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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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Israeli-American soldier Moshe Katz, killed in Lebanon rocket strike, laid to rest on Mt. Herzl
(JTA) — Hundreds gathered on Sunday night at Israel’s military cemetery on Mt. Herzl for the funeral of Moshe Yitzchak Hacohen Katz, an American-born Israeli soldier who was killed by a rocket strike on Saturday in southern Lebanon.
Katz, 22, from New Haven, Connecticut, is the fifth Israeli soldier killed in Lebanon since Hezbollah, an Iranian proxy in Lebanon, resumed attacks on Israel following a 2024 ceasefire, after Israeli and U.S. strikes on Iran last month.
“With unspeakable tragedy I regret to inform you that my 22 year old son Moshe Yitzchak a*h a sergeant in the idf, fell in battle in Lebanon,” Katz’s father, Mendy, wrote in a post on Facebook on Saturday. “My oldest Son with a zest for life and jokes. Burial is tomorrow in israel. Maybe we only share good news. My heart is shattered and the wound is real.”
Mendy Katz had been in Israel when the war began and posted on March 7 about witnessing his son’s graduation from basic training with the Israel Defense Forces before returning to the United States via Egypt.
During the funeral on Sunday, Katz, who was posthumously promoted from corporal to sergeant and was affiliated with Chabad, was eulogized by a host of fellow soldiers who referred to him as a “true friend” who “always used to make sure that anyone around him was always taken care of.”
“Moshe was a brave soldier, we have proof of that, but more than that, he was a loyal friend, he was a hard-working son and a loving, caring brother,” Adina, Katz’s sister, said between tears during her eulogy. “Moshe’s body might be gone, but his legacy is not. He was a proud soldier and a proud Jew, and we are the proudest family.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu offered condolences to Katz’s family in a post on X and wished a speedy recovery to three other soldiers moderately wounded in the attack.
“Moshe z”l immigrated to the land from the United States, enlisted in the Paratroopers Brigade, and fought bravely for the defense of our homeland,” Netanyahu wrote. “On behalf of all Israeli citizens, we embrace Moshe z”l’s family in this difficult hour and wish a swift and complete recovery to our fighters who were wounded in that incident.”
On Sunday, Netanyahu announced that he had instructed the Israeli military to further expand its operations in Lebanon in order to “finally thwart the threat of invasion and to push the anti-tank missile fire away from our border.”
Menachem Geisinsky, a photographer and friend of Katz’s, also eulogized him in a post on Facebook, writing that he “forever will be my hero” for “his bravery in coming all the way from New Haven, Connecticut to fight for what he believed was right and also for being a man who wouldn’t tolerate a frown.”
“So be like Moshe. Be a hero. Make someone’s day. Make someone giggle or smile,” wrote Geisinsky. “Step up, and be the man Moshe was, and forever will be remembered as.”
Katz is survived by his parents, Mendy and Devorah Katz; siblings Adina, Yehuda, Shua and Dubi; and grandparents.
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A second poll of US Jews finds the same result: Most oppose the war in Iran
(JTA) — For the second time in a day, a nonpartisan poll has found that most American Jews oppose the U.S. military campaign against Iran — even as 90% of them say they oppose the Iranian regime.
The new poll, conducted by GBAO Strategies on behalf of the liberal pro-Israel lobby J Street, found that 60% of U.S. Jews say they oppose “the US military action against Iran.”
About the same proportion, 63%, said they believed “the most effective way to address U.S. and Israeli concerns about Iran’s nuclear program and destabilizing regional actions is through diplomacy and sanctions,” not military action.
And the majority of American Jews said they believed the war will not improve Israel’s security, with a third saying they believe the war will weaken Israel’s security.
As with the previous poll released earlier on Monday, the poll found a sharp partisan and denominational split in the results, with Republicans and Orthodox Jews more likely to support the war, which the United States and Israel jointly launched on Feb. 28.
A press release from J Street touted the survey as “the first methodologically sound poll of Jewish American opinion since the conflict began,” positioning the results as an antidote to findings from the Jewish People Policy Institute, which surveys “connected” U.S. Jews and has found that a majority of them support the war, even though the proportion has fallen since the war’s start.
“This data is a wake-up call for anyone claiming to speak for the American Jewish community while beating the drums of war,” J Street President Jeremy Ben-Ami said in a statement. “Most American Jews see this war for what it is: A reckless, unforced error by a President who has no clear, achievable goals or an exit strategy. This poll proves that the ‘pro-Israel’ position is the pro-peace position – and that means stopping this war before more lives are lost.”
The survey of 800 Jewish registered voters was conducted March 24 to 26 and has a margin of error of 3.5 percentage points.
The J Street survey also asked respondents about other issues related to Israel. It found that 70% of U.S. Jewish voters said they are more sympathetic to the Israelis than the Palestinians in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, compared to multiple polls finding an even split or slight edge for the Palestinians among Americans overall.
It also found that 70% of American Jews oppose unconditional military and financial assistance to Israel — reflecting a mounting political consensus that is at odds with the priorities of AIPAC, the traditional pro-Israel lobby.
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Their sons survived the battlefield but not their wounds. Now these Israeli mothers mourn together.
(JTA) — TEL AVIV — On the morning she left Jerusalem for a health retreat for bereaved mothers, Taly Drori was surprised to recognize another woman in her rideshare. More than two years earlier, they had often crossed paths in the intensive care unit of the same hospital, where their sons were being treated in neighboring rooms.
The woman was Hazel Brief, the mother of Yona, an American-Israeli soldier who was seriously wounded at Kibbutz Kfar Aza in the opening hours of the Oct. 7 attack. Drori’s son, Chanan, also a soldier, was severely injured in Gaza in December of that year.
Both women spent long nights watching their sons fight to graduate from intensive care into rehabilitation, a milestone neither reached. Consumed by their sons’ care, they barely spoke. When they passed each other in the ICU hallway of Sheba Medical Center, Brief said, it was often just “a nod and a look in the eyes, to say, I got you. I get you.”
After two months, Chanan died from a fungal infection. A year later, Yona followed.
The retreat, held in the Gilboa region in northern Israel, offered a different kind of rehabilitation, Brief said, a “sacred space” where hallway nods gave way to a shared language of grief, as mothers try to rebuild themselves.
The gathering was part of a new initiative by OneFamily, an Israeli nonprofit that supports families of terror victims and fallen soldiers. Its impact is so significant that founder Chantal Belzberg was awarded the Israel Prize for Lifetime Achievement last week, the highest civilian honor awarded by the Israeli government — at a time when more Israelis are unfortunately joining its constituency.
“I am moved not because of myself, but because of the people for whom OneFamily was created: bereaved parents, widows, orphans, bereaved siblings, double orphans, and the wounded, with visible and invisible wounds,” Belzberg said in a statement. “This prize is, first and foremost, recognition of them. It is an embrace for the thousands of families who continue to carry this country, even when their hearts are broken.”
Belzberg’s daughter, Michal Belzberg-Slovin, is a yoga instructor who embraced Drori’s suggestion for a weekly health-and-wellness circle for bereaved mothers, centered on movement, mindfulness and nutrition. During the current war, meetings are taking place in a bomb shelter. But before it began, Belzberg-Slovin led 10 weeks of Wednesday sessions before the group traveled north together.
The program draws more than a dozen women, ranging from their early 40s to late 70s, all bereaved mothers of soldiers except one whose son was killed at the Nova music festival. It was originally intended for mothers bereaved in the current war, but the flyer OneFamily circulated omitted that detail. As a result, several mothers who had lost sons years earlier joined the circle as well. Belzberg-Slovin called it a happy accident, saying their presence was “very strengthening and healing,” and that it offered newer members a glimpse of how life can reshape itself around loss over time.
After Chanan’s death, Drori said she felt grief register physically before she could process it emotionally. “My life energy was draining away from me,” she said. She described chest spasms, sleeplessness and difficulty concentrating. At one point, she struggled even to stand upright. “I felt like I was made of lead.”
The next summer, she and her husband Roni spent several weeks at a health retreat on a kibbutz in northern Israel, a change of scenery that coincided with the war with Iran. The days were structured around nature walks, breathing exercises, yoga and simple, clean meals.
“The place slowly brought us back to life,” she said. That experience, she said, convinced her that bereavement requires deliberate physical care as well as emotional support, because “grief and trauma are stored in the body.”
Drori took the experience and pitched it to OneFamily as a half-day program to fit into the routines of women juggling work, family and mourning. Belzberg-Slovin bought into the idea immediately.
“This is my language,” she said, describing years of yoga, reflexology and aromatherapy.
Belzberg-Slovin had grown up around OneFamily, which her parents founded in 2001 after the Sbarro pizzeria bombing in Jerusalem, inspired by her decision as a bat mitzvah-age girl to forgo a party and redirect the money to victims and their families.
The Wednesday circles became even more of a family affair when her husband, Nadav, stepped in to cook the group’s vegan meal.
While not bereaved herself, Belzberg-Slovin said her own uneven path into adulthood has made her attuned to other people’s pain. She recalled a childhood in which terror victims and their families were always in her home, and a young adulthood marked by hurdles, including an eating disorder, cycling though career paths and remaining single long after most of her peers were married.
“I’m not one of them but something in my upbringing gave me the sensitivity to be fully with them in this process,” she said of the women in her circle.
Yoga and OneFamily, she said, were the two constants. “OneFamily has always been my identity. I always went back to it,” she said. Now, married with two children and a third on the way, she said she finally feels she is arriving on her own terms. “Now I’m bringing my new self into OneFamily which is special for me.”
The circle incorporates trauma-sensitive yoga, adapting an approach often used with survivors of sexual abuse and other trauma. The emphasis, Belzberg-Slovin said, is not on achieving a pose but on slowing down and respecting where the body is holding. A second yoga teacher, who is also a licensed therapist, facilitates the group discussion afterward.
She described one participant who shared that she found it hard to enter a supermarket because she saw reminders of her son everywhere. “How do you get from yoga poses to speaking about grocery shopping? But that’s what happens,” Belzberg-Slovin said. “We bring up everything the body raises.”
One of the veteran bereaved mothers on the retreat was Ruhama Davino, whose son was killed nearly 12 years ago during the 2014 conflict in Gaza. Davino said she kept her relationship with OneFamily at arm’s length, speaking by phone but repeatedly declining invitations to attend programs. “Every time they called, I said no,” she said. “I wanted to stay far from the bereavement and just continue my life.”
She doesn’t know what made her finally show up to the Wednesday health circle after so many years, but she left the first time without any doubt that she would be back, she said. “It’s powerful to be there, to be part of it, to draw strength.” Being in a room with mothers newly bereaved, alongside others who have lived with loss for years, changed her mind. “In the end, each of us needs this for the body and the soul,” she said.
Before the war, Chanan Drori had been studying biotechnology at Hadassah College and was preparing to begin his final research project in a medical research lab. After his death, the lab launched a research track in his name focused on infectious fungi, the complication that ultimately killed him.
“Chanan dreamed of helping people for whom no cure existed,” Drori said. “He dreamed of developing those medicines, so we felt like the best way to commemorate him was by realizing his dream.”
Chanan was treated at Sheba by Dafna Yahav, the head of its infectious diseases unit, who also treated Yona. Brief credited Yahav with pushing to bring in experimental drugs from overseas and said she never approached the family as a case first. “With all her accolades and running departments and being a world renowned expert, she’s an incredible human before being an incredible doctor,” Brief said. “She always responded first as a mom talking to another mom.”
Although the timelines were different — Yona was hospitalized for 417 days and Chanan for two months — Brief said the two mothers shared a form of loss that is hard to explain even to families of other soldiers who receive their news in an instant, with a knock at the door.
The similarities didn’t end there. Both men had volunteered to serve. Chanan did not meet criteria for a combat role, and Yona was exempt after he was wounded by an exploding pipe bomb months before Oct. 7. Both men loved music. OneFamily helped bring a piano for Yona, who played piano and guitar, into the hospital.
Both men and their families believed they would survive. Despite sustaining 13 bullet wounds and enduring repeated complications during his hospitalization, Brief said she expected Yona to “make it.”
Three weeks before Chanan died, doctors woke him from a medically induced coma and the family brought musicians to play at his bedside, including Yagel Harush, a singer he loved. The family invited Harush back to sing at the celebration they expected to hold after Chanan’s recovery, and at his wedding to his fiancée, Rivka.
“He was supposed to live,” Drori said.
Instead, this winter, two weeks after Drori returned from the north, Harush performed at a memorial event for the second anniversary of Chanan’s death.
When Drori met Brief again at the retreat, the two women posed for a photo to send to Yahav. Brief said she didn’t want to describe the retreat as “nice” or “comforting,” because nothing offers real consolation — “there’s no nechama,” she said, using the Hebrew word for solace. But OneFamily, she said, offered something she struggled to find elsewhere.
“You so often feel abnormal in society and here all of a sudden you feel normal,” she said. “Here’s another mom that knows what it’s like to see her son in intensive care for an extended period of time. I can’t share that with many people.”
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