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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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The post A new photo book celebrates the very Jewish cafeteria culture of a vanished New York appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Looking for snow in August: My lifelong obsession with the Irish
According to the 11th-century set of Irish texts known as Lebor Gabála Érenn, or The Book of the Invasions of Ireland, there once lived a man called Fénius Farsaid — “Irishman the Pharisee.”
If the weirdness of this name is not hitting home for you, it’s a bit like if I told you my name was “Jewess the Druid.” “Fénius,” a predecessor of the modern word “Fenian,” connotes an Irish person. “Farsaid” is the medieval Irish word for “Pharisee.” Though the term is now mostly reserved for insulting hypocrites in an obscure way, in biblical times it referred to a strict Jewish sect active in ancient Judea.
How did this early example of Irish-Jewish crossover earn his name? Lebor Gabála Érenn reports that he was one of the 72 chieftains who built the Tower of Babel. When it crumbled and God cursed humankind with multilingualism, he set up camp in the Tower’s remains and ordered his scholars to go out and study the babble of the world’s newborn languages. On his own, he explored Hebrew, Greek and Latin alphabets (hence the “Farsaid”). As a capstone project, Fénius blended together the best elements of all the world’s languages to make the perfect tongue: Irish (hence the “Fénius”).
Fast forward almost one thousand years after Lebor Gabála Érenn was written, and you get me, Fénius Farsaid in reverse: he was an Irishman interested in the Jews; I am a Jewish woman fascinated by the Irish. There are many ways to measure a life, but mine might as well be thought of as a 22-year-long montage of fanatical Irish-themed memories: as a child, reading Maeve Binchy’s Chestnut Street and Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes; as a tween, writing a racy work of historical fiction called Ballyhill inspired by the Irish Rebellion of 1798; as a teen, shaking my computer in rage when 23 & Me reported I was 0% Irish; as a young woman, discovering Seamus Heaney, W. B. Yeats, James Joyce and Maggie O’Farrell; and as whoever I am now, writing this confessional essay.
I do not know when or how this obsession took root, though some evidence suggests that I have a genetic predisposition towards loving the Irish. The story goes that my great-great grandfather Barnett Shapiro did not know his birthday. But on his way from Poland to America, he passed through London, where he mixed with Irish immigrants in the East End. He found them so delightful that when he arrived at Ellis Island and was asked his birthday, he, a Jewish man whose first language was Yiddish, proudly declared he was born on St. Paddy’s Day, 1888.
This recessive shamrock gene skipped a generation and reappeared in my Grandpa Barry, or “Gramps.” When I was 12 or so, he presented me with a copy of Snow in August, a novel by the Irish-American journalist and novelist Pete Hamill, a man as tender as he was hard-boiled. According to the book’s back cover, I could expect a tale of an unlikely, Brooklyn-bred friendship between a young Irish-American lad named Michael Devlin and an Orthodox rabbi named Judah Hirsch. I admit I was skeptical. Gramps had already busted his credibility several times by hounding me to read his personal favorites like Young Visitor to Mars, Hardy Boys and back-issues of Flash Gordon. But against my better judgment, I read the book. And then I read it again.
It’s hard to say why this book etched itself into me so deeply. Maybe as a fifth-generation Brooklyn Shapiro, I was hard-wired to like it. But what I remember best about the book is not the plot or any particular line, but how I felt while reading it. Snow in August made me feel that magical realism was not exclusive to jungle climates like Gabriel García Márquez’s Macondo, or Italo Calvino’s invisible cities. There were labyrinths of wonder built right under Brooklyn, like a subway system for the spirit. Pete Hamill taught me how to hear the rumble. In his Brooklyn, it was possible for a golem to rise up against your tormentors, for the dead to return for a final dance, for snow to fall in the middle of August.
Maybe you’ll be relieved to hear that in the 10 intervening years since I first read this book, I’ve tempered my admiration of the Celts by finding some Irish literature that enrages me. In my freshman year of college, I read James Joyce’s Ulysses and wanted to clobber him with it. At the recommendation of my playful Bronxonian druid of an English teacher, Ted Cleary, I read Flann O’Brien’s experimental novel At Swim-Two-Birds and was wracked by alternating warp-spasms of amusement and fury. (As Oscar Wilde, another great Irishman-of-letters, would say, “When critics disagree, the artist is in accord with himself.”)
But most recent and vivid among my Irish memories is the pilgrimage I made to peaty Erin this past March. I had been in Oxford for a term abroad, and when the “vac” (British for “vacation”) struck, my friends Cindy, Gemma and I set out for the stretch of western Irish coastline known as the “Wild Atlantic Way.” We walked the misty Cliffs of Moher, where we were attacked by angry winds. We took refuge in pubs and soaked up pints of Guinness, plates of beef stew and hours of foot-tapping fiddling sessions that gave enthusiastic tourists and taciturn locals a reason to engage with each other. We rode a see-sawing ferry to the Aran Islands and back, and learned that time works differently when you’re on the brink of barfing.
When I think of that week in Ireland, I remember the horizon at sundown. Behind the dark green hills, the clouds looked like silhouettes of other hills somewhere far away. The wind plunged down my collar and shimmied up my pant legs. I could see no end to the ocean, only the thin line where sky and water met in some unreachable place. I feared the vastness of the world, and loved it at the same time.
In a way, that wild Atlantic scene was repeating what many Irish writers had been trying to tell me for years: Life is immense, often surprising, and occasionally tragic. Still, why not hope? The words of Seamus Heaney’s poem “The Gravel Walks” provide a lodestar for living: “Walk on air against your better judgment.”
Poetic spirits in the Jewish world have come to uncannily similar conclusions. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel once described himself as “an optimist against my better judgment,” a parallel with Heaney that might have delighted Fénius Farsaid. Even a central premise of Judaism — that the messianic age when “nation will not lift up sword against nation” will arrive someday — would be impossible without a commitment to walking on air against your better judgment until that day comes.
Nobody is born knowing how to walk, let alone knowing how to walk on air. But in his poem “The Cure at Troy,” Seamus Heaney describes how to take those first steps —
“So hope for a great sea change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that a further shore is reachable from here.
Believe in miracle
And cures and healing wells.”
Believe that snow could come next August.
The post Looking for snow in August: My lifelong obsession with the Irish appeared first on The Forward.
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When does Shabbat end? This astrophysicist thinks we’ve been getting it wrong
Aster Taylor observes Shabbat on their own time — literally.
For the past year, Taylor, a Ph.D. candidate in astrophysics at the University of Michigan, has been keeping Shabbat according to a schedule they devised using astronomical data.
So this Saturday, when Chabad of Ann Arbor says Shabbat will end at 9:09 p.m., Taylor will observe for nearly 11 more minutes. Where does Taylor, 25, get the chutzpah to challenge longstanding Jewish tradition?
“We live in the modern world. We have computers, we have catalogs of all the stars, and especially in the 80s, the construction of more significant telescopes,” Taylor told the Forward. “We have a pretty good understanding of how the sky affects our vision. So we can now just calculate this, right?”
They might have a point. In true “two-Jews-three-opinions” fashion, there’s actually no universally accepted time that Shabbat ends. But most people can agree on this: Shabbat ends at nightfall, defined by the Talmud as when three medium-sized stars in close proximity to one another are visible to the naked eye.
But what defines a medium-sized star and how close is close enough? Whose eyesight should be trusted? Those answers are not clear, leaving it up to rabbis to impart practical guidance.
Since without astronomical expertise, determining which stars make the grade is pretty difficult for the “average Joseph,” rabbis rely on proxy criteria. Today, many Orthodox communities use a standard credited to the venerable Rabbi Yechiel Michel Tucazinsky, who in 1929 determined three stars are visible when the sun sets 8.5 degrees below the horizon. Others follow the teachings of the 12th-century Rabbeinu Tam, who places nightfall 72 minutes after sunset.
But those approximations didn’t satisfy Taylor, an aspiring professor currently writing their dissertation about giant planet formation. Taylor craved a more scientific approach.
So for a few nights over several months, Taylor went to a local park, sat at a picnic table and every two minutes measured the sky’s brightness with a light meter.
Taylor settled on a brightness standard for a medium star — between magnitude 2 and 3 — and determined that three stars of that brightness need to be within 10 degrees of one another, close enough that an observer could see all three stars without moving their eyes.
Taylor then built a computer model to determine when three stars that meet those conditions become visible, taking into account various atmospheric conditions. That model became a web app that calculates Shabbat times for any given location and elevation.
The results were striking. Based on Taylor’s calculations, Shabbat should often end around 10 minutes later than the time given by the conventional approximation — no small discrepancy for those who faithfully observe the Sabbath.
Taylor’s computations are intriguing Jewish scholars. Masorti: The New Journal of Conservative Judaism has agreed to publish Taylor’s research paper on the topic this winter.
The Forward also shared Taylor’s findings with two rabbis: Yaakov Hoffman of the modern Orthodox Bridge Shul in Washington Heights, who wrote a scholarly article about Shabbat’s end, and Jack Shlachter — who in addition to being a retired rabbi in Los Alamos, New Mexico, just so happens to have a Ph.D in physics.
Both were impressed. “There’s always room for science to enhance these practices,” Shlachter said. “This author is doing things in a very admirable fashion — trying to be fully aware of tradition, but also incorporating more modern, sophisticated techniques.”
Hoffman said it was “very impressive” that Taylor “was trying to research these things from a contemporary astronomical perspective, and to really put so much effort and passion into accurate determination of the time.”
If Taylor “wants to add a few minutes to Shabbat,” he added, “that doesn’t bother me.”
What if Shabbat never ends?
As any city dweller knows, the stars don’t exactly come out in force at night.
Once Taylor factored light pollution into their calculations, it produced a somewhat uncomfortable result. In New York City, Taylor said, light pollution is so intense that three medium stars in close proximity will never be visible this year. In Jerusalem, only a few months of the year offer enough clear visibility to see Taylor’s criteria.
“The conditions that end Shabbat are never met,” Taylor said, “which is obviously a problem.”
Taken literally, that would mean endless Shabbat. In his paper, Taylor wrote that such a scenario would “require most observant Jews to quit their jobs, refrain from cooking, and spend their time studying Torah.” That would be both “unrealistic” and “lessen the sanctity” of the Sabbath, Taylor wrote.
Fortunately, there is a rabbinic workaround that dates back long before the age of light pollution.
The 16th-century Rabbi Yosef Karo wrote that on a cloudy day, one should wait to end Shabbat until “the doubt leaves his heart.” In other words, wait long enough after sunset to be certain that the stars theoretically would have been visible on a clear night.
Taylor agrees that the same principle for clouds can be applied to light pollution. But they argue that it’s still worth knowing just how much the modern night sky has changed.
Light pollution isn’t the only factor messing with the Jewish clock. President Trump is urging the Senate to pass a bill that would make daylight savings time permanent — a measure which many Orthodox Jews oppose because a later winter sunrise would mean a later morning prayer service, making many Orthodox Jews late for work.
But it also would also push Shabbat an hour later, which could mean a less frantic rush to get home before sunset on wintertime Friday afternoons.
Those potential changes raise a broader question. As modern life becomes increasingly divorced from the natural rhythms of the Earth, to what extent should Jewish practice evolve?
Taylor, who attends a Conservative synagogue, said they’re in favor of maintaining Jewish tradition when possible — but that doesn’t mean it can’t also be improved.
“We should be using a calculation like this in communities in the future,” Taylor said. “It’s a strict upgrade to the way we’ve been doing things in the past, and so I’m hopeful that we’ll start using this more widely.”
Paradoxically, in Taylor’s case, they believe modern technology enabled them to get closer to the literal meaning of the traditional text. It was the ancient rabbis, lacking that science, who had to settle for the next best thing.
The post When does Shabbat end? This astrophysicist thinks we’ve been getting it wrong appeared first on The Forward.
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Do you suffer from ‘Israel Derangement Syndrome’? This ad says there’s a cure
It opens like a two-minute infomercial pulled off a 1990s VHS tape. Soft lighting, Clinton-era fashion, a narrator whose voice has the reassuring cadence of a prescription drug ad. “Do you or someone you love suffer from Israel Derangement Syndrome?” he asks.
The two-minute ad has become one of the most-shared clips on Jewish and pro-Israel social media this week — posted Wednesday morning, it garnered 2.6 million views on X by Thursday afternoon.
“Israel Derangement Syndrome” is presented like a real illness, complete with a fictional treatment center, the Clarity Center, and patients who describe “recovering.” The “symptoms” are a list of ways people criticize Israel and its supporters — bringing up the conflict unprompted, refusing to see any other issue in the world as important, being unable to acknowledge nuance. The “cure,” according to the ad, is just reading more and checking your sources. It ends with a rapid-fire list of side effects: “reading past the headline, a sudden interest in Middle East history, and a constant urge to touch grass.”
The ad’s target is obvious: people who are sharply critical of Israel. The name isn’t new. It’s modeled on “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” a term used to dismiss criticism of the president as pathology.
Why it lands the way it does
Anita Atwell Seate, a professor of communication at the University of Maryland who studies how people’s group identities shape the way they respond to criticism, called what’s happening in the video a textbook case of tribalism.
Our group memberships, she said, shape our psychological processes, since they’re so tied to our sense of self. That pushes us to process information in self-protective ways: “When we feel good about our social groups,” she said, “we feel good about ourselves.”
There’s a well-documented pattern researchers call the “intergroup sensitivity effect,” where people are far more willing to accept criticism from members of their own group than from people they see as outsiders. When criticism comes from outside, the instinct isn’t to engage with it; it’s to discredit whoever’s delivering it. “They’re deranged, they don’t understand facts,” Atwell Seate said, describing that reflex, which is more or less the whole premise of the ad.
She doesn’t see the video as an attempt at persuasion at all. “It doesn’t do anything to help change hearts and minds of the out-group,” she said “But it certainly does something important for the in-group, which is reify their beliefs.” Videos like this, she says, are like a pep talk — aimed at people who already agree, meant to bring them closer together.
Where it came from
It’s not entirely clear who actually made the video. What’s clear is that it was shared — and got millions of views — from an X account called the Trencher Broadcasting Company, whose bio reads: “Building the future of AI media. Mostly satire, always entertaining.” It appears to have been made with AI video tools, part of a broader wave of AI-generated political videos that have flooded social media this year.
TBC has posted this kind of thing before. Last week, the account shared an AI-fabricated video appearing to show Michigan Senate candidate Dr. Abdul El-Sayed and YouTube personality Ms. Rachel discussing Israeli “colonizers” with children — a conversation that never actually happened.
Ms. Rachel had, notably, donated to El-Sayed’s campaign, and both have been outspoken advocates for children in Gaza, which may have inspired the video.
The “Israel Derangement Syndrome” video ends with a display of fake contact info, which comes with its own punchline.
Call the phone number and it’s like spinning a roulette wheel. The first time I called, the robotic voice wanted to sell me a home security system. The second time: a medical alert device. And the third time, I got this message: “If you received a call displaying this telephone number on your caller ID, it has been spoofed, meaning the caller ID has been faked by a scammer trying to hide their actual telephone number. We are sorry this is occurring. Unfortunately, we cannot stop this from happening.”
The ad also promotes a website IDSHelp.org, a domain that was registered on Tuesday and redirects to DerekhLearning.com, the homepage of an AI-powered app for studying Torah and Talmud. It’s a fitting coda for a video built around telling people to check their sources.
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