# Before Vacation Resorts Became Experiences, Grossinger’s Was an Entire World 2026-11-11 · New Jersey and New York · Reported Feature A sold-out Teaneck film festival presentation of We Met at Grossinger’s revisited the Catskills landmark that inspired Dirty Dancing, and the community that made it matter. A sold-out Teaneck film festival presentation of We Met at Grossinger’s revisited the Catskills landmark that inspired Dirty Dancing, and the community that made it matter. --- For generations of vacationing families, Grossinger’s was more than a place to book a room. It was somewhere to spend an entire summer afternoon without having to leave the grounds, where the same families returned year after year, where entertainers and athletes could be part of the scenery, and where children grew up learning the geography of a resort almost as they would a hometown. It was a hotel, certainly. It was also a social world. That world was the subject of We Met at Grossinger’s, filmmaker Paula Eiselt’s 104-minute documentary, featured in a sold-out November 8 presentation at the Teaneck International Film Festival. The festival billed the noon showing at Temple Emeth as the film’s Teaneck premiere and scheduled a post-screening conversation with Eiselt and Susan Etess, granddaughter of Jennie and Harry Grossinger, moderated by Sandee Brawarsky. The screening brought a vanished New York vacation institution into a New Jersey community with its own ties to the story: Eiselt is from Teaneck. The quick description is irresistible: this was the resort that inspired Dirty Dancing. That connection is real, but it is only the doorway into the much larger story. The 1987 film remembered a certain kind of Catskills summer; Grossinger’s helped create the conditions in which those summers could exist. The resort grew from a modest family boarding house near Liberty, New York, into one of the best-known destinations in the Jewish Catskills, a region that became known as the Borscht Belt. Its early growth was driven by Malka Grossinger and her daughter Jennie, with Jennie’s daughter Elaine later carrying the family’s hospitality legacy forward. Eiselt makes those generations of women central to the documentary, giving the hotel an origin story that is about labor, family ambition and management as much as glamour. The larger context is easy to lose beneath the photographs of pools, dance floors and enormous dining rooms. In the early and middle decades of the 20th century, Jewish travelers faced exclusion from many prominent resorts and clubs. The Catskills offered more than an alternative vacation spot. Families and entrepreneurs built a network of hotels, bungalow colonies, camps and entertainment venues where Jewish culture could be visible and ordinary rather than something to be explained or hidden. That gave Grossinger’s a different kind of value. A room came with recreation, food and entertainment, but also with the expectation that guests belonged there. Repeat visits turned strangers into acquaintances, acquaintances into friendships, and holidays into family rituals. The appeal was not simply that every need could be met on one property; it was that an entire community knew how to inhabit the place together. Its influence reached well beyond those families. Comics, musicians, boxers and baseball players moved through a resort culture that helped shape American entertainment. Jackie Robinson and his family were among Grossinger’s notable guests, and the resort’s relationship with Robinson is part of the film’s wider history of inclusion and exclusion. In a November 5 interview with New Jersey Jewish News, Eiselt discussed discovering a story that extended beyond nostalgic accounts of food and comedy, while Etess described how the hotel’s history was inseparable from the discrimination that had made such a refuge necessary. Then there is Dirty Dancing. Eleanor Bergstein, who wrote and co-produced the movie, spent childhood summers at Grossinger’s. In a September 2026 interview with the Times Union, she was emphatic about the inspiration: “It was Grossinger’s.” The fictional Kellerman’s Mountain House was not a documentary portrait of one hotel, and the movie was filmed in Virginia and North Carolina, not at Grossinger’s. But Bergstein drew on the dancing, social atmosphere and class divisions she remembered from the Catskills. A film that became a lasting piece of pop culture helped preserve the feeling of a real place that would soon disappear. Eiselt’s documentary works in the other direction. Rather than borrowing the atmosphere to tell a fictional story, it uses archival film, photographs, audio recordings, animation and family testimony to put the people and the institution back into view. The production incorporates memories of the resort across generations, including Elaine Grossinger Etess, who died in January 2026 at 98. The result is a history of a business and a family, but also of the lives that crossed through its lobby. Grossinger’s did not survive the changes that remade American travel. As restrictions on where Jewish vacationers could stay loosened, vacation choices broadened. Air travel, shifting tastes and an aging resort model weakened the Borscht Belt’s hold on summer. Grossinger’s closed in the mid-1980s, and much of the abandoned property was eventually demolished in 2018. The buildings disappeared, but the movies, comedy traditions, photographs and family stories they helped produce did not. That is the tension running beneath the nostalgia. The disappearance of a place created in response to exclusion cannot be understood as only a tragedy; greater freedom to travel was itself progress. Yet something distinctive was lost when the institutions that had sustained a shared social life became unnecessary, unprofitable or impossible to maintain. A modern resort can recreate the décor and sell a weekend of retro activities. It cannot simply manufacture decades of relationships between guests, employees, performers and families. The Teaneck screening offered an apt setting for that story. A local filmmaker returned with a film about a family institution whose roots were in finding welcome where the wider world did not always offer it. The festival’s advance sellout suggested that the subject still had an audience, even among people whose own experiences of the Catskills might be inherited through relatives, photographs or a movie soundtrack rather than personal memory. Grossinger’s remains famous partly because it helped inspire Dirty Dancing. We Met at Grossinger’s makes a different argument for remembering it: beyond the romance and the dancing was a community that built a world of its own, made that world thrive, and left an imprint long after the doors closed. The resort is gone. The evidence that people belonged to something there is not. Sources Teaneck International Film Festival (festival tickets): https://events.humanitix.com/2026-teaneck-international-film-festival/tickets Film distributor: https://www.menemshafilms.com/grossingers New Jersey Jewish News: https://njjewishnews.timesofisrael.com/we-met-at-grossingers/ Times Union interview: https://www.timesunion.com/hudsonvalley/catskills/article/dirty-dancing-connection-with-grossingers-22408146.php --- ProbleMattic is written and maintained by Matthew Kulcsar, a software engineer, project manager, technologist, platform builder, emergency-services-trained helper, grandfather, and lifelong collector of broken systems, odd behaviors, and useful nonsense.