Skiing Through Sour Cream

As the 2026 Winter Olympics approach, the memory of how recently Jews were permitted to take part in alpine sports such as skiing and skating has blurred to the point of vanishing. Even less known is the role the Borscht Belt region in upstate New York–once famous for its Jewish resorts—paved the way for Jewish athletes, both female and male, to enjoy, let alone excel in, any sports at all.

Not only did these Catskill hotels and bungalow colonies offer Jews a refuge from antisemitism and a chance to relax and breathe fresh air, they provided an opportunity to try recreational activities that, in a particularly American way, enable immigrants, members of the working class, and women to improve their status.

I grew up in the early 1960s, a time when Jews like my parents were learning to live far different lives from their parents, even as girls like me were learning to live far different lives from our mothers. As someone who was born both Jewish and female in an America in which women, Jews, Blacks, and other marginalized people were only beginning to be allowed to engage in the pastimes so many straight white Christian men had long enjoyed, I feel called upon to provide some anecdotal history as to how the rest of us learned to skate, ski, swim, throw and hit a variety of balls, and generally fall on our tucheses and get back up.

Most Jews who vacationed in the Catskills then were sweatshop workers, Holocaust survivors, plumbers, butchers, the struggling owners of their own small businesses, the first generation to graduate from high school and, if they were lucky, attend CCNY or Hunter College in New York City. Even the fanciest Jewish resorts hosted the newly prosperous.

In 1920, my grandfather and eleven siblings purchased a hardscrabble farm in Ferndale, New York, as a way to provide clean air and wholesome food for two of the sisters, who had contracted tuberculosis. Eventually, my grandfather bought out his siblings and turned the farm into a modest seasonal hotel. My father worked his way through NYU, becoming one of two dentists in a town where nearly everyone else found employment at the hundreds of resorts and their allied industries.

We lived a mile or two from Grossinger’s, the most famous Jewish resort the world has ever known. “The G” commanded the hill above town, our Acropolis.

The first time I was driven past the guard booth, I was in third grade, on my way to the figure-skating lessons my mother had signed me up for. I was a tomboy—the term parents used to describe a daughter who dressed and acted like a boy but was cute enough that they could hope she wouldn’t grow up to be a lesbian. Endowed with so much energy I could have powered our entire town, I preferred to run around outside, climbing trees, digging snow forts, playing whatever game the boys were playing. My mother scolded me for ripping or staining the dresses she forced me to wear, so she signed me up to take figure-skating lessons, explaining I needed to “learn to be more graceful.”

Inside the lodge adjoining the rink was a giant photo of the renowned Norwegian figure-skater and film star Sonja Henie.

Swathed in white furs, seductive yet somehow virginal, Henie seemed the epitome of what we Jewish girls should aspire to be. Yet I sensed that the grown-ups warming themselves in that lodge feared this gentile snow-queen. Only later did I learn that at the 1936 Olympics, Henie had sieg-heiled Hitler and even lunched with him at his villa.

A photo of the G’s female instructor, Brenda, also hung in that lodge, and I remember staring at it in embarrassment, not only because she wore a skimpy costume but because her arms were raised so the viewer could see her armpits, which I considered as erotic as her vagina. Was this the kind of woman my mother hoped I would grow up to be? My mother took pride in her blondish hair and not-too-Jewish features. She dressed in the latest fashions. But I had never seen her wear anything more revealing than a bathing suit, had never seen her run or sweat or ride a bicycle. I had once overheard her advise my sister not to beat the boy she liked in ping pong. Was I meant to engage in an athletic pastime only if I were able to appear as feminine and graceful as Brenda while I was doing it?

The reason Grossinger’s even had an Olympic-size ice rink, given so few of the guests knew how to skate, provides a revealing glimpse of how daunting the obstacles would have been for a Jew in a Nordic sport. In the early 1900s, a feisty, big-nosed kid named Irving Jaffee was hustling around the Bronx, delivering newspapers on his roller skates to supplement his father’s meager income from a pushcart. By the time young Irving discovered the city’s indoor ice-rinks, he had the thighs of a champion speedskater.

Trouble was, his borrowed skates were so big he needed to wear nine pairs of socks to keep them on his feet. Despite his incredible speed and determination, Jaffee faced daunting antisemitism. Who had ever heard of a New York Jew beating the fair-haired, fair-skinned descendants of Norwegians, Swedes, and Finns at the ultimate Nordic sport?

Trying out for the U.S. Olympic team, then competing in two successive Olympics, Jaffee faced overwhelming opposition not only from the sport’s officials, but from his own teammates. In 1932, the Olympic venue at Lake Placid, New York, was still posted with signs that threatened NO DOGS OR JEWS; worse, Jaffee’s teammates tried to sabotage his chances by stealing his mattress and returned it soaked, shining flashlights in his eyes to disturb his sleep, and taunting him with antisemitic slurs. Yet he managed to best the Europeans, becoming one of the first two Americans to win two gold medals in a single winter Olympics.

Despite his triumph, the only way Jaffee could use his talent to support his family was to pawn his medals. Desperate to make a living, he agreed to take part in a publicity scheme in which he would train at Grossinger’s and attempt to break the world record for the speed-skating marathon. The stunt was a wild success: on January 27, 1934, a crowd of 5,000 watched and cheered as Jaffee raced solo 75 times around the hotel’s lake in just over 26 minutes. He signed on as the winter sports director, with the hotel building him that Olympic-size rink where I later took lessons, and Grossinger’s became the site of Olympic speed-skating trials, spectacular ice shows, and the world’s only barrel-jumping championships.

When I started skating at the G, Jaffee still would show up, taping dollar bills to his jacket and challenging us kids to chase him around the rink and pull one off. I liked skating. But my lack of flexibility was astonishing; I might as well have been an eighty-year-old grandma with arthritis. Once, my instructor, Kurt, grabbed my ankle and tried to jerk it up to the ninety-degree angle required to do a camel spin. “Up, up, up!” he commanded. “Zis cannot possibly be all that a little girl iz able to lift zee leg!” And yet it was.

I hated the super-short skirts and frilly panties we girls were expected to wear, the fuzzy covers for our skates, the daisies we were required to weave through our hair for our first recital. Like Jaffee, what I loved was skating fast. When the girls’ lesson ended, the boys burst on the rink for their hockey practice and, as my mother wrinkled her nose in horror, I joined them just long enough to demonstrate I was able to lead the pack, no small feat, given that the boys’ skates were endowed with short, curved blades instead of the silly toe-picks I had on mine.

I didn’t want to be a boy; I just wanted to do whatever was most dangerous and exciting. On weekends, when our mothers dropped us off to skate, we girls loved sneaking off to the hotel coffeeshop, balancing on the green vinyl stools, sipping hot cocoa, and pretending to be sophisticated teenage guests. But nothing could match the thrill of hurtling down the toboggan run (I didn’t yet realize the real purpose of the towering ramp was to jam male and female guests back-to-front on the toboggan). And there, just beyond the toboggan run, the ski hill beckoned. Oh, how I longed to careen down that snowy slope! And so, when my feet outgrew my skates, I begged my parents to buy me not a larger size but a pair of skis.

Even in the 1960s, very few Jews knew how to ski. Skiing hadn’t exactly been a common pastime in the shtetls of Europe or the crowded alleys of the Lower East Side, and most alpine resorts wouldn’t have accepted anyone with a Jewish name. The comedian Buddy Hackett— who got his start at my grandparents’ hotel—used to joke: “All a Jew needs to do is walk in the store and ask, ‘How much are the skis?’ and the bone breaks.”

Only in the Catskills was it safe for a Jew to venture down a slope. “The hills there don’t even have snow,” Hackett quipped, “it’s sour cream.”

Although my parents declined to buy me skis—my father was supporting his mother and mother-in-law while saving for three kids’ tuitions—my mother had no problem dropping me off at the G with the twelve dollars it cost to buy a lift ticket and rent equipment. The G ran a ski school, but I simply laced up my boots, as flimsy as Converse All-Stars, stepped into the bindings, grabbed the T-bar, reached the top of the hill, then bombed straight down the slope.

This wasn’t the feat it seems—I’ve seen suburban backyards steeper than the hill at Grossinger’s—but I was a natural on skis as I hadn’t been on skates. By the end of my first day, I had taught myself to snowplow and soon moved on to stem and slalom. Like most townies, I skied in a sweatshirt and jeans; we felt nothing but contempt for the snow bunnies who stepped from the lodge in stretchy pants, fuzzy earmuffs, and tight white jackets trimmed with fur. As we waited in the lift line, we would reach forward with our poles and release their bindings; then, as they grabbed the T-bar, it would yank them up and off their skis and leave them in a heap.

My mother didn’t object to an activity that might allow me to literally run into a nice Jewish medical student from New York. (I did end up smooching various boys I got paired with on the lift.) But neither parent was pleased when I announced I would be joining our high school ski team, which might entail breaking a limb, or worse. When they again refused to buy me skis, my only option was to accept an offer from the coach to buy her used grand slaloms. The skis were two feet too long for a girl my height, but, like Jaffee with his nine pairs of socks, I had to make do.

Only the largest Catskills resorts were open in the winter, but the other three seasons provided a wealth of opportunities for Jews of all genders to learn to play tennis and golf and swim. Few country clubs would have admitted Jews as members, but those same Jews could tee up at any of 21 courses within a few miles of my house. My dad was an avid golfer, and I used to beg him to take me out to play a few holes after he got home from work, which is how I learned to hit a drive and chip and putt. Just as most golf clubs were closed to Jews, so were most private tennis clubs. But my dad had learned to play on the cracked macadam court at his parents’ hotel and, despite his fairly conservative views about what was proper for a girl, he welcomed the opportunity to get out on the courts even with his daughter.

In those days, the only girls’ athletic teams at my high school were skiing, tennis, and track, and only the first two were options for any girl who hoped to be invited to her prom. Sweating, grimacing, getting red in the face, expressing the slightest desire to win … any of that would have tanked your popularity. As much as I loved tennis, I was afraid to smash a volley or hit an overhead shot too hard, because my opponents might not like me.

And I never felt comfortable in the tiny white dresses and frilly panties a female player was required to wear. But at least I could join the team–and now, after a lifetime of learning to be aggressive, I take great pleasure in joining other women on the court and competing to the utmost of my ability.

In America, sports not only are a way to remain healthy and sane, but a means to gain access to higher education, exclusive realms such as country clubs where business deals and marriages might be arranged, and the friendship and respect of classmates, colleagues, neighbors.

Without the Catskills, Jews would have struggled even harder than they did to achieve all of the above. And now, in an era of increased anti-immigrant sentiment and anti-feminist backlash, we need to make sure everyone is able to enjoy the opportunity to engage in athletic pursuits that Jews and women have managed to attain only in the past half-century.

Eileen Pollack’s most recent book is the collection of darkly comic essays Maybe It’s Me. She lives and writes in Boston.