FESTIVAL ORGANIZERS

Melody Gilbert, Festival Director

Melody is an award-winning filmmaker, educator, and veteran of attending hundreds of film festivals since she made her first documentary in 2001. Along the way, she directed, produced, and filmed over a dozen docs, became a film professor (in the U.S. and overseas in Bulgaria), and kept attending film festivals. At some point, she started helping with programming festivals, teaching master classes and workshops at festivals (including teaching her Documentary Boot Camp) and being on juries, where she learned the innerworkings of the film festival world. She is still making docs and her newest is a work-in-progress about her personal experience with the scandalous monokini (topless) in1964. When asked if she would run the first Borscht Belt Film Fest, Melody jumped at the opportunity, especially because she remembers vacationing here with her family at the Concord and Grossinger’s, and she recently discovered her grandparents also vacationed up here when she found two viewfinder key chain souvenirs of them at the Pines and Brown's. After living in Minnesota, Bulgaria and most recently Louisiana, Melody recently moved to Kerhonkson full time with her husband, a sports journalist, and her dog Harry.

Jay Blotcher, Director of Programming

Jay proved his mania for cinema by fast-talking his way into the 1981 Cannes Film Festival as a college student. He wrote about film for numerous publications from 1982 to 2014. Currently, Jay is a film programmer at the Rosendale Theatre and an executive producer of a forthcoming documentary about activist Gilbert Baker, creator of the iconic LGBTQ Rainbow Flag. Jay has been a Hudson Valley resident since 2001.

Andrew Jacobs, President, Borscht Belt Museum 

Andrew is a reporter for The New York Times, where he writes about global health for the Science section. He has written for the Metro, Styles and National sections, where he covered the American South, and he has reported from more than a dozen countries, including China, where he spent nearly eight years. He is also the director of “Four Seasons Lodge”, a documentary about a community of Holocaust survivors who shared a bungalow colony in Ellenville. He splits his time between Manhattan and a former dairy farm in Napanoch.

Dr. Peter Alan Chester

Peter has spent much of his life working in public education, and was founding director of the Bay Academy of the Arts and Sciences in Brooklyn. Peter’s affiliation with the Borscht Belt began in 1958, when his family spent their first summer at The Grand Mountain Hotel in Greenfield Park. At 9, he was the hotel’s newspaper boy; at 11 a busboy in the children’s dining room and at 14 he became a waiter. Peter also worked at The Concord, Grossingers and the Aladdin, where he was captain and later Maitre d’Hotel from 1974 until its closure in 1991. The child of Holocaust survivors, Peter was raised on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and now lives in Monticello.

Scott Frost

Scott is a producer and stylist with a background in Broadway advertising, technical theatre/stage management, as well as concert and event production. Having worked to produce the visual campaigns for over 80 Broadway and Off-Broadway shows, Scott brings years of experience working in Broadway and as the Assistant Production Manager for a Saugatuck, MI, based concert production company producing events at universities (including Notre Dame), arena shows, festivals and events across the greater Midwest. Since buying his house in Ellenville in 2021, he and his husband have become involved with the local nonprofit Coalition of Forward Facing Ellenville, where Scott managed Market on Market, a bi-monthly farmers and artisan market in the heart of Ellenville. He now serves as the secretary and director of fundraising of COFFE, and is a member of Reservoir Studios.

Robin Cohen Kauffman

Robin, a retired hospital administrator, volunteers for a number of nonprofit organizations, and has long had a hand in organizing Catskills reunions for Borscht Belt hotel staff, guests and nostalgics who are passionate about the period. Her work with the historic Touro Synagogue of Newport, R.I., the oldest synagogue in the U.S., left an indelible mark and motivated her to study the Jewish immigrant experience. As a child, Robin’s family vacationed in the Borscht Belt, and she worked at the Homowack Lodge while in college. She met her husband at the Concord Hotel.