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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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Latest Epstein files release unleashes wave of antisemitic conspiracy theories on social media
(JTA) — A bank account named for an ancient god in Israel. A “synagogue of Satan.” References to “goyim” that hint at a Jewish-run global cabal. The mystery of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s alleged visit to China.
These are among the latest antisemitic conspiracy theories to be born from the Jeffrey Epstein files, following the document dump that has occupied online commentators for days.
Since the financial advisor and sex trafficker’s arrest by federal authorities in July 2019 and death by suicide a month later, antisemitic conspiracy theories about him have circulated widely, often invoking his Jewish identity and connections with Jewish and Israeli leaders.
But the Justice Department’s newly released batch of Epstein files on Friday, which contained over 3 million pages of documents, has taken things to a new intensity.
“If you think Epstein was just some rich pedo, you’re missing the big picture,” wrote the X account Clandestine, which has more than 734,000 followers. “Epstein was part of the satanic global elite that pull the strings from the shadows. Epstein was a Deep State puppet master.”
Mike Rothschild, a writer who researches antisemitic conspiracy theories on the far right, said the amount of material available in the files made them fertile ground for misinterpretation and confirmation bias.
“Whatever your particular brand of conspiracy theory is, there’s something in the files for you,” Rothschild told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “One of the problems that we’re having is that there is so much information and there’s no filter for it.”
Among the real revelations in the documents are a variety of exchanges of relevance to the broader Jewish world. Those include revelations that various Jewish nonprofits had courted Epstein for donations even after his conviction, evidence of Epstein’s financial ties with several Orthodox yeshivas, and new details about his well-known relationship with former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak.
Some of the emails also show Epstein referencing the High Holidays and deploying Jewish phrases like “goyim” in a disparaging manner.
“This is the way the jew make money.. and made a fortune in the past ten years„ selling short the shippping futures„ let the goyim deal in the real world,” wrote Epstein in a 2009 email to the cognitive psychologist and onetime Trump University executive Roger Schank.
In another email dated August 2010 to Jewish entertainment publicist Peggy Siegal, discussing a party guest list, Epstein wrote, “No, goyim in abundance- jpmorgan execs brilliant wasps.”
Some of the largest conspiracist personalities seized on the new document dump, claiming that it confirmed their longstanding beliefs about secret Jewish control.
“Remember the end of last year when I was called antisemitic for telling you this is the literal, religious worldview of many people in power?,” Candace Owens, right-wing commentator turned conspiracist, wrote in a post on X responding to a photo of an email where Epstein used the term. “Type in ‘goy’ or ‘goyim’ in the Epstein files and be sure to tag a Christian who needs to wake up and leave the Zionist cause.”
In an hour-long livestream titled “BAAL SO HARD: The Epstein Files,” Owens referred to Jews as “pagan gypsies” and repeated the neo-Nazi conspiracy that B’nai Brith was behind the “ritualistic murder” of Mary Phagan, whose killing sparked the antisemitic lynching of Leo Frank in 1915.
“The Epstein files create an opportunity for us to discuss this, to hear the way they speak about us behind closed doors exactly how Sigmund Freud spoke, it’s racist,” said Owens during the stream, which had reached 2 million views on YouTube Thursday. “I want to make it clear that this is for them a religious philosophy, a racist perspective that we are goyim, meaning cattle, that are meant to be herded and ruled over.”
On Sunday, Owens posted on X, “Yes, we are ruled by satanic pedophiles who work for Israel,” adding “This is the synagogue of Satan we are up against.”
It isn’t just leading antisemitic personalities but rank-and-file social media users who have sought to paint the data dump as an indictment of Jewish power.
“Normies: ‘let’s not jump to any antisemitic conclusions, we don’t know why Epstein did these terrible things.’ Epstein: ‘I love trafficking children, manipulating markets, and don’t believe goyim are human. Also this is all because I am Jewish,’” wrote an Eastern Orthodox Christianity influencer on X.
The Nexus Project, an antisemitism watchdog group, condemned the proliferation of antisemitic Epstein conspiracy theories in a series of posts on X, writing, “The Epstein files are real. The antisemitism they’re fueling is also real. And right now, the second part is getting almost no attention.”
“Jeffrey Epstein was a monster. His crimes were real. His victims deserve justice and are being revictimized right now by the DOJ,” the Nexus Project wrote. “Turning his private emails into proof of a Jewish conspiracy is pure antisemitism. And it is spreading faster than anyone is willing to say.”
Rothschild said he believed the files were “reinforcing stuff that these people already are pushing out.”
“If you are predisposed to believe Candace Owens’ theory that Israel is behind everything bad that’s ever happened, you’re going to find it in the Epstein files, even if it’s not there, because there’s so many mentions and there’s so much intrigue swirling around about it, because it’s just all this raw material you can kind of use it to make whatever you want,” said Rothschild.
New conspiracy theories also stemmed from an email exchange where Epstein requested money be wired to a bank account that some concluded was titled “Baal,” the name of an ancient Canaanite god.
“BREAKING: 🇺🇸 🇮🇱 EPSTEIN NAMED HIS BANK ACCOUNT BAAL,” wrote AdameMedia, a popular right wing X account that frequently posts conspiratorial content. “Baal is a demonic being that was worshipped in ancient israel by some hebrews before they converted to Judaism. Child sacrifice is a ritual of Baal worshippers, usually through burning, like lsraeI did to Gaza. Archaeological discoveries have found thousands of urns with cremated infant and small children remains. Now we have evidence of Epstein’s circle kiIIing and even eating children.” (Similar files say “bank name” where this one says “baal,” suggesting an error.)
Others across the ideological spectrum extended longstanding theories about Epstein’s ties to Israel.
On Friday, the right-wing anti-Israel personality Tucker Carlson hosted Cenk Uygur, the progressive co-creator of The Young Turks, for a podcast interview titled “Cenk Uygur: Epstein, JFK, 9-11, Israel’s Terrorism and the Consequences of Opposing It,” during which the pair claimed that Epstein was an agent of the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad. (In July, Carlson received pushback from former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett after he said Epstein worked for Mossad.)
“Jeffrey Epstein was much more powerful than we realized. He could set up a meeting with almost any world leader. He can get almost anyone into the White House. Again, Ehud Barak has trouble getting into the White House, Epstein makes a call, boom, he’s in the White House. Israeli spy stays over at Epstein’s house,” said Uygur. “There’s just no question about it. He is definitely intelligence and in every turn he’s looking to help one country and it’s Israel. American media says shut up.”
Left-wing Twitch streamer Hasan Piker also repeated the claim that Epstein was working for Israel in a post on X Sunday.
“Benjamin netenyahu [sic] is in the files and former pm ehud barak has such an extensive relationship w esptein [sic] they might as well call it the israel files what the fuck are you talking about,” wrote Piker in another post on X, responding to influencer Eyal Yakoby’s claims that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was not named in the files.
The DOJ’s Epstein database includes 659 search results for “Netanyahu,” but the vast majority of the documents that appear under the search include news articles forwarded to and from Epstein relating to the Israeli leader.
“Going by sort of the raw number of mentions in an email database is not helpful, because there’s no context for it,” said Rothschild. “If there’s 630 mentions of Netanyahu, but 100 of them are just forwarded articles, and 100 of them are people responding to Epstein saying how much they hate Netanyahu, that doesn’t mean anything. It just means that you have this number and people run with it, because people are taking these things and turning them into proof for whatever conspiracy they already believe in.”
On X, another conspiracy theory took hold after users claimed that an email sent from China to Epstein in April 2009 coincided with a trip by Netanyahu that same month. (The article cited said Netanyahu met with the Chinese foreign affairs minister in Jerusalem, not China.)
“Benjamin Netanyahu was in China and it seems likely that he was the man sending Jeffrey Epstein torture videos,” wrote Jake Shields, a far-right influencer and former MMA champion, in a post on X.
Other emails appeared to tie Epstein to Russia, leading to speculation that he had provided intelligence to the country and prompting calls for an investigation by the Polish prime minister.
Some conspiracy theorists online rejected the idea that Epstein might have been a Russian asset, instead suggesting it is a distraction being offered to take the heat off Israel.
“The memo went out, and the media is trying to say that Jeffrey Epstein worked for the KGB,” said the TikTok influencer “contraryian” in a video posted Tuesday that has amassed more than 30,000 likes. “He might have had multiple passports, but he talked to Israeli politicians, Jewish businessmen, and repeatedly invokes his Jewish identity.”
In response to a New York Post article about Epstein’s alleged Russian affiliations, one X user with 300,000 followers and a stream of antisemitic posts claimed that the coverage was evidence of a “Jewish controlled media.”
“Jeffrey Epstein- ‘I work for the Rothschilds, Israel, and world Jewry.’ Jew York Post- ‘Epstein probably worked for the Russians….,’” the post, read. “You don’t hate the Jewish controlled media enough.”
In a podcast episode Monday, Jewish conservative pundit Ben Shapiro, who has previously criticized conservative rivals for linking Epstein with Mossad, said there was not evidence in the files that Epstein was blackmailing people “on behalf of a foreign power or a cadre of powerful people who are attempting to shape global policy.”
Rothschild, the conspiracy theory expert, said everything he has seen reflects deep-seated antisemitic animus among conspiracy theorists.
“Antisemitism is huge in these circles, it always has been,” he said. “Whether it’s just outright attacks on Jews, or the sort of more crouched globalists, European bankers, you know, antisemitism is a huge part of that world.”
But he emphasized that not all claims about Epstein amount conspiracy theories — which is why the drumbeat of antisemitism can continue unabated.
“Jeffrey Epstein was part of a cabal. I mean, it’s not like the Elders of Zion sitting around in a dark room, you know, deciding on the fates of nations, but it’s pretty clear that Epstein was at the center of a gigantic conspiracy,” said Rothschild. “That’s not a theory. That has nothing to do with Judaism. It has everything to do with greed and perversion.”
The consequences, he said, are bad for the Jews and for everyone else.
“Anything that calcifies our politics and our discourse even more, I think is very dangerous,” Rothschild said. “Certainly there’s always going to be a danger that it falls disproportionately on the Jewish community. I think it’s probably making life difficult for actual survivors of trauma like this to get people to pay attention to them.”
The post Latest Epstein files release unleashes wave of antisemitic conspiracy theories on social media appeared first on The Forward.
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Netanyahu is floundering without the hostages
After the return of the final hostage last week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu launched a fresh wave of propaganda aimed at rewriting history.
Among the false claims spread by him and his allies: That outrage against Haredi draft dodgers is an exclusively leftist issue (it’s not); that opposition leaders Yair Lapid and Benny Gantz collaborated with Qatar, rather than any of Netanyahu’s aides (the facts say differently); that former United States President Joe Biden is to blame for Israeli soldiers’ deaths — despite the exceedingly limited reach of the arms embargo Netanyahu cites as being at fault; that the attorney general’s office is trying to dismantle Israel’s democracy, when it is simply holding Netanyahu and his cronies to account.
Perhaps worst of all, a Netanyahu envoy baselessly claimed that Israeli hostages’ families aided Hamas
These lies are bolder and more pernicious than those we have become accustomed to from the prime minister’s office. And it’s because, with elections quickly approaching, Netanyahu is in a particularly precarious situation.
The return of the body of Staff Sergeant Ran Gvili marks a closing point in the war: One of its two stated aims — to secure the return of all hostages and oust Hamas — has been completed. Now, all the public attention that was focused on protesting to secure the hostages’ return for nearly two-and-a-half years is ready to be redirected.
Focusing on ousting Netanyahu is an easy next step, and the prime minister knows it. Which means the only way he can hope to maintain enough support to hold on to the government is by doing what he knows best: Pushing an aggressive propaganda campaign to rewrite history.
Since the onset of war with Hamas, Netanyahu and his inner circle have been selling half-truths, deceptions and flat-out lies to convince the public that the war would end in “total victory.” But Israelis remain unconvinced. Fewer than one-third of Israelis believe that Israel won the war.
Netanyahu, who is currently ahead in the polls for November’s election but lacks a majority coalition, can’t easily change that skepticism. What he thinks he can do, it seems, is spin a convincing story of his own victimhood and blamelessness.
Netanyahu has been laying the groundwork for this campaign for years. His first interest after the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023, according to one of his former aides, was figuring out how to avoid taking responsibility for the security failures that primed the ground for the massacre. Since those early days, his brazen willingness to push false narratives and point fingers at anyone but himself has been on full display.
Now, he’s amping up the falsehoods, using the rhetoric of terror and treason to inflame animus toward those seeking his removal and convince his base that they, too, are under attack. He has leaned into his focus on certain favorite targets: protesters, the opposition, and the so-called “deep state,” a term mainstreamed by U.S. President Donald Trump, who has used it to spread the conspiracy that government workers are trying to undermine the national interest.
“In these days we are witnessing an illegal and deliberate witch hunt,” read a Likud Party statement that Netanyahu reposted last week, claiming that effort aimed for “the overthrow of the right-wing government by the Israeli deep state and its operatives in the State Attorney’s Office, the Attorney General’s Office, and the police.”
“This witch hunt is designed to instill fear and terror” in Israeli politicians, the post continued, “while creating a noose around the people surrounding the Prime Minister.”
Days later, on Feb. 2, Netanyahu reposted a clip from Channel 14, with which he is generally allied, implying that Lapid and some hostage families were involved with Qatari foreign agents. Here, too, the message was the same: Don’t believe the bad press about Netanyahu — he, like the Israeli public, is a victim.
It’s becoming increasingly clear that Netanyahu is staking his political future on conspiracy theories and lies. His commitment to that strategy was on full display on Thursday, at a meeting of the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee.
There, Netanyahu regurgitated false excuses for Israel’s failures leading up to and on Oct. 7, 2023. He said that defense officials thwarted his past attempts to deter Hamas, when he in fact spent years allowing Qatari funds to be channeled to the group. And he accused former Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar — whom he fired last year — of falsifying documents that show he was updated about a possible Hamas invasion before Oct. 7, as part of an effort to claim that Israeli intelligence shown to him never indicated an impending attack. Yet independent Israeli media have confirmed that the documents Bar produced are legitimate.
What this barrage of untruths shows us: Netanyahu is floundering without the hostages.
Many believe he unnecessarily prolonged the war to sell the public on the idea that they needed him. No matter how much the hostage families might accuse him of delaying their loved ones’ return, he could still argue that the war he was leading gave Israel its only shot at their recovery.
Now, all the accountability that he sought to avoid over the last several years is coming to a head. What remains to be seen: Will he finally have to face the music, or will he succeed in manipulating Israeli voters into giving him another shot at power?
The post Netanyahu is floundering without the hostages appeared first on The Forward.
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A maligned marker honoring a French Nazi sympathizer is off NYC’s streets — for now
(New York Jewish Week) — Menachem Rosensaft was pleasantly surprised this week to learn that a historical marker honoring a Nazi collaborator that has been a bane of his existence for years had been removed.
Then panic set in: Could New York City really be planning to reinstall the plaque honoring Pierre Laval, the Vichy prime minister during World War II who was executed for treason?
“It’s one thing of making a decision to remove something,” Rosensaft told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “It’s quite another to make a conscious decision, of doing the work in order to replace it and put it back.”
For years, Rosensaft — general counsel emeritus of the World Jewish Congress and the son of Holocaust survivors — has lobbied against the plaques honoring Laval and Philippe Pétain, hero of the French army during World War I and later head collaborator with the Nazi regime. They are two of 206 names embedded on a half-mile stretch of Lower Broadway known as the “Canyon of Heroes.”
Rosensaft published an essay several years ago urging the removal of the plaques. He wrote another last month in conjunction with International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
What he didn’t know at the time was that Laval’s name had been removed back in November after city officials deemed it a tripping hazard. The cold snap and winter weather have wreaked havoc on the pavement, causing more than a dozen markers in total to be removed.
They could return. The Alliance for Downtown New York, the nonprofit that installed the plaques, plans to eventually replace them, the New York Times reported. The Mayoral Advisory Commission on City Art, Monuments, and Markers has previously fended off calls to remove the markers.
In 2017, following the white supremacist Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, then-Mayor Bill de Blasio tweeted that his administration would remove all hate symbols from city property — starting with the Philippe Pétain plaque downtown. (The plaque is still in place.)
But in 2018, the monuments commission recommended that the Pétain plaque remain where it is — though it advocated for “re-contextualizing them in place to continue the public dialogue.” The commission also recommended the removal of all official references to the name “Canyon of Heroes,” so as not to mischaracterize the markers as a “celebration” of any historical figures.
In 2023, following a national reckoning over Confederate statues that saw many of them torn down, then-Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine, who is Jewish, attended a Holocaust Remembrance Day event where he said it was “unacceptable” that Laval’s and Pétain’s names remained on the marker. Levine also sent a letter to the city’s Public Design Commission calling on the city to remove the plaques.
JTA has reached out to Mark Levine’s office — he is now the city’s comptroller — and City Hall for comment on the current situation.
The Alliance for Downtown New York contends that the removal of any of the plaques is a form of erasing history.
“Trying to render history free of mistakes, free of contradictions and horror, risks sanitizing our past and perhaps makes us more likely to repeat those mistakes,” Andrew Breslau, a representative from the Alliance for Downtown New York told The New York Times this week when it broke the news that Laval’s name had at least temporarily disappeared.
Before they became war criminals responsible for the deaths of more than 75,000 Jews, Laval and Pétain were honored in ticker-tape parades in 1931. Laval was even named Time Magazine’s “Man of the Year” that same year for his management of the Great Depression in France.
Rosensaft concedes that an additional plaque with the full context of who these men were would be “better than nothing.” But he said he would not give up advocating for their full removal.
“Controversial is one thing,” Rosensaft said. “And being convicted war criminals, both sentenced to death — one executed, the other had his sentence commuted — who were responsible for sending over 70,000 Jews, deporting them from France and sending them to their death is in a separate category.”
The post A maligned marker honoring a French Nazi sympathizer is off NYC’s streets — for now appeared first on The Forward.