was going to the lobby to tell Gray’s parents their seats were taken. It’s only when I said this that Gray remembers who the seats were reserved for. She then called Trump a certain Yiddish epithet, meaning pig.
(The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment regarding Trump’s presence or actions at the premiere, his enjoyment of the film or any plans to see the musical.)
Though a presidential encore is unlikely, members from Gray’s extended shtetl of Brooklyn are coming, along with a group of children who met at a bungalow colony for Holocaust survivors. (In other Jewish geography, the show’s casting director, Merri Sugarman, has known Kaller since they were around 2 — her parents were also in the bowling league.)
When Gray first wrote a treatment for the musical version of her film, she couldn’t help thinking of the first musical she ever saw: Fiddler on the Roof. It too had a forgotten Jewish milieu, with a self-contained community, an aura of nostalgia and an outside world pressing for change.
“It had to have influenced me, and I’m proud of that influence,” Gray said.
At this point I told her when my father and I saw the Yiddish Fiddler on the Roof, Charles Kushner, Trump’s mechutan, sat in front of us. What are the odds?
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Meet Matt Turner, the only Jewish player on Team USA in the World Cup
(JTA) — When the U.S. squad suits up Friday night to face off against Paraguay in its opening contest in the 2026 World Cup, one Jewish player will be in the mix.
Goalkeeper Matt Turner is not only the lone Jew on the U.S. team but he could well be the only Jewish player in the entire tournament, which is being jointly hosted by the United States, Mexico and Canada starting on Thursday. It’s the first edition of the tournament to be hosted by three countries, and the first to feature 48 teams.
Israel did not qualify for the World Cup and hasn’t since 1970 — due, in part, to geopolitics that pushed its soccer federation to compete in the talented European body, not in Asia.
Jewish players DeAndre Yedlin and Daniel Edelman, who both play in the MLS and have previously played for the national team, are not on the roster this summer. Yedlin played with Turner in the ‘22 tournament in Qatar, where Turner, 31, was a star.
Turner, a New Jersey native, discovered his Jewish heritage by finding his paternal great-grandmother’s emigration papers that had allowed her to flee Lithuania during the Holocaust.
“Once I found the documents, I was certainly very, very excited,” Turner told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in 2023. “America, in general, it’s a melting pot, and everybody has those roots elsewhere. So to understand your story, your history, a little bit is really nice.”
The revelation allowed him to obtain a Lithuanian passport, which made it easier for the goalie to pursue soccer opportunities in Europe. It also changed his relationship to his Jewish identity.
“The more my father and I dug, the more we learned, the more connected I felt to my Jewish side, the Jewish culture of my family,” Turner said at the time. “It really changed a lot of me.”
Turner, who now plays for the New England Revolution in MLS, started all four matches in 2022 for an American club that advanced to the Round of 16. He was the first American goalie with back-to-back shutouts in a World Cup since 1930.
Turner has 53 career appearances with the national team, with a 29-16-8 overall record, including 27 matches in which the opposing team did not score at all. He has also played in the Premier League and was the 2021 MLS Goalkeeper of the Year.
This time around, he is seen as less likely to start, following the ascent of a teammate to the top goalie slot. Still, he says he is moved to be part of the national team once more.
“I’ll probably cry when the national anthem goes,” he told FOX Sports. “It’s just such a huge honor — overwhelming honor — to be granted that responsibility to be on this team to do our best in those roles and ultimately, change soccer here forever.”
Although there are few Jews on the field during the 39-day tournament that ends July 19, one familiar Jewish face — or more accurately, voice — will return this year. Legendary Argentine broadcaster Andres Cantor, whose famous “Goooooooal” calls have helped popularize the sport in the United States, will be calling his 12th consecutive World Cup.
Cantor was born in Buenos Aires to a Romania-born mother and a father whose family fled the Nazis in Poland. He moved to the United States as a teenager and has publicly embraced his Jewish identity.
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Their nickname is the Red Crosses, but these World Cup challengers practice at a Jewish day school
For years, San Diego Jewish Academy had been preparing for the World Cup. The school, serving students from pre-K through 12th grade, has one of the best soccer fields in California, and tournament organizer FIFA had approved the site to serve as a national team’s base camp — if any visiting countries were interested.
When the school looked at the World Cup’s qualifying nations, they wondered if their plans might be for naught.
“You have Qatar, Egypt, Jordan, Iran — teams that wouldn’t necessarily choose the Jewish Academy,” said Adam Benmoise, SDJA’s director of auxiliary programs. “We were nervous.”
To their relief, the World Cup schedule delivered a stroke of luck. The four teams playing group-stage games on the West Coast did include Qatar. But one the others was a country famous for its neutrality. Switzerland began practicing at the Jewish day school June 2.
Both sides have found the arrangement a winning one. For Switzerland, San Diego Jewish Academy is more than just a practice field. It’s also a gym, a media center and an office space. (Or a synagogue, if they needed one.) And for SDJA, a pluralist school with about 500 students, the rental arrangement doesn’t just pay the bills: it also connects the local Jewish community to the world’s biggest sporting event.
The partnership is the culmination of four years of planning for Benmoise, a lifelong soccer fan whose job is to drum up outside revenue for the school. Recognizing the unusual quality of the SDJA field — real grass, not turf — he pitched the school’s CFO and athletic director on the idea of renting it out to pro teams with an eye on the 2026 World Cup.
His first move was to bring San Diego tourism officials for a site visit. They were shocked — and word got around about the 56-acre hillside campus.
“It’s a true gem,” Benmoise said. “It’s built properly, it’s manicured properly, it’s mowed properly, we have the proper irrigation. It has all of the footprints of a professional-grade soccer field, but was built for a school.”
The field was used for practices during the Gold Cup, a biennial international soccer tournament, then by Major League Soccer and touring European clubs, and finally by the U.S. men’s and women’s national teams — whose rave reviews of the campus put San Diego Jewish Academy on FIFA’s radar.
To be added to FIFA’s official site catalogue for the World Cup, though, the vetting was more rigorous. The international soccer governing body has strict pitch standards, and it employs a phalanx of inspectors and groundskeeping experts to ensure fields are up to par and consistent with one another. Benmoise also had to prove that SDJA’s facilities could accommodate the wide-ranging needs of a national team program.
In response, the school expanded the playing area by covering an unused softball diamond with 16,000 square feet of sod — a project funded by school donors. (SDJA hasn’t fielded a softball team for over a decade, Benmoise said.) The school also rented and installed a 4,500 square foot tent with tile flooring to set up a gym alongside the pitch — a temporary construction that will be paid for by the Swiss. Benmoise is hopeful the school will get to keep the workout equipment.
Sergio Affuso, a press officer for the team, said in an email that Switzerland was “very happy” with the base camp. “It is great to see how enthusiastic everyone is about hosting us here, included the kids of the school, and the facilities are very well prepared,” Affuso said.
Per FIFA rules, each of the 48 countries playing in the World Cup has to host a public community day at their base camp to locals during one of its first five days of practice. But because school was still in session those days, FIFA allowed SDJA to invite only the internal school community to the event.
That day — June 3 — the SDJA student body, faculty and a few dozen parents filled the bleachers to watch the “Red Crosses” practice. Then the team set up some mini games to play with the kids — shooting on the goalies, passing and dribbling drills, and the crowd-pleaser known as “three Swiss players against 45 fourth graders.”
A pair of journalism-interested SDJA students are getting another special perk: the Swiss federation hired them as media interns for the duration of their stay in San Diego.
Benmoise didn’t want to share how much FIFA is paying to use the field, but said the compensation is “very generous.”
“Let’s just say we’re not charging FIFA the same that I would charge, like, a youth team,” he said.
SDJA isn’t the only Jewish school whose facilities rate professional use. A pair of Orthodox high schools in Los Angeles rent their basketball gyms to NBA players for off-season workouts. The all-star roster that uses those courts appreciate not only their quality, but also the schools’ privacy and security.
Benmoise said the Swiss team — which kicks off against Qatar on Saturday in San Francisco — was thus far too focused on game prep to explore the rest of the campus. But a social media post from the team’s Instagram account about their practice field did cause a stir back home.
The post was an overhead map of the practice facility, showing the dressing area, the play area, the goalkeeper area and — on the next slide of the carousel — the hills beyond the field, labeled “snake area.”
“Watch out for the snakes 🐍 👀,” the caption read.
An alarmed Swiss media published a number of stories about the threat of serpentine pitch invasions, forcing Affuso clarify that the post was an attempt at humor.
“People in Switzerland understood the joke,” he told The Athletic. “But maybe, abroad, they didn’t.” (Benmoise said snakes had “never been an issue” on the campus.)
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Mamdani was set to meet Colombian president known for inflammatory Israel rhetoric
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani had planned to meet this week with Colombian President Gustavo Petro — who has compared Israel’s leaders to Nazis and recently defended his use of the phrase “Heil Hitler” on social media — during the South American leader’s visit to New York, a source familiar with the mayor’s schedule plans confirmed.
The meeting — set to be Mamdani’s first with a foreign leader — was reportedly canceled after the Trump administration intervened, directing Colombian officials to call it off, arguing that it would violate the terms of Petro’s entry into the United States for a United Nations Security Council session on Wednesday.
The State Department revoked Petro’s visa last fall after he appeared at a pro-Palestinian rally in Manhattan, calling on U.S. soldiers to disobey presidential orders over its support for Israel’s war in Gaza and urging an armed response to counter Israel’s action against the Palestinians. Petro was granted a limited waiver this week to attend the U.N. meeting on the Middle East.
A former member of Colombia’s M-19 guerrilla movement and elected in 2022 as the country’s first socialist president in decades, Petro has repeatedly drawn condemnation from Jewish and Israeli leaders since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks for comparing Israel’s military actions to those of Nazi Germany. In 2024, he severed diplomatic ties with Israel, accusing the Jewish state of committing genocide in Gaza, an allegation Israel has strongly rejected.
This week, Petro came under fire after posting the phrase “Heil Hitler” on X in response to an op-ed supporting the right-wing presidential candidate, Abelardo de la Espriella, ahead of Colombia’s June 21 presidential runoff. Petro defended the post, saying he was criticizing what he described as the author’s “fascist” rhetoric rather than endorsing the Nazi slogan itself. In his UN remarks, Petro again compared Israel to the Nazis.
A City Hall spokesperson declined to comment on the matter.
The mayor’s canceled sit-down with Petro is the latest flashpoint in his fraught alliances with inflammatory critics of Israel.
Mamdani has faced scrutiny from Jewish leaders and Zionist organizations over his sharp criticism of Israel and embrace of Palestinian activism that is shaping his tenure as leader of the city with the largest population of Jews outside Israel. During his mayoral campaign, Mamdani refused to recognize Israel as a Jewish state and said he wouldn’t travel to the country and called for divestments in Israel’s economy. Recently, the mayor skipped the annual Israel Day parade.
In congressional races in New York City, Mamdani has actively been campaigning for candidates who have made inflammatory statements on Israel, including challenging U.S. military aid to the country and accusing the Jewish state of genocide. In particular, Mamdani has thrown his support behind former Columbia University Gaza War encampment activist Daraliza Avila Chevalier, who is challenging Rep. Adriano Espaillat with the incumbent’s support for Israel front and center. Avila Chevalier, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America’s NYC chapter, attended the Oct. 8, 2023, pro-Palestinian rally in Times Square, which was broadly condemned for celebrating the Hamas attacks on Israel. She has continued to defend her participation, saying that she showed up in anticipation of Israel’s “outsized reaction.”
Mamdani reignited tensions with many Jewish communities by posting a Nakba Day video produced by his City Hall media team commemorating the displacement of Palestinians during Israel’s founding in 1948. That was followed by what was perceived as a delayed and ultimately supportive response to pro-Palestinian protesters who descended on a heavily Jewish Brooklyn neighborhood where a synagogue was hosting a real estate sale that included West Bank properties.
The head of Mamdani’s office of international affairs, tasked with interacting with the United Nations and handling diplomatic relations, is Ana Maria Archila, the past co-chair of the Working Families Party who led campaigns critical of Israel. On his first visit to the U.N. headquarters in March, Mamdani met with Secretary-General António Guterres, whom Israeli officials have criticized for his statements about the war in Gaza, accusing him of failing to sufficiently condemn Hamas. Israel recently cut ties with Guterres and barred him from entering the country following the blacklisting of Israeli authorities in a UN report regarding sexual violence in conflict zones.
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