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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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John Galliano bows out of Met exhibition as backlash over antisemitism mounts
(JTA) — John Galliano withdrew from a planned exhibition of his work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in response to a rapidly escalating controversy over the museum’s decision to honor the fashion designer despite his history of antisemitic and racist remarks.
Galliano said Monday that, after discussions with the Met and others involved in the exhibition, he had decided that it was best for the show not to take place “at this time.” He said he remained accountable for the pain caused by his past words, particularly to Jews and Asians, and recognized that an exhibition honoring his work could be painful for some. The Met said it agreed with his decision.
The reversal came less than a month after the Met announced that Galliano would be the subject of its spring 2027 Costume Institute exhibition, a rare honor that would have made him only the third living designer to receive a solo show there. The exhibition was to open in conjunction with the Met Gala, one of New York’s biggest annual cultural and celebrity events.
Opposition to the exhibition appeared to mount steadily in recent weeks. Early public pushback came from Dana Thomas, Galliano’s biographer, who wrote in an Aug. 6 New York Times guest essay that the Met had made a serious error in choosing to honor him. The criticism then broadened, with Jewish leaders, museum donors and New York politicians publicly urging the museum to reconsider.
Those criticizing the exhibition were New York City Council Speaker Julie Menin, who called the decision deeply painful for Jewish New Yorkers. Prominent Met donor Alice Tisch described the planned exhibition as a “whitewash,” according to the Times.
The reversal is also a setback for Anna Wintour, Condé Nast’s chief content officer and the driving force behind the Met Gala. She had championed Galliano for decades and was among the Met figures most closely associated with bringing the exhibition to the museum.
The controversy was complicated by the fact that some prominent rabbis had actually met with Galliano before the exhibition was announced and had come away believing that his repentance was sincere, as JTA reported earlier this month.
Rabbi Rick Jacobs, president of the Union for Reform Judaism, said Galliano had shown the contrition necessary to earn his return to the fashion world. Rabbi Joshua Davidson of Congregation Emanu-El, a Reform synagogue in New York, likewise said he was convinced by Galliano’s statements of remorse and his efforts to educate himself about Judaism and the Holocaust. Neither rabbi endorsed the Met’s decision to honor Galliano, however. Rather, both told the museum that if it proceeded, it had a responsibility to make Galliano’s antisemitic conduct and the lessons of his repentance an explicit part of the exhibition.
That distinction was reflected in the Met’s original plans. Andrew Bolton, the Costume Institute’s curator, said in announcing the exhibition that it would address Galliano’s antisemitic and anti-Asian conduct, as well as his firing from Dior, a hate speech conviction in France and his subsequent treatment for addiction and public acknowledgment of his actions.
Galliano, among the most celebrated designers in the world, was fired by Christian Dior in 2011 after a video surfaced showing him praising Hitler and making antisemitic remarks in a tirade in a Paris cafe, and directing an anti-Asian slur at the partner of a Jewish woman. A French court convicted him of making public insults based on race, religion and ethnicity.
After entering treatment for substance abuse, he embarked on a process of rehabilitation and eventually returned to the fashion industry. Abraham Foxman, then national director of the Anti-Defamation League, met privately with Galliano repeatedly; in 2013 the ADL said that Galliano had demonstrated “true contrition.”
After the initial announcement of the exhibition, Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO and national director of the ADL, noted that the organization had “long since accepted his apology,” but added that he understood “why some Jews may question the decision to include Galliano’s work in an exhibit given the massive spike in antisemitism in recent years.”
In a statement Monday, Greenblatt appeared to take a harder line in welcoming Galliano’s withdrawal.
“With antisemitism at crisis levels, the Met honoring John Galliano at this moment was misguided, and even Galliano ultimately recognized what the Met should have done from the start,” Greenblatt wrote on X. “This was the wrong move at the wrong moment. Timing matters.”
Galliano’s withdrawal leaves the Met without a planned spring 2027 Costume Institute exhibition. The museum said information about a replacement exhibition and the 2027 Met Gala will be announced later.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Julie Moos Named as the Forward’s New Editor-in-Chief & Chief Content Officer
The Forward today announced the appointment of Julie Moos as Editor-in-Chief & Chief Content Officer. This newly created executive position merges newsroom leadership with audience strategy, positioning the nation’s premier independent Jewish news outlet to accelerate digital growth and serve audiences across platforms.
The appointment was announced by Forward Publisher & CEO Rachel Fishman Feddersen.
Moos, who joined the Forward in 2024 as Managing Editor for Audience, previously served as Interim Editor-in-Chief and Vice President for Audience & Strategy. In these roles, she advanced the publication’s digital content strategy and helped secure major grant funding, including a prestigious Luce Foundation award to support the “Holy Ground” series chronicling Jewish life and reinvention across rural and small-town America.
Under Moos’ leadership, the Forward has hit unprecedented growth milestones:
- Record Audience Scale: Surpassed 100 million total audience views in 2025 across web, video, audio and social channels, as measured by Brandwatch.
- Social Acceleration: Grew social media reach by 280%, expanding video reporting to meet the audience where they are.
- Critical Acclaim: Led the Jewish journalism field in reporting awards, including record recognition from the New York and Los Angeles press associations.
- Product Innovation: Successfully relaunched specialized newsletter offerings, including Antisemitism Decoded.
“Julie’s new role marks a pivotal shift toward a fully integrated structure that meets the demands of the rapidly changing news environment,” said Feddersen. “By bringing editorial stewardship and audience strategy under unified leadership, we can ensure our high-impact reporting meets readers where they consume media today, expanding our reach and amplifying the Forward’s mission to elevate issues vital to the American Jewish community.”
Joel F. Brown, Chairman of the Forward Board of Directors, added: “Julie has made important contributions to the Forward from her first days with us and our franchise will accelerate its growth significantly under her editorial leadership. She has a deep and authentic devotion to Jewish communal life which she braids brilliantly with her excellence in journalism and her advanced command of media distribution strategy. I am confident that her leadership will ensure the Forward remains the premier, trusted media source for American Jews.”
Moos said, “I’m honored to lead this incredible team at a moment of dramatic change in the Jewish world and in the media. For over a century, the Forward has been a trusted guide and voice of Jewish life in America. Today, that requires deep, principled reporting, groundbreaking storytelling and ongoing innovation — from dynamic newsletters to video and live events — to ensure our work invites conversation and connection everywhere people watch, listen, read, talk and meet.”
Moos is a nationally recognized editor and media leader who has served in senior roles at McClatchy Media, the National Press Club Journalism Institute and The Poynter Institute. She edited the New York Times bestseller President Obama Election 2008: A Collection of Newspaper Front Pages Selected by the Poynter Institute.
She lives in Alexandria, VA. She is a graduate of Barnard College and earned a nonprofit management certificate from Georgetown University, where she taught digital journalism at the graduate level. She serves as an ambassador for Central Synagogue’s online community, The Neighborhood, and co-hosts the DC-area chapter. Julie has served for decades as a synagogue board member, staff member and active congregant in North Carolina, Florida and Chicago.
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Republican Mike Rogers is the Senate candidate Democrats need to save their party
Many progressive Michiganders – especially in the Jewish community – will hold their nose and vote for Democratic Senatorial candidate Abdul El-Sayed despite his association, friendship and political partnership with antisemitic streamer Hasan Piker.
Many will hold their nose because El-Sayed has called Israel a “rogue” state, refusing to recognize the Jewish State of Israel as legitimate.
They will hold their nose and vote for El-Sayed because they are more scared of the Republicans’ hold on the Senate than a tainted Democrat.
However, as a social progressive who almost always votes Democrat, I want to push back against this logic and urge my fellow Michigan Democrats and progressives to vote for Republican candidate Mike Rogers for the sake of progressive, democratic values.
For me, the disdain that El-Sayed has shown for the Jewish community, especially in his continuing refusal to disavow his relationship with Piker, puts him in the same category as candidates who are openly racist and homophobic. Even the most loyal progressive would reject a racist, even if that meant risking a Republican Senate.
To show the Democrats that such candidates should never be nominated, we must show them that such candidates can never win. Such a candidate winning would be a disaster for the most fundamental requirements we have for any candidate of any party.
Instead, those who really want to focus on turning the Senate Democratic should slip across Michigan’s border to Ohio to knock on doors for Sherrod Brown or donate to help James Talarico in Texas. Those efforts would be a real show of Democratic and progressive solidarity – much more than a vote for El-Sayed.
Donald Trump and the Republican party would like nothing more than to see Abdul El-Sayed in the Senate – an easy target to paint all progressives, liberals and loyal Democrats with the brush of anti-Zionism and antisemitism.
The anti-Israel and antisemitic words of El-Sayed and other extremists in the party are a poison that has the potential to severely damage the party long term and make it unviable both for Jews and all those with traditional liberal values. Only a decisive win for Rogers will send a clear message to the Democrats that a return to a stance that is both pro-Israel and pro Palestinian, respecting the Jewish community, is the only way for a strong party to stand up to the Republicans in national elections to defend our progressive values.
This election is not just about the safety and future of Jews in the Democratic party. It is also about returning America to a place where we do not tolerate the harassment of people with whom we politically disagree. The harassment and intimidation of any candidate considered pro-Israel at the Michigan Democratic convention in April traumatized many Jewish participants. Michigan’s Jewish Attorney General Dana Nessel skipped the convention on Saturday out of fear for her safety.
Meanwhile, El-Sayed has said nothing to apologize for his supporters who carried out this gross infraction of the democratic process. Imagine what the National Democratic Convention will look like in less than two years if this model of behavior is not denounced now. Jews with traditional pro-Israel values will see they have no place in the Democratic party.The only way to stop this behavior is to show that it leads to Democrats losing elections.
In recent days, El-Sayed reportedly apologized for remarks he made in March after a truck loaded with explosives rammed into Temple Israel in suburban Detroit with a driver intent on shooting whomever he didn’t blow up. There were more than 100 children inside.
Jews were shocked when El-Sayed seemed to justify the near murder with the words “hurt people hurt people.” His recent non-apology apology if anyone was hurt by his words made it worse.
He doubled down on recognizing the “context” for the attempted massacre: Israel’s actions in Lebanon fighting Hezbollah – the terror group in which the Michigan terrorist’s brother was a member when he died.
In other words, according to El-Sayed, if children are blown up in Michigan, you can blame Israel.
Moreover, he continues to blame Israel for Michigan not having enough funds for its public schools and other needs, a classic antisemitic deflection. His antisemitic blood libel continued after his primary victory when he accused Israel – not just its government – of being “bloodthirsty” – in its defensive war against Hamas.
El-Sayed’s friend and campaign partner Hasan Piker has shared the same sentiment ,warning pro-Israel American Jews that if they continue to defend Israel, they will be targeted because of that stance.
I urge my fellow progressives to examine Piker’s comments insulting Poles and Poland, blaming the West for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and his disdain for Black chatterers on his show – with the vilest of expressions. How can they vote for a candidate who befriends such a man and repeatedly invites him to campaign events?
Yes, Mike Rogers is an old-fashioned conservative who has had to cede some ground to Donald Trump’s conspiratorial views of the 2020 election. But I would argue that worse for our democracy is to normalize the cesspool of disgusting swearing and demonization that Piker champions.
Progressive Democrats must never give up the fight for our causes. However, in the long run, we must right the sinking ship of the Democratic party, a party which is our only hope for winning the war for our progressive values. The path to making this necessary correction is turning our energies to making sure that Mike Rogers defeats Abdul El-Sayed. That is why Rogers, a Republican, has my vote and my voice.
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