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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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How Shabbat bound Lindsey Graham to Joe Lieberman
Lindsey Graham did not always know what time Shabbat started, but he always knew when it ended. That was the joke the South Carolina Republican made while remembering his close friend, the late Sen. Joe Lieberman, at a memorial service in Washington in 2024.
In his remarks, Graham said that while traveling around the world with his Senate colleague, Lieberman, an observant Jew and author of a book about Shabbat, always knew exactly when sundown arrived on Friday, no matter where they were. After years of traveling together, Graham joked, he learned to recognize when Shabbat ended on Saturday “so we didn’t have to do this anymore.”
This past Saturday evening, almost exactly as Shabbat came to a close, Graham died after suffering an apparent heart attack at his Capitol Hill townhouse. Emergency dispatch audio indicates first responders were called to his home at around 8:30 p.m. after a report of chest pains.
The two politicians from different sides of the aisle first became close when Graham joined the Senate in 2003, joining an already close friendship between Lieberman and Sen. John McCain, who died in 2018. Despite disagreeing on many domestic issues, Graham and Lieberman bonded over shared views about American leadership abroad, traveling together to the world’s most dangerous conflict zones in the years after the Sept. 11 attacks. The three senators, who became known as the “Three Amigos,” also made repeated trips to Israel.
At Lieberman’s memorial, Graham recalled one of their more memorable trips together, accompanying McCain during his 2008 presidential campaign to visit the Western Wall in Jerusalem. Graham said he was pinned against the ancient stones by photographers scrambling for the perfect shot and injured his knee. “They crushed me against the wall, and I began to wail,” Graham joked, referencing the site’s English name, the Wailing Wall. Lieberman, he recalled, helped pull him back to his feet.
Months later, during a meeting with the Dalai Lama in Colorado, Lieberman brought the Tibetan spiritual leader over to Graham and asked if he could heal his injured knee. The Dalai Lama placed a hand on it and asked if it felt any better. “No,” Graham replied.
“I didn’t think so,” the Dalai Lama quipped.
A strong ally of Israel
Israel occupied a central place in Graham’s political career. He was one of Congress’ strongest supporters of the U.S.-Israel alliance, pushed for a tough approach toward Iran and backed efforts to expand peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors. Axios reported Sunday that Graham spent his final weeks working on a renewed push aimed at normalizing relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel.
In a Sunday appearance on Fox News, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu revealed that he and Graham disagreed over Israel’s recent proposal to phase out U.S. military assistance in the coming years, amid growing criticism of aid to Israel from both parties. Graham “went ballistic,” Netanyahu said. “He said, ‘No way. You can’t do that.’ He was so concerned with our security, which he believed was your security, that he actually fought the prime minister of Israel on keeping America’s aid – or actually increasing it.”
As news of Graham’s death spread Saturday night, Jewish organizations and leaders mourned his passing and reflected on the legacy he leaves as one of the Senate’s strongest advocates for Israel and Jewish causes.
In his farewell to Lieberman two years ago, Graham concluded: “One of the best things that ever happened to Lindsey Graham was to meet Joe Lieberman. So until we meet again, my amigo, God bless.”
For those who watched their friendship over the years, it is hard not to imagine that somewhere beyond this world, McCain, Lieberman and Graham have found each other once again.
The post How Shabbat bound Lindsey Graham to Joe Lieberman appeared first on The Forward.
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I was there when the lights went out and New York was plunged into darkness
I’m the lifelong resident of a vast and complicated metropolis that smugly prides itself on never stopping. Subways, buses and cabs running day and night, bodegas and diners open 24/7, hundreds of thousands of people at work or out partying somewhere, bike couriers and truck drivers making deliveries — all in a town with a million moving parts, where the show always goes on — until, suddenly, it doesn’t.
I was reminded of that one evening not long ago in a drab Chinese restaurant uptown on Broadway, clutching a pair of wooden chopsticks poised to shovel another mound of chicken and walnuts into my mouth.
Music was playing softly over the house PA system. The melody suddenly sounded strangely familiar, but oddly out of place in those surroundings. I froze mid-bite, trying to place what I was hearing. Then it hit me. I glanced at my dinner companion Ann Aptaker, author of the Cantor Gold noir crime novels.
“Wow,” I said. “Do you hear that?”
She paused, tilted her head slightly, then raised an eyebrow.
“Yes,” she said. “It’s Threepenny Opera!”
Sure enough, the song drifting through the room was Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s wickedly jaunty tango, “Ballad of Immoral Earnings.” Even stranger, it was a track from my favorite production of the show: the Lincoln Center revival from decades ago, starring the late, great Raul Julia as Mack the Knife and Ellen Greene as his favorite prostitute, Jenny Diver.
“Of all things! What a weird song to play while people are eating,” I mused.
“I don’t think I’ve ever heard it in a restaurant before,” she agreed. “And certainly not a Chinese place.”
“They must have good taste in musicals.”
Shrugging, we resumed picking away at our dinner. A minute later another song from the same show began to play. We gaped at each other.
“They’re playing the whole album!” I sputtered. “What are the odds?”
Ann frowned and paused. then suddenly whirled to reach into the pocket of her denim jacket hanging behind her chair. She pulled out her phone, and the music instantly grew louder. We both laughed. She must have leaned back against her jacket and set off her music app. Whew — mystery solved!
But hearing those distinctive strains of Weill’s score transported me back to one of the hottest summers New York City had ever endured.
It was 1977, the year I attended an outdoor performance of Threepenny Opera at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park. My mother and a roommate from Pratt had joined me that night.
The Delacorte sits beneath the stone towers of Belvedere Castle, lit by floodlamps like a fairytale illustration, open to the sky and the sounds of the city beyond the trees. On a good night it can feel magical. On this particularly sweltering night, the air hung over us in the audience like a damp blanket as Philip Bosco, who had replaced Raul Julia for this summer staging, swaggered across the stage as Mack the Knife, and Ellen Greene reprised her role as Jenny.
And then — just as she was belting out her furious solo number, Pirate Jenny — all the lights shut off. Greene’s mic abruptly went dead, and the band lurched sourly out of tune before grinding to a halt.
We were plunged into pitch darkness. For a moment, there was silence.
Then the crowd began to buzz nervously. Was this part of the show? I’d seen the play several times before, and knew that it most definitely was not.
A few awkward minutes later, some of the cast reappeared wielding flashlights. While the tech crew worked on the electricity, the band filled the darkness with some lively jazz. Rubber-limbed dancer Tony Azito pranced around jovially in the flickering beams, easing the mood for a spell. But that age-old theater adage, the show must go on, was about to bite the dust.
The house manager finally stepped up on stage to make an announcement: “Ladies and gentlemen, we just learned that there’s been a massive power failure at Con Edison. It’s not just us; the whole city is dark!”
We didn’t know it yet, but this was the Big Blackout of July 13, 1977, and there we were, thousands of us stranded smack in the middle of Central Park. There wasn’t even much of a moon out that night, so it was really, really dark.
“Well, this is some pickle,” Mom said.
We wondered how the hell we were going to get out of there.
I vividly recalled the last big blackout in New York City, the one in 1965. I was just a young kid back then and safely at home, so it had actually been fun. While my mother lit a few Sabbath candles, my little sister and I roamed from room to room pretending we were in a haunted house. Meanwhile, our poor Dad had to trudge back to Brooklyn from midtown Manhattan — a five-hour hike in hot leather shoes.
But this time felt very different. I was far from the safety of home, trapped in the middle of what might as well have been a forest at night. Central Park is beautiful when you can see it. In pitch darkness it’s downright hazardous.
“Guess we’ll all just have to sleep in the park tonight,” I cracked. Neither Mom nor my Pratt roomie were laughing.
Thankfully, a phalanx of city cops eventually arrived to help guide us out. Audience members, cast and crew all joined hands as we carefully made our way along the park’s winding paths, stepping over roots and curbs, catching one another when someone stumbled. Our only illumination came from a few scattered police car headlights.
A walk that normally takes ten minutes took forever, but eventually we emerged onto Central Park West.
The scene was eerie. Streetlamps were dark. Traffic lights were out. Cars sat frozen in the intersections. Not a single apartment window was lit. For a city that never sleeps, it felt as if someone had suddenly flipped off the master switch.
Then I spotted something: “Look, the buses are still running!”
A city bus was rumbling slowly toward us, brightly lit inside. With the subways dead, getting back to my dorm in Brooklyn would have been impossible, so Mom’s place on the Upper East Side looked like the safest destination. She had temporarily split with my Dad and was living there with a roommate at the time.
The three of us squeezed aboard along with what felt like half the audience, and somehow made it across town to First Avenue. As we approached my mother’s high-rise, a dreadful thought suddenly hit me.
“Mom, what floor are you on again?”
“Twenty-five,” she replied grimly.
Of course both elevators were dead. We trudged up 25 flights of stairs in complete darkness, arriving exhausted and panting. My mother fumbled with her key, finally opening the door to reveal Sylvia, her gravel-voiced, seen-it-all Long Island roommate, standing there with her ever-present cigarette tip glowing in the dark.
“Come on in, darlings,” she rasped dryly. “Join the party.”
Sylvia had lit a few candles around the apartment, the only light we’d see that night.
Outside, the city was far from peaceful. While we tried to sleep on sofa cushions on the floor, one of the worst nights of unrest in New York history was unfolding in the streets below. Store windows were smashed. Shops were looted. Garbage cans were set on fire.
Lying there in the dim glow of flickering candlelight, hearing distant sirens punctuated by the sudden crash of breaking glass somewhere in the darkness below, I felt a growing sense of dread. An evening that had begun with music and theater had improbably ended with Manhattan plunged into darkness, its fragile machinery suddenly exposed.
By morning the city looked as though it had survived a world war.
This resilient burg has been battered and bruised over the years, enduring terrorist attacks, blackouts, blizzards, hurricanes, floods, garbage strikes, transit strikes, and the occasional collapse of its aging infrastructure. Yet somehow it manages to reset and lurch forward each time, improvising solutions the way Tony Azito danced in the dark that night at the Delacorte.
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Lindsey Graham, pro-Israel Trump confidant in the Senate, dies suddenly at 71
(JTA) — Sen. Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina who has been one of Israel’s staunchest supporters in Congress, has died at 71.
Graham’s office announced his death in a statement early Sunday morning, saying that he had died late Saturday after “a brief and sudden illness.” Graham had returned from Ukraine, where he met with Prime Minister Volodymyr Zelensky, the day before.
Graham’s death means the Senate and Republican Party have lost one of its most durable pro-Israel voices at a time when anti-Israel sentiment is on the rise in both places. In his more than three decades in Congress, first in the House and then in the Senate since 2003, Graham aggressively backed U.S. aid to Israel, advanced a hawkish line on Iran and met repeatedly with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in both Israel and the United States.
Netanyahu repeatedly said Israel had “no greater friend” than Graham in the United States. Graham’s most recent visit to Israel was in February, ahead of the U.S.-Israel war on Iran, which he later took credit for urging. “They’ll tell me things our own government won’t tell me,” he said of Israeli officials at the time.
Graham was also a vocal backer of Israel’s military responses to attacks by Hamas, including during the 2014 and after Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel that triggered the war in Gaza and augured a period of declining support for Israel. On Oct. 8, he issued a statement calling for Israel to defeat Hamas “by any and all means necessary” and in the subsequent weeks drew attention for calling on Israel to “flatten the place.”
Graham continued to promote a two-state solution as it receded as a U.S. priority, but he also adjusted to reflect the mounting isolationist streak in his party. Last year, he made news for embracing Netanyahu’s announcement of a plan to “taper” U.S. aid to Israel, saying it should be done sooner than Netanyahu’s 10-year timeline.
Graham’s outlook on Israel fit into a broad portfolio that included helming the Senate Budget Committee and pushing for a stronger U.S. response to Russia. Graham, who never married and had no children, was up for reelection in November.
This obituary will be updated.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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