Photo Essay‘Dirty Dancing’ and the Yiddish Camelot it captured
An illustrated deep dive into the 1987 film that brought the Jewish Catskills to the masses
Illustration by DenBerg
Photo Essay‘Dirty Dancing’ and the Yiddish Camelot it captured
An illustrated deep dive into the 1987 film that brought the Jewish Catskills to the masses
By DenBerg June 23, 2023
It’s been 36 years since Dirty Dancing first blasted into America’s cultural DNA, and the film, and its music, remain iconic.
Written by Eleanor Bergstein and directed by Emile Ardolino, the 1960s romance between wealthy Catskills resort guest Frances “Baby” Houseman (Jennifer Grey) and the smoldering dance instructor Johnny Castle (Patrick Swayze) captivated moviegoers from the beginning. Yet the film also struck home for many American Jews in particular, who recognized the characters, the Borscht Belt comedy and the Catskills resort experience as quintessentially Jewish. “It’s a Jewish film,” Bergstein told a reporter in 2011, “if you know what you’re looking at.”
In this series by illustrator DenBerg, he plumbs the depths of the film’s Jewishness frame by frame, placing the fated love affair between Baby and Johnny in context of the political, social and cultural maelstrom of the ’60s.
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