Registration required; link to come in March

Join us for a visual presentation and Q&A with photographer Marisa Scheinfeld, author of the book The Borscht Belt: Revisiting the Remains of America's Jewish Vacationland. This illustrated lecture features Scheinfeld’s photographs of abandoned sites where resorts, hotels and bungalow colonies once boomed in the Catskill Mountains. The images were made inside and outside locations that once buzzed with life as year-round havens for generations of people. In her talk, Scheinfeld discusses the rise, fall, and impact of the Borscht Belt along with the deeper, more layered meaning she finds in the series, as well as her current work with the Borscht Belt Historical Marker Project.

A collaboration between the Loeb and the Poughkeepsie Public Library District, this talk is presented in conjunction with Great Green Hope for the Urban Blues, the Loeb's current special exhibition. The show explores two centuries of art and myths of the Hudson Valley, and includes one of Scheinfeld’s Borscht Belt photographs.

Books will be available for purchase and signing at the event.

More about Marisa Scheinfeld

Marisa Scheinfeld (b. 1980) is a Jewish-American photographer and author who was born in Brooklyn and raised in the Catskills. She received her B.A. from SUNY Albany and her MFA from San Diego State University. Her work is motivated by an interest in regional landscape and its myriad histories, both apparent and hidden, and a drive to use the medium of photography as an act of preservation. Marisa’s work is among the collections of the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library, the Center for Jewish History, the National Yiddish Book Center, the Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life at UC Berkeley, and the Museum of Photographic Arts. Her work has appeared in numerous publications, including National Geographic, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, Paper Magazine, Village Voice, and American Photography. In the fall of 2016, Cornell University Press released her first book The Borscht Belt: Revisiting the Remains of America’s Jewish Vacationland. In the fall of 2022, she founded the Borscht Belt Historical Marker Project, a multi-faceted initiative that celebrates and cements the famed era through a large-scale historic marker trail in the Catskills. Marisa is currently an Adjunct Professor of Photography at SUNY Purchase and working on her second book which explores hidden, alternative and fringe histories of the Catskills and Hudson Valley.