Join us for a fun evening on Thursday, Oct. 15 in the Campus Center (Building 1P) Park Café at 7:00pm when author Stephen Silverman will discuss his history of the Catskills, bringing them fully to life in all of their intensity, beauty, vastness, and lunacy.

The Catskills were this nation’s original frontier, northwest of New York City and its first great vacationland–an almost godlike majesty of mountains and landscapes, skies, waterfalls, pastures, and cliffs. The Catskills were a refuge and home to poets and gangsters, tycoons and politicians, preachers and outlaws, musicians and spiritualists, outcasts and rebels, and the resorts that after World War II catered to upwardly mobile Jewish families, giving rise to hundreds of hotels inspired by Grossinger’s, the original “Disneyland with knishes”—the Concord, Brown’s Hotel, Kutsher’s Hotel, and others—in what became known as the Borscht Belt and Sour Cream Alps.

A dessert smorgasbord will be served.

Tickets are $25 per person, free for students with valid ID. Proceeds will benefit the programs of Hillel at the College of Staten Island.