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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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Columbia University student workers union drops Israel divestment demand
The student workers’ union at Columbia University has withdrawn its demand that the university divest from Israel — a significant reversal for the group, which has played a leading role in the campus’s pro-Palestinian movement since the start of the Israel-Hamas war.
Divestment had been one of the union’s signature demands, and a recurring point of contention throughout negotiations.
The union, Student Workers of Columbia–United Auto Workers, represents over 3,000 undergraduate and graduate student workers and had long campaigned for Columbia to cancel its dual degree program with Tel Aviv University, stop plans to open a new facility in Tel Aviv, and financially divest from Israel. The demand it withdrew this week would have mandated that the university divest from state actors or companies deemed by the International Criminal Court and the United Nations to be in violation of international law
But in a Monday general body meeting, union members voted to withdraw the divestment proposal.
Columbia became an epicenter for campus protests following the onset of the Israel-Hamas war, sparking a wave of encampments, building occupations and high-profile arrests. Its union’s leaders, in particular, had been heavily involved in pro-Palestinian activism. In 2024, the group passed a resolution supporting the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, and pledged to strike if necessary to force the university to “end its complicity in the genocide.”
Former PhD student Grant Miner was arrested for his role in the occupation of Hamilton Hall in 2024 and was subsequently expelled but still identifies himself as the union’s president.
Miner acknowledged the decision to withdraw the demand in an interview this week with the campus newspaper The Columbia Spectator, saying the give-and-take realities of collective bargaining had forced the union to adjust its demands.
“You start off a campaign with one thing, and then as you bargain, you have to face the realities of where you are,” he said.
Earlier this year, Columbia alleged the union did not bargain in good faith by “conditioning bargaining on the presence of an expelled student,” apparently referring to Miner. They also alleged the organization attempted to “bargain over matters that are not related to terms and conditions of students’ employment with the University; and filing grievances that similarly have nothing to do with terms and conditions of students’ employment.”
Indeed, the move appeared to reflect the realities of federal labor law. Under the National Labor Relations Act, employers and unions are required to bargain only over wages, hours and other terms and conditions of employment. Because university divestment is generally considered outside those mandatory subjects of bargaining, Columbia is not legally obligated to negotiate over it, though it could choose to do so voluntarily.
The union also softened on other contentious demands, dropping and significantly modifying its proposal to remove all police officers from campus and narrowing a surveillance-related demand.
In November, a university Advisory Committee on Socially Responsible Investing rejected three proposals filed by activists calling on Columbia to divest, citing a lack of financial viability and consensus on campus.
Columbia maintains its dual degree program with Tel Aviv University, and plans to open its Tel Aviv global center this summer, according to Nadav Eyal, a Columbia professor who spoke of the matter in an episode of the Call Me Back podcast this week.
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A Yiddish theater troupe condemned U.S. racism — then the Nazis came
In 1935, the experimental theater group Yung Teatr invited audiences in Warsaw to a new play that was virtually all in Yiddish but wasn’t about Europe or Jews. It was a modified retelling of the plight of the Scottsboro Boys, nine Black teenagers who were falsely accused of raping two white women in Tennessee in 1931. While the case was being retried in the United States for the second time, the three-act play Mississippi exposed Polish Jews to the injustice.
Penned by Yiddish writer Leib Malach, whose work as a journalist took him around the world including to Harlem, and directed by Michał Weichert, a trained lawyer with a love for avant-garde theater, Mississippi premiered in Warsaw in March 1935 at a time Yiddish culture in Poland was flourishing. Several troupes were staging translated works about American race relations, such as a Vilna Troupe production of Eugene O’Neill’s All God’s Chillun Got Wings, but scholars believe Mississippi was the first original Yiddish or Polish play on this issue to be performed in Poland.
Although it didn’t have the financial resources or popularity of traditional Yiddish productions, Mississippi had more than 100 performances in Warsaw and several in other Polish cities, where it was widely praised, as Jewish audiences identified with the mistreatment of the Scottsboro Boys. There is evidence of at least one production outside of Poland, all the way in Buenos Aires.
“Yiddish theater was much more given to a kind of transnational existence, probably more than any theater,” Alyssa Quint, a curator at YIVO and a co-editor of their translated Yiddish Voices series, said. “Because of all the communities, all the Jewish settlements that had been settled by that time were still really speaking Yiddish.”
Quint worked with scholars Ellen Perecman and Amelia Glaser to translate Mississippi into English for the first time and it has been published as a book with an introduction and notes from Quint.
Malach, who had been wanting to write a political play inspired by his time in America, made a few deviations from the real Scottsboro incident. In Mississippi, there are only seven Black defendants. Malach also invented characters to represent how the Black community and the boys’ family would react to the trial, although a mother of one of the accused is closely modeled after Ada Wright, the real-life mother of two of the Scottsboro boys who went on a European speaking tour about the case. White actors in blackface played the parts of the Black characters.
Acts Two and Three involve simultaneous actions on multiple small stages throughout the performance space, making Mississippi one the earliest examples of “immersive” or “environmental” theater.
“It’s experimental, but it was actually something that people flocked to as well,” Quint said. “That’s a very hard combination to strike even today, even under the best of circumstances.”
Because Poland’s censors had previously shuttered Weichert’s shows for being “politically provocative,” Yung Teatr left “Scottsboro” out of the title. Malach wrote that they chose Mississippi since it “is the name of a river along which reside communities of Black people, and it is also a state where ‘Scottsboro’ is a regular occurrence.”
Although few members of Yung Teatr had ever met a Black American, the play reads as a nuanced — if at times heavy-handed — investigation of the precarious position of Black people in American society.
The play also focuses a lot on class conflict, as Weichert thought it would make the story more accessible to Jewish audiences. While Weichert and Malach recognized the parallels between anti-Black discrimination in America and the antisemitism they experienced in Poland, Weichert wasn’t sure broader Jewish audiences would automatically sympathize with the Black characters. The communist-aligned Yung Teatr leaders also may have been hoping to inspire their Jewish audience to embrace class solidarity and at times, class seems to usurp race as the primary issue in the play.
One character, Shirley Silverstone, a Jewish labor activist who represents the real-life activists from the International Labor Defense that got involved in Scottsboro, argues that the case is really about “revealing the bloody intention of the ruling class to strangle us all.”
Mississippi offers a contrasting view in the form of Mickey, a Black Pullman train worker, who accosts Shirley for using the boys’ trial “for the benefit of your party” and playing “with the lives of the accused Negroes.”
“I think that you don’t really know where you necessarily stand or where the play stands,” Quint said.
The translation took several years. In 2020, as protests spread across the country in the wake of the killing of George Floyd, Quint saw a connection between her work and the present, which she said can be a rare experience in the Yiddish world.
“Often you’re in your little corner and you have to have a more indirect relationship with the spirit of your time, or none at all even,” Quint said. “But it seemed like there was something very relevant about this play when I began translating it.”
“People were getting more and more engaged with deeper questions about the Black experience here in America.”
When it came to translating the Yiddish word for the n-word, Perecman, Glaser, and Quint had to decide whether or not to include the original language.
“I felt strongly that since this was placed in the 30’s in the South, we needed to use the word,” Perecman said about the ultimate decision to have the slur in the play.
Both the transcultural and serious nature of Mississippi make it a standout piece of Yiddish theater history. Perecman said that many people have a narrow idea of what makes Yiddish theater, something she’s experienced firsthand running the New Worlds Theatre Project, which translates and stages early 20th century Yiddish plays.
“People would come and they’d say, ‘Oh my God, I thought Yiddish theater was all about singing and dancing,’” Perecman said.
There is music in Mississippi, but it’s jazz and gospel inspired numbers instead of Jewish folk tunes. The translators don’t know how much interaction the composer, Henkh (Henoch) Kon had with Black American music, but the lyrical structures, including a call-and-response gospel, show an intent to mimic what he imagined were traditional forms. YIVO plans to have music experts at a book launch event on Nov. 30 to analyze the lyrics and possibly put them to music.
In the post-Holocaust world, the play’s message about discrimination carries a sense of foreboding. Several of the actors and crew were murdered in the Holocaust. Weichert survived and made aliyah to Israel in 1958, where he died in 1967. Malach died in Paris in 1936 during an operation.
The Nazi invasion forced Yung Teatr to close in 1939 after only ten years of operating, but the troupe left a mark on Yiddish theater with their ambitious, unorthodox projects.
“There was just very, very little support for what they did,” Quint said. “They were just very devoted to what they did, and that’s what kept them going.”
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A mayor exposed New York City Jews to chaos. It wasn’t Mamdani.
The mayor ventured to a Brooklyn synagogue, hoping to assure an overflowing crowd of Jewish New Yorkers who blamed him for fostering an environment of antisemitism that he understood their fears and their place in a city they considered increasingly threatening to their safety.
Not Zohran Mamdani, who stands accused by segments of the Jewish world of turning New York City into a hunting ground for Jews with his invective against Israel. Not David Dinkins, who was mayor in 1993 when violence descended on the Jews of Crown Heights for days and a Jewish man was murdered.
It was 1968, and Mayor John Lindsay’s attempt at making peace was an utter disaster: He had to flee East Midwood Jewish Center into his limo, with a jeering mob behind him. The cause of the furor was Lindsay’s cooperation with an experiment in community control of public schools in a district called Ocean Hill–Brownsville. The neighborhood, once a hub of immigrant Jewish life, was now mostly Black, mostly poor, and eager to exercise self-determination and power as the civil rights movement crested.
As historian Richard Kahlenberg recounted to the Forward, the new district school superintendent sought to have an all-Black teacher workforce. Teachers were largely Jewish — and expendable. The district transferred 19 of them, prompting strikes by the teacher’s union that roiled the city.
The union had another weapon in its arsenal: the charge that the firings were acts of antisemitism.
For his 1973 movie Sleeper, Woody Allen premised the futuristic sci-fi comedy on a joke few today would understand: that the world as we had known it ended when “a man named Albert Shanker got hold of a nuclear warhead.”
Back then, as president of the United Federation of Teachers, Shanker was one of the most newsmaking Jews in America. And he had a compelling story to sell to his members, the media and elected officials. He seized on a flamingly antisemitic anonymous letter placed in teachers’ mailboxes at a middle school and had it reprinted by the hundreds of thousands to show the world.
It read, in part: “It is Impossible For The Middle East Murderers of Colored People to Possibly Bring To This Important Task The Insight, The Concern, The Exposing Of The Truth That is a Must If The Years Of Brainwashing And Self-Hatred That Has Been Taught To Our Black Children By Those Bloodsucking Exploiters and Murderers Is To Be Over Come.”
Jewish alarm in the face of such provocation — not to mention dismissals without cause, something out of a Soviet Union purge — was certainly warranted. Conflicts between the community-control school board and teachers escalated inside school buildings, prompting Jewish teachers to file complaints that prompted grand jury indictments and to seek police protection.
District leaders’ attempt to steamroll the union, and escalating clashes with the largely white workforce, created an intolerant and intolerable climate. All the same, Shanker’s conversion of the complex facts of the situation into a hardened story of war on the Jews only added to the turmoil. Lindsay’s crucial mistake was to deliver his support for a bold experiment in establishing Black and Puerto Rican power without heed to the force of nature that was organized labor in its heyday — which was by extension organized Jewish power. By the time he faced the furious mob during the second of three strikes, it was too late.
When thinking about Mamdani and the frenzy of the moment over the fate of New York Jews under his mayoralty, my mind sometimes flashes to the Daily News photo capturing Lindsay’s truly awful moment — dashing out of a synagogue turned into a battleground, after Rabbi Harry Halpern tried in vain to keep decorum in the sanctuary.
East Midwood today is my congregation and community, a vantage point from which to look at the present landscape through the lens of history and see two kinds of power at play.
There is the kind of war that Shanker fought: where Jews, faced with a competing claim for power, resort to charges of antisemitism as a shortcut to establishing moral authority and political leverage. Ultimately, what Shanker was doing was protecting the jobs of union members and the civil service apparatus that organized their world. That was his job! But saying that would have been a much harder sell than “antisemitism” against the enormous public sympathies for Black power as a righteous cause.
Benjamin Netanhayu, in a newly released campaign video responding to Mamdani’s declaration that he is a war criminal, is playing the same game Shanker did. The video, based on a Fox News interview with the Israeli prime minister, is a smear job, seizing on the recent stabbing of a Jewish man on the Upper West Side to accuse Mamdani and his wife of being personally responsible for making New York City unsafe for Jews. But they serve to elevate Netanyhu’s standing as a defender of Israel.
I found Mamdani’s video indictment of Netanyahu alarming, too: prosecutorial, selective in the facts presented, and utterly unconstructive in providing leadership, even knowing his goal of eliminating Israel as a Jewish state. It only turns up the heat fueling what has become a panic in American politics over U.S. aid, doubling down on Israel as a pariah nation.
But he is, ultimately, a mayor — someone who admitted he has no power to follow through on his vow to arrest Netanyahu but very much does control how he runs his city. As much as anything, the Upper West Side stabbing reflects years of leaders’ failures to fix broken mental health services, on top of which his nothingburger move to create a new Department of Community Safety to respond to mental health crises is just another layer of sedimentary crud.
Meanwhile, the fear that Netanyahu and others are exploiting for their own political purposes clouds a clear view of the second kind of power, which Mamdani’s administration is actually exercising on the ground. We see it in how his police department has responded to conflict involving Jewish communities: not pitting one group against another, the world against Jews, but carefully balancing rights, safety and interests in potentially explosive situations. Lindsay could have learned something here.
Infinite credit goes to Mamdani’s appointee as NYPD commissioner, Jessica Tisch, a Zionist and a capable leader — and to Mamdani for letting her do her job.
I was witness to how Mamdani and Tisch’s NYPD responded to the extremely difficult challenge of synagogue protests, which erupted this spring outside land sales events that included properties on the occupied West Bank. And once again, the story came to East Midwood Jewish Center’s doorstep, thanks to a sale happening at Young Israel across the street.
The protests culminated in some upsetting moments. Marchers parading through a Jewish neighborhood’s streets carrying Palestinian flags and “Free Gaza” banners sent an unmistakable message of disdain and exclusion. And yes, some scary clashes you might have seen on social media, such as a protester shining a strobe light into a Jewish teen’s eyes, actually happened.
But what the world did not see was the discipline the NYPD brought to keeping the demonstrators at a distance from the synagogue — and to keeping taunts and chants from escalating into anything worse.
The rival camps and their flags met face to face in the middle of a major intersection in what could have been a Brooklyn rumble, but police did their best to steer the sides into separate zones. Some of the most aggressive insults came from Jewish teens blindsided by a hostile presence on their turf. One protester-counterprotester pair got locked into an extended debate about their opposing views on the fate of Israel and Palestinians. I gave them my card and said, only half jokingly, that they should consider doing a podcast.
None of this is to say that Mamdani’s words on the global stage are making Jews any safer. His fixation on uniquely attacking Netanyahu, when a mayor’s job description requires governing all New Yorkers, gives permission to those determined to antagonize Jewish supporters of Israel — as does his encouragement to protest the prime minister when he visits for the UN General Assembly in September, where clashes could break the containment that was possible in sleepy Brooklyn.
But a look back at John Lindsay’s catastrophic scramble to make peace is a reminder that it’s the decisions about how to deploy power within a mayor’s domain that ultimately determine Jewish safety.
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