Jewish resort culture in the Borscht Belt peaked in the mid-1950s when there were 538 hotels, 50,000 bungalows, and 1,000 boarding houses. Among the best known was Grossinger’s where Jewish singles mingled with the likes of Lucille Ball, Milton Berle and Elizabeth Taylor over the course of the resort’s more than seven-decade existence.

We Met at Grossinger’s, a documentary directed by Paula Eiselt (Under G-d, 93 Queen), explains how Grossinger’s became so successful despite the fact that its founder had only a sixth grade education. In 1900, at the age of 8, Jennie Grossinger immigrated with her family from Galicia, Austria to New York. She dropped out of school and began working as a buttonhole maker to help support her family, until her father became sick and they moved to the Catskills. Her father hoped to start a farm, but the family found the rocky land was better suited for a boarding house than crops. Jennie managed the inn while her mother oversaw the kitchen, and she eventually made enough money to purchase a larger building down the road.

The documentary features a range of interviewees, including Grossinger’s descendants, historians, and celebrities, such as Jackie Hoffman and Joel Grey, who frequented the resort. With its snappy editing and in-depth approach to the history of the culture, the film brings the past back to life and captures how the resort became ingrained in people’s personal lives.

Grossinger’s grandson Mitchell Etess estimates that thousands of couples met there. Hoffman says it’s where she had her first makeout session with a boy. Former employees say Grossinger’s elite guests motivated them to pursue better education and careers. Multiple interviewees say the resort was a home away from home.

Archival footage of people dancing, swimming, dining, and being entertained takes viewers back to the glitz and glamor of the Catskills in its heyday. Although Jewish resorts were founded in response to antisemitic exclusion at other places, the joy Jews were able to create for themselves diminishes the darkness of this bigotry.

The resorts gave Jews a place to escape antisemitism and be among people with a shared culture. For Holocaust survivors it provided the opportunity to connect with others who could understand their trauma. Jewish athletes like boxer Barney Ross (born David Rosofsky) relied on Grossinger’s as a place where they could train and get kosher food. Jews also got a crash course on assimilation, learning how to engage in American social activities like golfing and playing tennis without fear of judgment.

It wasn’t just Jews that fled to the Catskills. Bard College professor Myra Armstead’s grandparents moved there during the Great Migration and opened the Gratney M. Smith, a boarding house for Black workers and vacationers. Jackie Robinson was an invited guest at Grossinger’s and became friends with Jennie. The Jewish Vacation Guide, which pointed Jews to safe housing and dining in the area and around the country, inspired the Green Book, which provided the same functions for Black people.

But in the 1970s, when it became easier for Jews to vacation with non-Jews, the resorts became less of a necessity. Buildings in the city now had air conditioning, so people didn’t have to escape to the mountains for cooler weather. Teenagers and young adults began to prefer to spend their vacations with friends or doing activities that didn’t involve being attached at the hip to their parents or grandparents.

In 1987, a year after Grossinger’s closed, the lost culture it had once embodied was given renewed attention in Dirty Dancing. Although the film avoided explicit mentions of Judaism, the fictional Kellerman’s was based on Grossinger’s and the script was written by resort regular Eleanor Bergstein.

Now, younger generations are starting to take an interest in the Borscht Belt culture. The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel has exposed new audiences to this old form of Jewish vacation culture. Photographers Marisa Scheinfeld and Isaac Jeffreys have created photography collections of abandoned Catskill resorts. The Borscht Belt Museum teaches visitors about this bygone period.

But unlike fictional media and photos of the past, We Met at Grossinger’s offers firsthand accounts of life in the Catskills from those who lived it, adding a personal dimension to this new wave of Jewish nostalgia.

We Met at Grossinger’s will have its world premiere at DOC NYC on November 13, with subsequent screenings on November 16 and 19.

The post At Grossinger’s in the Catskills, Jews learned how to be American appeared first on The Forward.

Here’s a stark fact: More people may have been killed in Sudan in just the past week than in Gaza in the past two years.

“They’re killing everyone that moves,” said Nathaniel Raymond, executive director at Yale’s Humanitarian Research Lab, in a recent interview with Mehdi Hasan. Raymond’s lab has tracked the carnage via satellite imagery, witnessing the slaughter of innocent civilians in real time.

And the main source for the weapons destroying the Black, non-Arab population in Darfur is the United Arab Emirates, one of the United States’ closest allies in the Middle East.

So where are the American protesters?

A major reason American protesters have relentlessly focused their time and energy on Israel, they say, is that the U.S. is Israel’s most significant ally, as well as an arms supplier to the IDF. There are real actions the U.S. could take to sway the course of events in Israel, so protesters aim to influence the U.S. government to do so.

But the U.S. has ties to conflicts all over the world, especially in Sudan, where a major American ally is helping supply the weapons of slaughter. The idea that its ability to pressure Israel is unique, and therefore worthy of unique focus, is misguided.

“Only American pressure can stop the killing in Sudan,” wrote Alex De Waal, executive director of the World Peace Foundation, in Foreign Affairs. So why aren’t American activists, well, active?

A genocide to rival Rwanda

The UAE has $29 billion in active defense contracts with the U.S. It is also host to — and protected by — the 380th Air Expeditionary Wing and Jebel Ali Port, the U.S. Navy’s largest port of call in the Middle East.

And while UAE officials have denied that they are arming the Arab militia, known as the Rapid Support Forces, responsible for the genocide, diplomats, humanitarian groups and journalists have confirmed the link. Three of the same organizations that pro-Palestinian activists regularly cite in their brief against Israel — the United Nations, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International — have established the UAE’s complicity.

Every crime American protesters accuse Israel of — killing civilians among military targets, rape, starvation as a weapon, destroying hospitals and killing patients in their beds — is happening now, at a far greater scale, in Darfur.

“Rebels hurl racial insults at fleeing women and children,” the Wall Street Journal reported. “Black women with long hair are systematically separated and raped.”

Humanitarian groups say the ongoing slaughter is likely to rival that of Rwanda genocide, and of the genocide that took place in the same Darfur region 30 years ago. That atrocity, led by a predecessor to the RSF, claimed 200,000 lives.

Why would the UAE supply weapons to be used in such a context? Perhaps because it uses Sudan’s mines to supply gold and other resources, and wants to stay on the good side of a group primed to exercise control over ongoing access.

“The war would be over if not for the UAE,” Cameron Hudson, a former chief of staff to successive U.S. presidential special envoys for Sudan, told the Wall Street Journal. “The only thing that is keeping them in this war is the overwhelming amount of military support that they’re receiving from the UAE.”

In the U.S., silence

So where are the protesters shouting at their representatives in town halls to suspend the recent $2 trillion investment agreement between the U.S. and UAE? Pushing sanctions against the UAE? Or demanding New York University shutter its Abu Dhabi campus?

Where are the movie stars and director refusing to engage with the UAE, which according to Variety is the “prime Middle East hub” for Hollywood production? Javier Bardem, who recently said he will no longer work with the Israeli film industry, filmed part of his last movie, F1, in Abu Dhabi last year. What if he said no more?

Imagine the impact if, instead of unveiling her new fragrance, Orebella, at a splashed-out event last week in Abu Dhabi, supermodel Bella Hadid announced that just as she calls relentlessly for the world to boycott Israel, she will no longer visit the Emirates until it ends funding for the genocide in Darfur?

This is not an argument for whataboutism, and none of this is to deflect attention from the injustices and suffering happening in the West Bank and Gaza. Everyone has a right to choose their battles. I don’t ask the Save the Whales people, “But what about the rainforest?”

But if someone is actively bombing the rainforest, today, as you read this — and your country is in bed with the bomb suppliers — then claiming to care about the planet and doing nothing is inexcusable.

“This is not only a crisis of violence but also a crisis of indifference,” wrote Reena Ghelani, CEO of Plan International in Al Jazeera. “Each day the world looks away.”

And the go-to excuse, that Americans lack leverage and influence over the slaughter, is utter BS.

The post Why won’t pro-Palestinian protesters turn their attention to Darfur? appeared first on The Forward.

Fox personality Tucker Carlson speaks at the 2017 Business Insider Ignition: Future of Media conference in New York, U.S., November 30, 2017. Photo: REUTERS/Lucas Jackson

When Tucker Carlson sat across from comedian-turned-podcaster Dave Smith last week and declared that the “dividing line” between him and Ben Shapiro was that Shapiro “feels a thrill when killing the enemy,” he wasn’t making a point about morality. He was performing one.

With his trademark half-smirk of false humility, Carlson intoned, “We do not have a right to kill people… we do not have a right to kill the innocent.” Then, as he so often does, he cast himself as a noble voice of moral conscience surrounded by bloodthirsty warmongers. “That’s the dividing line between me and Ben Shapiro,” he said.

But that line doesn’t divide pacifism from bloodlust. It divides moral clarity from moral theater.

The Convenient Conversion

Carlson’s newfound pacifism would be more convincing if it weren’t so exquisitely convenient. He wasn’t always allergic to the use of force. In the early 2000s, he defended the Iraq War, mocked anti-war protesters, and called for “resolute American leadership.”

He praised US strikes in Syria as “necessary shows of strength.” Only after those wars became unpopular — and after populism replaced conservatism — did Carlson decide that any military action involving civilian casualties was inherently immoral.

Since then, he has transformed “anti-war” sentiment into performance art. He interviews strongmen like Vladimir Putin and Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei with deference bordering on reverence. He portrays their regimes as victims of Western arrogance, scolds the United States for aiding Ukraine’s defense, mocks NATO as an “empire,” and treats every aggressor — from Hamas to the Kremlin — as a misunderstood nationalist simply protecting his homeland.

This is not pacifism. It is appeasement for tyrants, rebranded as empathy.

There’s a clear pattern to Carlson’s moral inversions. When Israel defends itself against fascist terrorist regimes, he insists that “killing civilians” can never be justified. When Russia invades a democracy, he claims the US “provoked” it. When Iran bankrolls terror proxies across the region, he shrugs and asks whether it’s “really our problem.”

He calls this “asking hard questions.” In reality, it’s moral inversion disguised as introspection. His sympathies reliably tilt toward those who wield cruelty as policy and away from the democracies that agonize over conscience even as they fight for survival.

That pattern reached its nadir when Carlson hosted white nationalist Nick Fuentes — a Hitler- and Stalin-admiring Holocaust denier whom he treated not with revulsion but with indulgent curiosity. Fuentes spewed bile about “Zionist media control.” Carlson nodded, called him “talented,” and moved on. In that same interview, Carlson calmly declared that he “hates Christian Zionists more than anyone.” When public outrage followed, he feigned contrition, claiming he’d merely been “mad.” It was the same pattern as always: provoke, deny, and reframe the provocation as misunderstood virtue.

Ben Shapiro and the Real Moral Divide

Carlson’s supposed “dividing line” with Shapiro reveals the delusion he’s selling. Shapiro’s worldview — rooted in Jewish ethics, classical liberalism, and just-war theory — recognizes the tragic necessity of force in confronting evil. The question is not whether killing may ever occur, but whether moral societies can survive without defending themselves.

Carlson now confuses moral restraint with moral paralysis. He accuses others of bloodlust because he has lost the vocabulary to distinguish between aggression and defense. He sees all war as equally corrupt, while Shapiro understands that refusing to confront evil ensures its victory.

Carlson’s selective pacifism collapses under the weight of reality — especially in the war Hamas started and sustained by cynical design. Hamas doesn’t merely fight Israel; it fights the very concept of moral civilization. It builds command centers beneath hospitals and schools, fires rockets from residential towers, and blocks civilians from reaching Israeli-designated humanitarian corridors.

Its 700 kilometers of tunnels, which could have sheltered ordinary Gazans, were reserved for its terrorists — not its children.

When ordinary Gazans protest, Hamas executes them. In October 2025 alone, it murdered hundreds accused — without trial — of “collaboration.”

This is not a movement that protects innocents. It is a fascist regime that feeds on civilian death. Every corpse is a press release. Every tragedy, a weapon. Hamas’s strategy is not merely to harm Israel — but to corrupt the world’s conscience by making morality itself seem impossible.

Israel, by contrast, spends billions on pure defense: Iron Dome interceptors, bomb shelters, warning systems, and evacuation zones — designed to protect civilians, both Israeli and Palestinian. Its moral imperative is the same as every democracy’s: to safeguard life even amid war. That effort often fails — not from malice, but from the impossible calculus of fighting an enemy that hides behind its own people.

Carlson’s moral arithmetic ignores that calculus entirely. If, as he claims, “no innocent death” is ever acceptable, then every democracy facing fascist regimes like Hamas is doomed. For if one side obeys the laws of war while the other hides behind them, only barbarism will prevail.

The Anti-War Pose as Anti-Moralism

Carlson’s evolution — from conventional conservative commentator to sanctimonious defender of authoritarians — mirrors a deeper sickness that is growing the West: the belief that moral complexity is hypocrisy, that self-defense is indistinguishable from aggression, and that survival itself is suspect.

It’s the same mindset that brands Israel an “occupier” for refusing to surrender its ability to defend itself, calls NATO “imperial,” and derides Churchill as a “warmonger.” At its core, this is not compassion, but cowardice marketed as virtue.

Carlson’s moral theater now serves those who thrive on Western self-doubt. Russian state television airs his commentaries. Iranian media echoes his talking points. Hamas officials cite his words when denouncing Israel.

He plays the role once filled by the isolationists of the 1930s — the celebrity preachers, pilot, and industrialists who mocked Churchill as a warmonger and thought peace could be purchased with silence. Those voices, too, claimed to be true moral realists. History judged them otherwise.

The Real Dividing Line

Carlson says the dividing line between himself, and Ben Shapiro is the “thrill of killing.” The real line is between moral seriousness and moral vanity — between those who know that defending life and free societies sometimes requires force and those who posture as saints while others bear the cost of courage.

Under very limited circumstances, pacifism can be noble. But Carlson’s brand of pacifism isn’t noble — it’s narcissistic: the comforting illusion that moral purity can be preserved by staying on the sidelines.

Slavery didn’t end through persuasion. Nazism wasn’t defeated by restraint. Evil stops only when it’s resisted — sometimes by force, always by moral clarity.

Carlson wants his audience to mistake cowardice for compassion and indulgence for conscience. If that illusion continues to spread, he won’t just distort history — he’ll help repeat its darkest chapters.

Micha Danzig is an attorney, former IDF soldier, and former NYPD officer. He writes widely on Israel, antisemitism, and Jewish history and serves on the board of Herut North America.