Ed Schwartz grew up in the "borscht belt," an area of primarily Jewish-run hotels in the Catskill Mountains of New York. He never experienced Europe and Russia's anti-Semitic programs directly and was spared the horrors of the Holocaust.
Despite this, these terrible crimes influenced Schwartz's life, along with those of many American Jews, even as they struggled to reconcile the old world Yiddishkeit, or Yiddish world, with their new identities as Americans.
Anxious to be seen as "real" Americans, first generation Jews consciously distanced themselves from the Yiddishkeit. The second...
Ed Schwartz grew up in the "borscht belt," an area of primarily Jewish-run hotels in the Catskill Mountains of New York. He never experienced Europ...
