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A new photo book celebrates the very Jewish cafeteria culture of a vanished New York
(New York Jewish Week) – Back in 1975, Marcia Bricker Halperin had just graduated from Brooklyn College with the dream of becoming a professional photographer when she stepped into the Flatbush outpost of Dubrow’s, a cafeteria-style restaurant, for a warm cup of coffee.
It was there that inspiration hit. “I was wonderstruck,” Halperin writes in the introduction to her new book of photographs, “Kibbitz & Nosh: When We All Met at Dubrow’s Cafeteria,” describing the “cavernous” space with mirrored walls and a mosaic fountain. “It was the most idiosyncratic room I had ever seen.”
“I sensed it was a vanishing world on its last legs, and that impelled me to document it,” she continues. “On many visits, the tables were empty, sans a painterly still life of condiment bottles and jars in the morning light. I also perceived cafeterias as places that embodied a secular Jewish culture, something that was of great interest to me.”
“I attended a lecture by Isaac Bashevis Singer, who was billed as an “Outstanding Anglo -Yiddish” author, at the Brooklyn Jewish Center on Eastern Parkway in Crown Heights,” Bricker Halperin writes in the introduction. “I adored his short stories, many of which were set in cafeterias, and I regret never finding the nerve that day to tell him about my own cafeterianiks.” (Marcia Bricker Halperin)
Halperin was prescient: She started photographing these once-ubiquitous eateries one decade before the final Dubrow’s location in the Garment District would close in 1985. The chain’s first location was founded in 1929 on the Lower East Side by Benjamin Dubrow, a Jewish immigrant from Minsk. By the mid-twentieth century, the family-owned company expanded throughout Brooklyn, Manhattan and Miami Beach, with ownership passing to the second generation, and then to the third. In Dubrow’s prime, a stop at one of the cafeterias was practically required for politicians such as John F. Kennedy and Jimmy Carter.
Nearly 50 years after her first visit, Halperin’s new book is a tribute to this now-defunct New York City cafeteria culture and the characters she met during the five years she regularly photographed there. The compelling 152-page book features her original black-and-white photos along with essays from Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Donald Margulies and Jewish American historian Deborah Dash Moore.
“Although Jews were not the only ones to patronize cafeterias, they preferred them as inexpensive places to hang out to bars, which often attracted an Irish immigrant or working-class clientele,” Moore writes in her essay, titled “See You at Dubrow’s.” “By the 1930s, cafeterias were part of the fabric of Jewish neighborhood life in New York City, a welcome alternative for socializing to cramped apartments, street corners, or candy stores.”
Now living in Park Slope and retired from a career as a special education teacher, Halperin talked with the New York Jewish Week about the city’s lost cafeteria culture and what inspired her to capture it with her camera.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
New York Jewish Week: You took these photos nearly 50 years ago. What made you decide to publish them now?
Marcia Bricker Halperin: In the 1970s, there was such good feedback on the work. I was given a show, I was collected by a few people, I had a photo in The New York Times. People wrote me letters in the mail: “Ms. Bricker, I’m interested in buying one of your photos.” At the time, I was in a project called the CETA artists project, a federally funded arts project in the ’70s where I was paid to be a photographer. It was very much like the [Depression-era] WPA project, but one of the great differences with the CETA project was anything you shot, you owned.
So I continued photographing changing New York during those years — some of it by assignment for nonprofit organizations that I worked with, like the Jewish Museum and an organization in Brighton Beach that was resettling the Soviet Jews that were arriving in the ’70s. They wanted photographs to help both the Soviet Jews understand American life and the old Jewish population in Brighton Beach understand Russian life. What a great opportunity!
I was going to be an artist and I did adjunct teaching and different things to make it work. I kind of fell into teaching high school photography and then, from there, I fell into teaching special education — that took over. Thirty-five years later, I retired from teaching. The day after I retired, I took out my negatives and my photography stuff and bought a scanner and all kinds of printers and things.
So, I was a photographer once upon a time and then taught for many years and, overnight, I became one once again.
A man reads the Forvertz newspaper in Yiddish. (Marcia Bricker Halperin)
How did it feel to see these photos again? Had you developed any of them before?
Yes, I printed quite a few of them then. I worked as a darkroom lab technician, so I had an opportunity in the ’70s to do a lot of silver gelatin prints. I would bring in a thick envelope of the imperfect prints to the cafeteria and at that point, everybody knew me. I gave out portraits to people. If I hadn’t shot them, they would gather around me asking: “Do you have my picture? Did you print it?” Especially the staff — there was a very international cohort of people working there and they all wanted pictures to send home to their families.
After that, the pictures lay fallow for all these years. I protected them and stored them very carefully. When I had the opportunity to come back and put together a sample book, I started looking through the negatives and I said, “Oh, my God, I don’t remember that picture.” It was a time warp to see some of these photos taken in the 1970s. In Manhattan, the ’60s had happened, but Flatbush in Brooklyn was the “Old Country.” It hung onto the past for a while and some women dressed like they were still in the 1950s.
Dubrow’s Cafeteria, Kings’s Highway 1975. The photographer appears in the top left corner. (Marcia Bricker Halperin)
Dubrow’s closed just ten years after you started shooting there. Could you feel at the time that cafeteria culture was ending?
I kept a journal at the time. When I went back 42 years later to look at it, I had written: “One day I’m going to show up here and this is going to be closed.”
There were other cafeterias in Manhattan and the Bronx and they had all closed. I’ve collected like every article ever written about cafeterias, and there’s one from 1973: “Are cafeterias going to be gone?” So it was fairly well known that this was a vanishing kind of establishment in New York. The automats ceased having the little boxes, Burger King bought them out, they tried to modernize and it got pretty sad. Sometimes during the day, the huge cafeteria would be empty and people would say, “This business can’t survive.” So I knew I was photographing in the vein of needing to document the things that are there and will be gone. It was one of the things that propelled me to get out there and photograph.
Today, things are different. There’s food courts and wonderful little coffee places. There are many businesses, especially here in Brooklyn, trying to perpetuate “grandmother foods” and there are restaurants that are serving “reinvented Jewish-style foods.” So there are some continuations, but in terms of the huge, opulent cafeteria spaces — grand professional murals, intricate woodworking, food with a crazy amount of preparation, 300 items, 30 different cakes — no restaurant could possibly survive like that. The only thing that still exists are my photos of them.
Men and women converse around empty tables at Dubrow’s on Kings Highway. (Marcia Bricker Halperin)
What was the Jewish culture of Dubrow’s and Flatbush like at the time?
Growing up, we went to a little old “Conservadox” synagogue. We were the kind of family where my mother kept a kosher kitchen at home, but on Sunday nights we’d go out to the Chinese restaurant. Dubrow’s menu was “Jewish-style” but it was also a place you could go out and have your first shrimp salad sandwich, which became their most popular food. They were famous for shrimp salad!
These cafeterias were all started by Jewish immigrants. But they were democratic for everyone — there was ham on the menu, shrimp. You could choose whether to have just meat or have a meat meal and then have a cream pie for dessert. That was your choice. With cafeteria-style, like religion, you pick and choose what you want and what you want to observe.
When I would go there, all the older people would ask: “Are you Jewish? You don’t look Jewish.” I’d say,“I’m Jewish. I know a few words of Yiddish, my parents speak Yiddish at home.” They would be satisfied with that. There was this sense that it was a club a little bit, it was a Jewish establishment. Not that everybody wasn’t welcome, and everybody socialized with everyone else.
Socializing was a big thing there, not necessarily eating. Many of my pictures are people sitting around — sometimes it’s a coffee cup on the table, most of the time the table is empty. They were there to meet their friends and talk. Some people said it replaced the synagogues. The old men would go to Dubrow’s and have a cup of coffee with their friends in the morning and gossip and talk.
“Kibbitz & Nosh: When We All Met at Dubrow’s Cafeteria” will be published on May 15, 2023. The photos are on exhibit at the Edward Hopper House in Nyack, New York through June 25.
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European Countries Join France in Demanding Anti-Israel UN Special Rapporteur Albanese’s Resignation
Francesa Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories, speaks at a conference, “A Cartography of Genocide” Israel’s Conduct in Gaza,” at the Roma Tre University, in Rome, Italy, Oct. 6, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Remo Casilli
Top diplomats from Austria, Germany, Italy, and the Czech Republic have joined France in calling for the resignation of the United Nations’ special rapporteur on the human rights situation in the Palestinian territories, Francesca Albanese, who has an extensive history of using her role to denigrate Israel and seemingly rationalize the terrorist group Hamas’s attacks against the Jewish state.
Earlier this week, French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot accused Albanese of being “a political activist who stirs up hate” after she delivered yet another inflammatory tirade against Israel, this time at an Al Jazeera forum in Doha, prompting renewed calls for her resignation.
He described Albanese’s “outrageous and reprehensible remarks” as targeting “not the Israeli government, whose policies may be criticized, but Israel as a people and as a nation, which is absolutely unacceptable.”
The top French diplomat announced that France will demand Albanese’s resignation “with firmness” at this month’s United Nations Human Rights Council session.
Despite her history of antisemitic statements, the United Nations has consistently refused to fire Albanese, citing her status as one of its “independent experts.”
Now, officials in Austria, Germany, Italy, and the Czech Republic have aligned with France in demanding Albanese’s removal, warning that she continues to spread hatred under the cover of her official role.
Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani said Albanese’s “conduct, statements, and initiatives are not appropriate for the position she holds within an organization dedicated to peace and security.”
Austrian Foreign Minister Beate Meinl-Reisinger accused Albanese of “spreading incitement” in a way that “undermines the impartiality and highest standards that the role of a UN representative requires.”
German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul called her “untenable in her position,” noting that she “has made numerous inappropriate remarks in the past.”
Albanese sparked fresh outrage after seemingly calling Israel a “common enemy of humanity,” drawing sharp condemnation from diplomats and human rights advocates worldwide.
Speaking at the Al Jazeera forum in Qatar last weekend, she accused Israel of “planning and carrying out a genocide” during the country’s defensive war against Hamas.
“It’s also true that never before has the global community seen the challenges that we all face, we who do not control large amounts of financial, algorithms, and weapons,” Albanese said, appearing to invoke a long-standing antisemitic conspiracy that Jews control wealth and technology.
She also accused Western nations of being complicit in the so-called “genocide” by supplying arms and financing Israel, while claiming that Western media helps defend the Jewish state by “amplifying the pro-apartheid, genocidal narrative.”
Facing mounting backlash and renewed calls for her resignation, Albanese defended herself, insisting that her comments targeted a “system” that allowed a “genocide” to unfold in Gaza.
In an interview with France 24, Albanese rejected the allegations against her as “completely false accusations” and “manipulation.”
“I have never, ever, ever said ‘Israel is the common enemy of humanity,’” she said.
On Thursday, Stéphane Dujarric, spokesman for UN Secretary-General António Guterres, acknowledged disagreement with Albanese’s statements, emphasizing that her language does not reflect the tone or approach of the United Nations.
“If member states are not happy with what one or more of the special rapporteurs are saying, it is their responsibility to get involved in the work of the Human Rights Council … and push for the direction they wish to push for,” Dujarric said in a statement.
On the contrary, UN human rights spokesperson Marta Hurtado defended Albanese, stressing concerns over personal attacks and misinformation targeting UN officials.
“We are very worried. We are concerned that UN officials, independent experts and judicial officials, are increasingly subjected to personal attacks, threats and misinformation that distracts from the serious human rights issues,” Hurtado said in a statement.
Since taking on the role of UN special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories in 2022, Albanese has been at the center of controversy due to what critics, including US and European lawmakers, have described as antisemitic and anti-Israel public remarks.
Last year, the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) faced intense pressure to block Albanese’s reappointment for another three-year term, with several countries and NGOs urging UN members to oppose the move due to her controversial remarks and alleged pro-Hamas stance.
Despite significant pressure and opposition, her mandate was confirmed to extend until 2028.
In her long history of antisemitic remarks, Albanese has referred to a “Jewish lobby” controlling the US and Europe, compared Israel to Nazi Germany, and stated that Hamas’s violence against Israelis — including rape, murder, and kidnapping — needs to be “put in context.”
Last year, the United Nations launched a probe into Albanese for allegedly accepting a trip to Australia funded by pro-Hamas organizations.
In the past, she has also celebrated the anti-Israel protesters rampaging across US college campuses, saying they represent a “revolution” and give her “hope.”
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France Marks 20th Anniversary of Ilan Halimi’s Death as Macron Condemns Rising Antisemitism
France’s President Emmanuel Macron speaks during a ceremony commemorating the 20th anniversary of the murder of Ilan Halimi, a 23-year-old French Jew who was tortured and murdered in 2006, at The Elysee Presidential Palace in Paris, France, Feb. 13, 2026. Photo: BERTRAND GUAY/Pool via REUTERS
France on Friday marked the 20th anniversary of the death of Ilan Halimi — the young Jewish man who was brutally tortured to death in 2006 — as Jewish leaders and government officials sounded the alarm over a relentless wave of antisemitism that continues to shadow the nation.
Local communities across France planted olive trees in Halimi’s memory as part of a nationwide initiative responding to the recent surge in antisemitic incidents.
“Twenty years after Ilan Halimi’s death, the situation has only worsened,” Yonathan Arfi, president of the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France (CRIF), the main representative body of French Jews, said during a commemorative ceremony at the Élysée Palace in Paris.
“Antisemitic prejudice is spreading, even among the youngest generations,” he continued. “Schools, once safe havens, can no longer shield children from this hatred.”
French President Emmanuel Macron also attended the ceremony, condemning what he called an “antisemitic hydra” that has spread into “every corner” of French society over the past two decades.
During the tribute, Macron called for elected officials convicted of “antisemitic, racist, or discriminatory acts and statements” to face mandatory disqualification from public office, insisting that politicians must act as “guardians of the Republic.”
“Far too often, those who commit antisemitic crimes face sentences that are shockingly light,” Macron said. “We must ensure transparency and accountability by closely monitoring every ruling and sanction.”
“The government and Parliament will take decisive action to strengthen laws against antisemitic and racist acts,” he continued, vowing a tougher, more consistent approach to combating hatred.
Halimi was abducted, held captive, and tortured in January 2006 by a gang of about 20 people in a low-income housing estate in the Paris suburb of Bagneux.
Three weeks later, he was found in Essonne, south of Paris, naked, gagged, and handcuffed, with clear signs of torture and burns. The 23-year-old died on the way to the hospital.
In 2011, an olive tree was planted in Halimi’s memory. In August, the memorial was found felled — probably with a chainsaw — in Epinay-sur-Seine.
Halimi’s memory has faced attacks before, with two other trees planted in his honor vandalized in 2019 in Essonne.
On the 20th anniversary of his death, IFOP — France’s leading pollster — released a report showing that antisemitic stereotypes about Jews, their wealth, and perceived communal solidarity remain widespread, revealing how deeply such prejudices persist in French society.
“The case of Ilan Halimi shows the deadly consequences of antisemitic prejudice,” Yossef Murciano, president of the French Union of Jewish Students (UEJF), which commissioned the study, said in a statement.
“Twenty years later, remembering him means rejecting the idea that a Jew could be attacked or killed simply for being Jewish,” he continued.
Regards sur les préjugés antisémites 20 ans après la mort d’Ilan Halimi : étude @IfopOpinion pour @uejf
20 ans après l’assassinat d’Ilan Halimi, l’Union des Étudiants Juifs de France (@uejf) publie une étude intitulée « Regards sur les préjugés antisémites 20 ans après la mort… pic.twitter.com/eHIP7B84Ti
— CRIF (@Le_CRIF) February 13, 2026
According to the newly released report, one in four French people still believe Jews are wealthier than others, while 69 percent perceive them as a closely united community.
The poll also found that 44 percent of the overall population are unaware of Halimi’s case, with 73 percent of 18–24-year-olds having never heard of it.
Even though 25 percent of young adults believe that Jews “make too much of” antisemitism, 76 percent of French citizens say a tragedy like Halimi’s could happen again today.
“The change is undeniable: antisemitism is not fading, but evolving. It shows less as overt biological hatred and more as suspicion, expressed through narratives of power, influence, and money. It is becoming diffuse, normalized, sometimes even politically justified — and now, more than ever, it often takes the shape of anti-Zionism,” Murciano said.
According to the latest statistics, 47 percent of young adults believe the existence of the State of Israel is unjustified.
The report also found that half of respondents view Zionism as a racist ideology, while 35 percent see it as an international organization aiming to influence the world for the benefit of Jews — reflecting long-standing conspiratorial stereotypes.
The data followed the French Interior Ministry’s releasing its annual report on anti-religious acts on Thursday. The report revealed a troubling rise in antisemitic incidents documented in a joint dataset compiled with the Jewish Community Protection Service.
Antisemitism in France remained at alarmingly high levels last year, with 1,320 incidents recorded nationwide, as Jews and Israelis faced several targeted attacks amid a relentlessly hostile climate despite heightened security measures, according to the published data.
Although the total number of antisemitic outrages in 2025 fell by 16 percent compared to 2024’s second highest ever total of 1,570 cases, the newly released report warned that antisemitism remained “historically high,” with more than 3.5 attacks occurring every day.
Over the past 25 years, antisemitic acts “have never been as numerous as in the past three years,” the report said, noting a dramatic spike following the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
Even though Jews make up less than 1 percent of France’s population, they accounted for 53 percent of all religiously motivated crimes last year.
Between 2022 and 2025, antisemitic attacks across France quadrupled, leaving the Jewish community more exposed than ever.
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Princeton University Anti-Zionist Group Cancels Norman Finkelstein Lecture, School Says He’s ‘Welcome’ to Come Back
Norman Finkelstein participating in pro-Hamas demonstration in New York City in April 2024. Photo: ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters Connect
Princeton University’s Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapter has canceled this year’s annual lecture by Norman Finkelstein, a stridently anti-Israel activist and political scientist who for years has been one of the West’s most outspoken critics of the Jewish state.
“We regret having to inform you on such short notice, but due to unforeseen circumstances involving new university policy, this event has been canceled. There are no confirmed plans at this stage for a rescheduled date,” SJP said in a statement. “Please help share this to all who were planning to attend.”
Finkelstein, who has been criticized for reprising antisemitic conspiracies of Jewish influence and power, has remained a regular on Princeton University’s speaking circuit thanks to SJP. As previously reported by The Algemeiner, SJP chapters across the US have been involved in assaulting Jewish students, stalking Jewish and Israeli faculty, and destroying university property during illegal occupations of school grounds.
Princeton University, which at one time had notoriously imposed disciplinary sanctions on conservatives and Zionists that are generally reserved for alleged sexual predators, has not stopped Finkelstein, who was born to Jewish Holocaust survivors, from coming to campus.
Writing in 2000 that the Holocaust, in which 6 million Jews were murdered by the Nazi regime, has become an “industry” for Jews and Israelis to exploit, Finkelstein charged that a “handful of American Jews have effectively hijacked the Nazi Holocaust to blackmail Europe” and “divert attention from what is being done to the Palestinians,” whom he describes as unwilling subjects of an “apartheid” country. Meanwhile, he derided advocates of Holocaust commemoration as a “repellant gang of plutocrats, hoodlums, and hucksters.”
Finkelstein, according to The Princeton Tory, is also on record calling a Princeton student who served in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) a “concentration camp guard” during a campus event, an allusion to false accusations that Israel is committing a genocide against a Palestinian people whose population, according to the Palestinian Bureau of Statistics has “doubled about ten times since” Israel’s founding in 1948.
In other Princeton events, Finkelstein has said it is acceptable to “shoot them dead,” referring to Israelis,” and said that Israeli Jews are “drinking the blood of those children.”
Writing to The Algemeiner on Friday, Princeton University noted that the institution did not disinvite Finkelstein and that SJP is “welcome” to have him back.
“Princeton University did not disinvite Norman Finkelstein,” a university spokesperson said. “The event could not take place as scheduled because the student organizers did not register it with the required advance notice. We require advance notice for logistical planning, a requirement that is unrelated to the content of this or any event.”
Princeton University has long been a hub of antisemitism on campus, often propagated by anti-Zionist activists who present their call for the destruction of Israel as being consistent with progressive values.
In 2023, week before Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre in southern Israel, Princeton appeared to defend a professor’s assigning his students a book which accuses the Israel Defense Forces of “maiming” Palestinians and harvesting their organs. The book, Rutgers University professor Jasbir Puar’s The Right to Maim, is widely denounced as “pseudo-scholarship” for trafficking in antisemitic blood libels rooted in medieval conspiracies charging that Jews murdered Christian children and drank their blood during the holiday of Passover.
Princeton University President Christopher L. Eisgruber addressed the issue at a faculty meeting at the time, defending the work’s inclusion in Princeton’s curriculum as a routine of academic freedom.
“It has unfortunately become common for university faculty members here and elsewhere to become the target of viral social media storms focused on controversial materials that they assign or teach,” Eisgruber said during a faculty meeting. “That has sometimes extended to demands that the university should ban or condemn a book, cancel a course, or discipline a professor.”
He continued, “We, of course, will not do that. Academic freedom protects your right to decide what to teach and how to teach it. That right, like the right to free speech on campus, is very broad indeed, and we will protect it.”
One year later, students marked the first anniversary of the Oct. 7 massacre by vandalizing the Princeton University Investment Company (PRINCO), splattering red paint on the entrance door and graffitiing the perimeter of the building with the slogan “$4genocide.”
Since March 2025, Princeton remains under federal investigation for allegedly ignoring campus antisemitism.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.