amesters, the frivolous and the giddy,” the communal press urged Jewish pleasure-seekers to cultivate their intellect as well as their sensations. Women often bore the brunt of such public exhortations. Time and again, the prospect of idle Jewish women sporting red lacquered nails and flimsy, though expensive, summer dresses greatly troubled the community’s cultural custodians. In 1922, for example, the Froyen Zhurnal, a popular Yiddish women’s magazine of the period, encouraged its female readers to be “intelligent vacationers.” “Think twice before going into any undue expenditures,” the paper cautioned, recommending that working women plan carefully for their much awaited vacations, especially in planning their wardrobes. “Girls, remember, please ... that to be rigged out in fine style,” one doesn’t need much, just one or two skirts, two dress blouses, two “dressy gowns,” a wide-brimmed hat, and a sweater. “Rest assured, you girls, who have to rely upon a limited wardrobe during your vacation, that the woman who has gone on vacation with her trunks full of elaborate clothes will not find contentment and pleasure if she will have to rely wholly upon her clothes for that.”
In addition to sartorial advice, the community’s cultural arbiters dispensed a different kind of wisdom, suggesting that women spend their summers “wisely.” Attend lectures, read “good books,” and engage in good deeds, they were told. After all, recommended the Hadassah News Letter in 1927, “psychologically, a summer resort is a superb setting for disseminating Hadassah knowledge. The necessarily constant companionship of the resorts and the leisureliness of vacationing create just the right atmosphere for conversation and exchange of ideas.”
Despite such entreaties, Jewish daughters seemed to delight in the pursuit of pleasure, much to the disappointment and consternation of communal leaders such as Dora R. Spiegel, president of the Women’s League for Conservative Judaism. Writing in 1934, Spiegel fulminated against those women who “talked small talk all day long between food, drink, mah jong and golf and judged all others by the clothes they wore.” Though these women “eschew all talk of politics and books lest they be thought bores, they like to think of themselves as the cream of Jewish society.” “Perhaps they were,” Spiegel acidly concluded, “but the cream has turned rancid.”
American Jewry’s leading literary lights felt much the same way. Taking aim at the apparent ease with which so many Jewish daughters took to the good life, Jewish writers produced some of the harshest critiques of American leisure culture ever published. Take, for example, editor and writer Abraham Cahan’s wrenching tale of deracination, The Rise of David Levinsky, in which forty pages are given over to depicting the social machinations and sartorial aspirations of largely female vacationers at a fictitious Catskill resort. Saturday dinner “was not merely a meal. It was, in addition, or chiefly, a great social function and a gown contest.” Bediamonded and bedecked, young women were “powdered and painted. Prosperity was rapidly breaking the chains of American Puritanism, rapidly ‘Frenchifying’ the country and the East Side was quick to fall in line.” Belletrist Maurice Samuel was equally scathing. In his 1925 poem, “Al Harei Catskill,” published in the high-toned Menorah Journal, he mocked the mindlessness of Catskill culture.
And here in Catskill what do Jews believe? In Kosher, certainly; in Shabbas, less ... in charity and in America. But most of all in Pinochle and Poker, in dancing and in Jazz, in risqué stories and everything that’s smart and up-to-date.
In the Catskills and other summer retreats, the prospect of romance loomed large, inflaming passions and roiling the search for quiet. “Our seashore pastimes are becoming artificialized and complicated and straining,” observed Brooklyn rabbi Alexander Lyons in 1915, referring to such popular resort towns as Arverne and Long Branch. “They are becoming too extensively fashionable parade places and ... matrimonial marts.” Mu