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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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When ‘Context’ Becomes Complicity — The Language That Incited the Bondi Beach Massacre
People walk at the scene of a shooting incident at Bondi Beach, Sydney, Australia, December 14, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Kirsty Needham
On Sunday, a Chabad Hanukkah candle-lighting at Bondi Beach was turned into a massacre. At least 16 people are dead. Witnesses report that the terrorists shouted “Allahu Akbar” between bursts of gunfire. What should have been a moment of communal joy became a scene of mass murder, carried out in full view of a society that has spent years purposefully ignoring antisemitic incitement and terror attacks that led to this moment.
Around the same time, elsewhere in Australia, the same moral failure surfaced again. On a Melbourne tram, an Australian woman verbally accosted a rabbi and his two children, aged eight and 14, telling them to “go to the gas chambers.” She was carrying a bag bearing the PLO flag. A Jewish father and his children were told, in public, to imagine their extermination.
And that was after “protesters” in Sydney chanted “gas the Jews” — with absolutely no consequences.
“Go to the gas chambers.” There is no metaphor here. No policy critique. No political argument hiding behind rhetoric. There is only genocidal hatred, delivered calmly and directly.
And yet anyone familiar with the pattern already knows what comes next. Not moral clarity, but “context.” Not unambiguous condemnation, but explanation.
We will be told about anger, about trauma, about spillover from Israel’s war with Hamas. We are reminded that emotions are high, tensions are inflamed, and nothing can be viewed in isolation.
This is not analysis. It is evasion.
This is the anti-Zionism exception.
In any other context, this kind of mass murder would end the conversation. No editor would ask what provoked it. No official would suggest it must be understood through global politics. No journalist would hesitate to call the racism exactly what it is. And don’t forget that before the State of Israel was created, one third of the entire global Jewish population was murdered for their religion. But now we’re going to be told that this is only happening because of Israel.
When the targets are Jews, and when the hatred can be draped in the language or symbols of the Palestinian cause, the rules change. Antisemitism becomes negotiable. Murderous language becomes expressive speech. The victims become abstractions.
This is why anti-Zionism has become the dominant framework through which antisemitism is excused in the modern West. Zionism is the belief that Jews, like any other people, have the right to collective self-determination and national survival through sovereignty in part of their indigenous and historical homeland. To deny that right uniquely to Jews — while granting it to every other people — is not a policy disagreement. It is a moral inversion that recasts Jewish survival itself as illegitimate.
For years, Australia, like much of the democratic West, has tolerated rhetoric that would be unthinkable if directed at any other group.
Crowds have chanted “gas the Jews” and many other murderous slogans with no consequence. Universities have hosted speakers who portray Jewish sovereignty as a unique moral crime. Media outlets have repeatedly softened or obscured antisemitic incidents — like burning synagogues — treating them as political reactions rather than as hatred with a long and documented history.
Law enforcement responses have been hesitant and inconsistent, often focused on crowd control instead of stopping incitement.
In England, Jews wearing yarmulkes and Stars of David have been arrested for “provocation,” while standing before crowds chanting “Globalize the Intifada,” “Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the Gas,” and “Khaybar, Khaybar ya Yahud” — an explicit invocation of the massacre of Jews in seventh-century Arabia.
This matters because antisemitism does not operate like other hatreds. It has always depended on permission structures. It advances not only through violence, but through ideas that render violence against Jews intelligible, justifiable, and even necessary to those inclined to act.
When genocidal slogans are tolerated in public space, when Jewish identity is reframed as provocation, when Jewish self-determination is condemned as uniquely evil, and when hatred is endlessly contextualized rather than condemned, the distance between speech and action collapses.
What happened at Bondi Beach was 100% predictable. A slogan shouted yesterday becomes gunfire today. The targets were not symbols or states or abstractions. They were Jews lighting candles.
The media plays a central role in this process, whether it admits it or not. Language is softened. Headlines are hedged. Victims are pushed to the margins of their own stories. A massacre becomes an “incident.” A threat of extermination becomes “heated rhetoric.” Jewish presence itself is recast as a political act that invites response.
This is how a Hanukkah celebration becomes a “flashpoint.” This is how a rabbi and his children become “part of a broader conflict.” This is how Jews going about their lives in Sydney, London, or New York are quietly reassigned responsibility for the hatred directed at them.
Some will insist that Bondi Beach and the Melbourne tram were isolated events. They never are. Antisemitism has never announced itself first with bullets. It begins with the libels societies allow to circulate. It begins when calls for violence against Jews — “Globalize the Intifada,” “Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the Gas” — are treated as political opinions rather than warnings.
A culture that cannot draw a red line at “go to the gas chambers” has already erased the line entirely.
Bondi Beach was not unforeseeable. It was foretold — in slogans excused, in threats contextualized, in hatred endlessly rebranded as politics. The massacre did not appear without warning. It appeared after years of permission.
Micha Danzig is an attorney, former IDF soldier, and former NYPD officer. He writes widely on Israel, antisemitism, and Jewish history and serves on the board of Herut North America.
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The Maccabees taught us persistence and hope – even when the light flickers, as it has this Hanukkah
The first time I lit a Hanukkah candle as a Jew wasn’t at a synagogue or around a large family table. It was in a tiny apartment kitchen with my then-fiancé, Reid. I didn’t yet know the blessings by heart or if I belonged. But when that first shamash, the special “helper” candle used to light the Hanukkah menorah, flickered to life, something in me shifted. I knew I had reached a place where curiosity wasn’t a problem to be solved, it was a doorway.
Lighting the candles with Reid and our two children as we process the horrifying news from Sydney, Australia, I find myself thinking back to that first candle and to a tradition that empowers us through learning and debate, where hard questions are not avoided or feared but welcomed, even in times of great heartbreak and adversity. In a moment when so much pushes us apart and so many try to make us afraid, those values draw us together and give us strength.
Hanukkah itself is a story of a community striving to stay whole in the face of profound forces of division. The Maccabees stood against a regime that attempted to erase Jewish practice by banning observance, desecrating the Temple, and punishing the very acts that defined Jewish life. The victory we celebrate is the enduring resilience of Jewish identity, a small, committed people, deeply diverse in their own ways, coming together around a shared purpose to reclaim the right to live authentically.
When the Temple was rededicated, they relit the ner tamid, the eternal flame, with only a day’s worth of consecrated oil. The miracle, tradition teaches, is that the flame lasted eight days until new oil could be secured. But perhaps the greater miracle is that they lit the flame at all, despite their fear, the uncertainty, and the enormity of the moment. Even in the darkest times, our light shines brightest when we choose to light it together.
My journey to becoming Jewish was many years in the making. I was raised Catholic in the church my mother grew up in. I was a curious child, always pressing to understand the world around me. After the sudden death of my father at nine, I craved answers to life’s toughest questions and felt increasingly out of place in a setting where questions were treated as a lack of faith. In Judaism, I found a spiritual home that teaches that questions are holy, learning is lifelong, truth is revealed through wrestling with ideas, and our sacred bonds to each other are strengthened through debate.
I still remember the moment I first learned this about Judaism. More than a decade before my conversion, Reid and I sat on a lumpy sofa in a University of Chicago lounge debating life’s mysteries the way only college students can. After I had shared my frustrations about organized religion, Reid explained that in his experience, Judaism didn’t fear disagreement, but welcomed it. It was a tradition built on commentary layered over commentary, where even the margins of our texts are alive with centuries of Jews arguing, interpreting, questioning, refining, and expanding on the ideas that came before them.
As I continue to grow into my Jewish identity, it becomes ever more clear that the Jewish community is not a monolith. We span countless traditions, cultures, and perspectives. Our disagreements are real, deeply felt, and sometimes painful. But disagreement is not the opposite of unity. Judaism gives us the tools to lean into complexity without letting it tear us apart.
At this difficult moment we are living in, that seems a daunting task. Antisemitism is surging in ways both familiar and surprising, and Jews are being targeted simply for being Jewish. Millenia-old tropes are finding new life in the ugliest corners of the internet and on our sidewalks, with online conspiracy-theories fueling real-world violence. This bigotry is often smuggled into mainstream discourse using criticism of the State of Israel as a Trojan Horse, with the intention of pitting Jews against each other.
We must reject this attempt to co-opt political disagreements by those who wish to destroy us and remember that for many American Jews, Israel represents shared history, culture, and the enduring light of Jewish peoplehood – the very light that antisemites have long tried to extinguish.
The goal of antisemitism is, as it has always been, to divide us, isolate us, and snuff out our light. Hanukkah reminds us that our story did not end in the ancient world. From Jerusalem to Sydney to New York, we are still here, still connected, still carrying that light forward, and the miracle the Maccabees fought for endures in Jewish survival and the promise of a Jewish future. Hanukkah teaches that when Jewish people, by birth and by choice alike, stand together in shared purpose, bound together as B’nei Israel, we can overcome even the greatest darkness.
Unity does not mean uniformity. It means choosing one another, especially when the world feels fractured and we, as Jews, are under attack. It means committing to our shared future even as we debate the path to get there. It means recognizing that our strength has always come from community, learning, and a willingness to keep asking the hard questions together.
This is the model I strive to follow as a public servant: to lead with curiosity, to listen across differences, to protect our sacred spaces, and to build bridges through education and shared understanding.
As someone who chose this tradition because of its capacity for honesty, complexity, and hope, I urge us to take the lesson of the Maccabees to heart and keep the light shining – for ourselves, for each other, and for the generations who will inherit the world we shape today.
The post The Maccabees taught us persistence and hope – even when the light flickers, as it has this Hanukkah appeared first on The Forward.
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Will Anything Change After Bondi — and How Will the Story End?
A man lights a candle as police officers stand guard following the attack on a Jewish holiday celebration at Sydney’s Bondi Beach, in Sydney, Australia, December 15, 2025. REUTERS/Flavio Brancaleone
Jews arrived in Australia with the First Fleet in 1788. That is the Australian equivalent of the Mayflower, albeit with convicts.
From their earliest days, Australian Jews integrated into national life visibly, with patriotism and confidence. They built their shuls without apology, established businesses without resentment, and raised families with great pride.
They were disproportionately represented in the military, academia, medicine, and commerce. They embraced their Australian identity fully, while remaining true to their Jewish faith and seeing no contradiction between the two.
Australia was once a country that understood how integration worked. Newcomers were welcome, but they were expected to participate in a shared civic culture. Loyalty, contribution, and respect for Australian society were not considered controversial demands — they were the price of admission. For more than two centuries, Australian Jews lived by that bargain.
This is why the massacre at Bondi Beach during a public Hanukkah celebration seems like more than an act of terror. It feels like a betrayal. Holocaust survivor Alex Kleytman, 92, shielded his wife of 57 years in the crowd before dying. That is the Jewish-Aussie spirit that symbolized this community.
Hanukkah is, by design, a public holiday. It commemorates a minority preserving its identity while remaining part of a broader civilization. Light is placed deliberately in the public square. Faith without withdrawal. Cultural continuity without separatism. That is the message of Hanukkah.
That such a celebration was targeted in one of Australia’s most iconic public spaces is not incidental. It was an attack on a place and a community that exemplified successful integration during a festival that celebrates cohesion and tolerance.
Speaking to Australian Jews over the past two years, a new theme has emerged — not only of fear, but abandonment. The country they love increasingly hesitates to defend them, is embarrassed by its own culture, and is unwilling to confront hateful belief systems it has imported.
This is not an immigration crisis. It is a governance crisis.
Great countries are built by immigrants. The Greeks, Romans, and Americans all understood that growth comes from outsiders who want to become insiders. But instead of importing entrepreneurs, innovators, and builders, we have incubated an endless supply of cultural resentment. A nation cannot transmit to its citizens what it no longer values. Assimilation requires national pride and confidence in one’s own civilizational values.
Deterrence is dismissed for fear of “sending the wrong signal.” Enforcement is denounced as cruelty. Borders are discussed endlessly but defended reluctantly. Politicians still perform the language of control, but with the conviction of actors reciting lines they no longer believe.
Western governments have not failed to implement their will. They have abandoned the idea that they are entitled to have a will in the first place. The result is a system engineered for failure while absolving those responsible for it. Illegal entry is rewarded. Removal is treated as a scandal. Integration becomes optional.
What emerges is grievance without gratitude, and hate without consequence. Flags become suspect. History is reduced to a catalogue of sins. Elites perform ritualized shame as a marker of sophistication. A country that cannot defend its own identity cannot plausibly ask newcomers to adopt it.
Bondi was not a random eruption of violence. It was the predictable outcome of a system that encouraged hate, refused to do anything about years of incitement and terror attacks on Jews, and will likely change nothing after this attack.
The bitter irony is that the community that proved integration was possible is now among the first to feel the consequences of a society that has stopped insisting on it.
Nations do not decline in a single dramatic moment. They erode through a thousand small capitulations; each defended as compassion.
Bondi was not an aberration. It was a warning. The only question is whether the warning arrived too late. The story of Hanukkah ends with our salvation and spiritual redemption; how will this story end?
Philip Gross is a Manhattan-born, London-based business executive and writer. He explores issues of Jewish identity, faith, and contemporary society through the lens of both the American and British experience.