Uncategorized
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.
—
The post A new photo book celebrates the very Jewish cafeteria culture of a vanished New York appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
New CD of Yiddish children’s songs by Vilna-born composer David Botwinik
A new CD was released this year of delightful Yiddish children’s songs, composed by the Vilna-born musician David Botwinik who died in 2022 at the age of 101.
The album, Zumer iz shoyn vider do, which translates to “Summer is finally here again”, was compiled by Botwinik’s son, Sender Botwinik. It features 36 tracks of melodies composed by David Botwinik set to the works of various Yiddish poets, including David Botwinik himself.
The text and music for most of the songs were originally published in Botwinik’s seminal songbook, From Holocaust to Life, published in 2010 by the League for Yiddish. On this new CD, these songs are brought to life through the voices of both children and adults, with Sender Botwinik on the piano; Ken Richmond on violin; Shira Shazeer on accordion, and Richmond and Shazeer’s son Velvel on trombone.
These recordings are valuable not only for people familiar with the Yiddish language and culture, but also for others looking for resources and inspiration. Singers, music teachers, choir conductors and Yiddish language students will find a treasure trove of songs about the Jewish holidays, family, nature and celebration.
Born in Vilna in 1920, composer David Botwinik’s life was filled with music and creativity from his earliest years. As a young child, he would walk with his father to hear the cantors at the Vilna shtotshul — the main synagogue in what is now Vilnius, Lithuania.
At age 11, he became a khazndl, a colloquial Yiddish term for a child cantor, performing in several synagogues in Vilna. At 12, he composed his first melodies. Later he undertook advanced musical study in Rome.
In 1956, he settled in Montreal, soon to become a leading figure in the city’s thriving Yiddish cultural scene. He worked as a music teacher, choir director, writer and publisher. As he wrote in From Holocaust to Life, he sought, most of all, to “encourage maintaining Yiddish as a living language.”
There are many standout pieces on the CD, but I want to point out several whose lyrics, in addition to the melody, were written by David Botwinik himself. “Zumer” (Summer), the first song on the recording, gives the CD its title. In a Zoom interview with Sender and his wife, Naomi, they said that “Zumer” won first prize in a Jewish song competition in Canada in 1975, and that he remembered singing in his father’s choir for the competition.
“Zumer” is a jaunty earworm that opens with a recording of David Botwinik reading the lyrics, followed by the song itself, performed by a magnificent chorus of children from four Yiddish-speaking families who met years ago at the annual Yiddish Vokh retreat in Copake, New York.
Another standout song is “Shabes-lid” (Sabbath Song) which David Botwinik’s grandchild Dina Malka Botwinik sings with a pure, other-worldly sound:
Sholem-aleykhem, shabes-lebn,
Brengen ru hot dikh Got gegebn,
Ale mide tsu baglikn,
Likht un freyd zey shikn.
“Sholem-aleykhem, shabes shenster,”
Shvebt a gezang durkh ale fentster,
Shabes shenster, shabes libster,
Tayerer, heyliker du.
Welcome, dear Shabbos,
Given by God to bring us rest,
To gladden those who are tired
To send them light and joy,
Welcome loveliest Shabbos,
The song drifts from every window.
Loveliest Shabbat, dearest Shabbos
Precious holy one.
Sender Botwinik’s website also includes a track of the same song recorded in the 1960s by the late Cantor Louis Danto. Both recordings are deeply moving.
As we enter the Hanukkah season, I’d like to point out my current favorite of Botwinik’s work, “Haynt iz khanike bay undz” (“Today is Our Holiday, Hanukkah”). Botwinik composed the words and music to this song shortly before his 99th birthday in December 2019.
On the CD, we hear him performing the song for his fellow residents at the assisted living facility Manoir King David, in Cote Saint-Luc, Montreal, with harmonies and accompaniment later added by his son. The lyrics are accessible and the melody is catchy, with clever compositional twists and turns.
This new CD is a beautiful homage to an extraordinary musician and a welcome addition to the world of Yiddish song.
To purchase the album, Zumer iz shoyn vider do, email info@botwinikmusic.com.
The post New CD of Yiddish children’s songs by Vilna-born composer David Botwinik appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Chicago Man Pleads Guilty to Battering Jewish DePaul University Students
Illustrative: Pro-Hamas protesters setting up an encampment at DePaul University in Chicago, Illinois, United States, on May 5, 2024. Photo: Kyle Mazza via Reuters Connect
A Chicago-area man has pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor battery charge he incurred last year for beating up Jewish pro-Israel students participating in a demonstration at DePaul University.
On Nov. 6, 2024, Adam Erkan, 20, approached Max Long and Michael Kaminsky in a ski mask while shouting antisemitic epithets and statements. He then attacked both students, fracturing Kaminsky’s wrist and inflicting a brain injury on Long, whom he pummeled into an unconscious state.
Law enforcement identified Erkan, who absconded to another location in a car, after his father came forward to confirm that it was his visage which surveillance cameras captured near the scene of the crime. According to multiple reports, the assailant avoided severer criminal penalties by agreeing to plead guilty to lesser offenses than the felony hate crime counts with which he was originally charged.
His accomplice, described as a man in his age group, remains at large.
“One attacker has now admitted guilt for brutally assaulting two Jewish students at DePaul University. That is a step toward justice, but it is nowhere near enough,” The Lawfare Project, a Jewish civil rights advocacy group which represented the Jewish students throughout the criminal proceedings, said in a statement responding to the plea deal. “The second attacker remains at large, and Max and Michael continue to experience ongoing threats. We demand — and fully expect — his swift arrest and prosecution to ensure justice for these students and for the Jewish community harmed by this antisemitic hate crime.”
Antisemitic incidents on US college campuses have exploded nationwide since Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel.
Just last month, members of Toronto Metropolitan University’s Students for Justice in Palestine chapter spilled blood and caused the hospitalization of at least one Jewish student after forcibly breaching a venue in which the advocacy group Students Supporting Israel had convened for an event featuring veterans of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).
The former soldiers agreed to meet Students Supporting Israel (SSI) to discuss their experiences at a “private space” on campus which had to be reserved because the university denied the group a room reservation and, therefore, security personnel that would have been afforded to it. However, someone leaked the event location, leading to one of the most violent incidents of campus antisemitism in recent memory.
By the time the attack ended, three people had been rushed to a local medical facility for treatment of injuries caused by a protester’s shattering the glazing of the venue’s door with a drill bit, a witness, student Ethan Elharrar, told The Algemeiner during an interview.
“One of the individuals had a weapon he used, a drill bit. He used it to break and shatter the door,” Elharrar said. “Two individuals were transported to the hospital because of this. One was really badly cut all his arms and legs, and he had to get stitches. Another is afraid to publicly disclose her injuries because she doesn’t want anything to happen to her.”
The previous month, masked pro-Hamas activists nearly raided an event held on the campus of Pomona College, based in Claremont, California, to commemorate the victims of the Oct. 7. massacre.
Footage of the act which circulated on social media showed the group attempting to force its way into the room while screaming expletives and pro-Hamas dogma. They ultimately failed due to the prompt response of the Claremont Colleges Jewish chaplain and other attendees who formed a barrier in front of the door to repel them, a defense they mounted on their own as campus security personnel did nothing to stop the disturbance.
Pomona College, working with its sister institutions in the Claremont consortium of liberal arts colleges in California (5C), later identified and disciplined some of the perpetrators and banned them from its campus.
In Ann Arbor, Michigan, law enforcement personnel were searching for a man who trespassed the grounds of the Jewish Resource Center and kicked its door while howling antisemitic statements.
“F—k Israel, f—k the Jewish people,” the man — whom multiple reports describe as white, “college-age,” and possibly named “Jake” or “Jay” — screamed before running away. He did not damage the property, and he may have been accompanied by as many as two other people, one of whom shouted “no!” when he ran up to the building.
Around the same time, at Ohio State University, an unknown person or group tacked neo-Nazi posters across the campus which warned, “We are everywhere.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
Uncategorized
US Lawmakers Advance Bill to Designate Muslim Brotherhood as Terrorist Organization
US Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart (R-FL) talks with reporters outside a meeting of the House Republican Conference at the US Capitol on Dec. 20, 2024. Photo: Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/Sipa USA via Reuters Connect
The US House Foreign Affairs Committee on Wednesday advanced legislation to designate the entire Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization, continuing a bipartisan push in Washington to combat the global Islamist network.
Members of the committee voted to approve the bill on a bipartisan basis, with every Republican and several Democrats supporting the measure just over a week after US President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing his administration to determine whether to designate certain chapters of the Muslim Brotherhood as foreign terrorist organizations and specially designated global terrorists.
Notably, the legislation would require the US government to proscribe the Islamist network globally, while Trump’s order more narrowly directs Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to submit a report “on whether to designate any Muslim Brotherhood chapters, such as those in Lebanon, Egypt, and Jordan.”
The legislation considered on Wednesday was spearheaded by Reps. Mario Diaz-Balart (R-FL) and Jared Moskowitz (D-FL).
“I am pleased that my bill to designate the entire Muslim Brotherhood globally as a terrorist organization has been approved by the full committee. This is a step in the right direction and further amplifies other efforts, like those of President Trump, to take decisive action against this insidious threat,” Diaz-Balart said in a statement.
“I thank Chairman [Rep. Brian Mast] for his leadership and the committee for advancing this bill to protect US national security interests and Americans by prohibiting US dollars from enabling the Muslim Brotherhood’s dangerous and pernicious activities while ensuring that MB members are blocked from entering the United States,” he continued.
Moskowitz similarly praised the committee for advancing the bill to a broader debate by the full House of Representatives.
“For decades, the Brotherhood has been tied to extremism and instability across the Middle East and around the world,” he said in a statement. “Other nations have already taken steps to investigate the Brotherhood and its affiliates, and the United States must have the authority to do the same.”
The Muslim Brotherhood, a transnational movement active in some 70 countries that preaches a vision of society governed by Sharia law, has been banned or designated as a terrorist group by several governments, including those in Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain. The Palestinian terrorist group Hamas has long been affiliated with the Brotherhood, drawing both ideological inspiration and even personnel from its ranks.
The US House version of the bill blacklisting the Muslim Brotherhood, HR 4397, was introduced in July. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) introduced the companion Senate bill, S 2293, backed by a group of Republican co-sponsors. Together, the measures aim to push the president and secretary of state to identify the Brotherhood and all its branches worldwide as terrorist entities, a move that supporters say would close longstanding gaps in US counterterrorism policy and more closely align Washington’s stance with that of key Middle Eastern allies.
The legislation would expand the Anti-Terrorism Act of 1987 to explicitly include the Muslim Brotherhood, blocking its network from operating in the United States and imposing broad visa bans on individuals tied directly or indirectly to any of its global branches. The bill would require the State Department to map out every affiliated group worldwide and assess each for formal terrorist designation, effectively placing the entire Brotherhood ecosystem under unprecedented US scrutiny.
The measure outlines a direct connection between the Muslim Brotherhood’s ideological infrastructure and the terrorist groups it has inspired, including Hamas, whose terrorist activity remains at the forefront of US, Israeli, and European security concerns. Counterterrorism experts argue that targeting the Muslim Brotherhood’s sprawling network is an overdue step to combat the roots of Islamist extremism.
A recent report by the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP) found that Qatar has funneled roughly $20 billion into American schools and universities over five decades as part of a coordinated, 100-year project to embed Muslim Brotherhood ideologies in the US.
The 200-page report, unveiled in Washington, DC to members of Congress, chronicles a 50-year effort by Brotherhood-linked groups to embed themselves in American academia, civil society, and government agencies, exposing what ISGAP calls the Brotherhood’s “civilization jihad” strategy, while maintaining an agenda fundamentally at odds with liberal democratic values.