The latest episode of Empire State Engagements features a conversation with Marisa Scheinfeld on her book The Borscht Belt: Revisiting the Remains of America’s Jewish Vacationland (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016).
She discussed her work as a historian and photographer to document and convey the history, ruins, nature, pathos, and possibility of the shuttered Catskill resorts that transformed Jewish American history and helped form twentieth-century U.S. popular culture. [Read more…] about Back To The Borscht Belt: Jewish Vacationland Ruins in the Catskills
The most recent episode of Empire State Engagements features a conversation with Dr. Lizabeth Cohen Professor in the Department of History at Harvard, who discussed her Bancroft Prize-winning book 
Because I teach urban history, immigration history, and in particular New York history, I often have students inquire about the merits of Martin Scorsese’s 2002 film “Gangs of New York.”
Readers will recall that one of the most important periods of reform in New York history was spurred by the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist Fire of March, 1911: in the wake of this horror, protective labor legislation was passed at a frenzied pace, informed by the State Factory Investigating Commission and shepherded through the legislature by Assemblyman Alfred E. Smith and Senator Robert F. Wagner.