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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. 

—
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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Campus Frontlines: Professors and Students Continue to Fuel Antisemitism

A pro-Hamas group splattered red paint, symbolizing spilled blood, on an administrative building at Princeton University. Photo: Screenshot

There may be a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, but on university campuses globally, antisemitism has yet to end. The encampments that took up space both on the lawns of universities and on the front pages of newspapers may be gone, but the new form of antisemitism, one that student leaders and professors are driving, is not.

The top global universities are expected to train students to become the next leaders in society. That requires complex courses to be taught with accuracy and objectivity.

This is not the case at Princeton, however. One course, entitled Gender, Reproduction, and Genocide, is scheduled for the spring 2025-2026 semester.

Taught by Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, the course is said to explore “genocide through the analytic of gender” and specifically will focus on the “ongoing genocide in Gaza.”

In the course, students will “engage reproductive justice frameworks,” suggesting that Israel is committing genocide by deliberately targeting institutions that would prevent women from becoming pregnant. However, this claim, spread by the UN, has no factual basis.

The UN report relies on a 2024 ABC News story that claimed an IDF shell was deliberately fired at an IVF clinic in December 2023, allegedly destroying more than 4,000 embryos with the intention to “prevent births.”

But even ABC News and its sole source, who was not present at the time, could not verify that an IDF shell caused the damage. In fact, a wide-angle photo of the scene shows a nearby high-rise building visibly damaged, while the IVF clinic itself appears fully intact.

If the course’s entire framework being held up by falsified information wasn’t enough, it also seeks to compare the history of the “genocide” in Gaza to other genocides, including the Holocaust. There is no lack of moral clarity more evident than flattening the Holocaust into a political talking point. No comparison can be made between a war of defense and the industrialization of murder that the Nazis waged against the Jewish people.

Yet, this vile comparison does not come as much of a surprise, considering the professor herself has, in the past, denied the murder and assault of Jews.

Antisemitism from faculty is not limited to academic courses. A Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapter at University College London hosted Samar Maqusi as part of a series titled “Palestine: From Existence to Resistance.” Although the lecture was advertised as a discussion on the origins of Zionism, Maqusi instead promoted classic antisemitic tropes, including that Jews require the blood of gentiles for making their “special pancakes,” referring to a medieval blood libel in which Jews use the blood of gentiles for making matzah.

Unfortunately, many discussions of Zionism on university campuses come from those with hostile and thus inaccurate beliefs on what it truly means to be a Zionist.

Even in an interfaith discussion at the City College of New York, a Hillel director was told he was “responsible for the murder” of Gazans and caused “disgust” in other participants because he was a Zionist. Activist and student groups further condemned the interfaith discussion. Not in favor of defending the Hillel director whose sole wrongdoing was being a Jew, but because interfaith efforts were causing the “normalization of Zionism.”

In warping the definitions to fit the narrative of the speaker or lecturer, lectures and campus spaces have become breeding grounds for bias and thinly veiled antisemitism.

Antisemitic Student Voices

Student leaders and activists have also frequently isolated their Jewish peers.

At The Harvard Crimson, one column suggests that there are some “visions of Zionism more morally objectionable” and therefore one might “feel wary of staying friends with Zionists.” It should then be no wonder to the author why Jewish students feel isolated on campuses.

This becomes all the more problematic when the students elected to represent the entire student union are not neutral nor representative on complex issues, particularly regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at large.

At the University of Oxford, the Oxford Student Union elected Arwa Elrayess as the incoming president. She has been part of a no-budget documentary on the pro-Palestine protests that erupted after October 7. In one post promoting the film, Elrayess makes the moral equivalence between the Holocaust and the war against Hamas in Gaza by comparing the deaths of Anne Frank and Hind Rajab, a Gazan civilian.

Elrayess is meant to represent all students equally. Still, her posts suggest otherwise and are part of a worrying trend of using Jewish trauma to uncritically discuss Israel’s war.

As the current academic year continues, it remains clear that the issue of antisemitism on campus has not gone away, nor can it be afforded to be swept aside and ignored. When courses are built on debunked claims and student leaders use Holocaust inversion to further their anti-Israel narratives, it becomes evident that this issue is not isolated but rather is systemic, requiring urgent and sustained action.

Jewish students on campuses worldwide deserve the same safety and respect as any other student, and all students deserve an education grounded in truth and accuracy. The moral and intellectual integrity of higher education depends on confronting antisemitism directly, rather than allowing it to fester under the guise of activism or academic freedom.

The author is a contributor to HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.

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Social Media Algorithms and Design Spread Antisemitism — Not Foreign Actors

A 3D-printed miniature model of Elon Musk and the X logo are seen in this illustration taken Jan. 23, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration

Recently, as Jewish Insider reported, bipartisan lawmakers in Congress hailed what they saw as a major advance in fighting online antisemitism — X’s new location feature.

The new tool, showing which country an account operates from — had started revealing that some accounts spreading antisemitic content in US political discussions were based overseas. For legislators on both sides, this represented a digital unmasking.

Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE) remarked that the feature exposed “foreign interests trying to spread antisemitic poison” while “masquerading as Americans.”

Sen. James Lankford (R-OK) insisted Americans “deserve to know which accounts are run from abroad, so we know the true source of these narratives.” Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-NY) took a geopolitical view: “Beijing, Moscow and Tehran know they cannot defeat us economically or militarily, so they exploit controversial issues, like Israel and antisemitism, and try to divide.” Former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley declared the feature “a huge win for transparency and American security.”

The story is appealing: foreign enemies weaponize antisemitism to fracture American unity, and transparency about account origins helps us counter these external threats. There’s truth here — bad actors do exploit divisive topics.

But this celebration reveals a dangerous misdiagnosis.

As the lead of the Decoding Antisemitism project — which has examined over 300,000 items of digital content across multiple crises — I’ve identified three distinct but connected drivers of online antisemitic radicalization: coordinated malicious actors (foreign and domestic), algorithmic amplification through platform design, and homegrown participatory dynamics enabled by online communication itself — anonymity, mutual reinforcement, and the normalization of extremism through constant exposure.

The issue isn’t that foreign influence exists — it does. The problem is treating it as the primary driver while overlooking the structural and domestic conditions that allow antisemitic narratives to take root and spread.

How we diagnose problems determines how we design solutions — and misdiagnosis doesn’t just limit our response, it actively redirects resources, attention, and political will away from factors we can actually control.

Comprehending online antisemitism demands a virological approach: examining not just where accounts originate, but how hate narratives evolve, which platform features enable transmission, and what conditions allow them to thrive. Yet social media platforms remain essentially black boxes — we lack systematic tools to understand dynamics unfolding within these digital spaces.

Lawmakers celebrate a feature revealing account geography while leaving the actual black box — algorithmic recommendations, engagement optimization, and content amplification — completely unexamined.

The Conflation Problem

The Jewish Insider article and quoted lawmakers collapse “foreign,” “adversarial,” and “antisemitic” into one category. This conflation obscures more than it reveals.

It treats geographic origin as definitive of intent and impact. An account in South Asia or Eastern Europe engaging with US politics isn’t necessarily a state-directed operation. It may simply be someone with opinions about American affairs. Account location reveals nothing about whether content is coordinated, conspiratorial, state-driven, or simply individual opinion.

More crucially, emphasizing foreign accounts distracts from what we know empirically about domestic antisemitic content production.

Following the October 7 attacks, antisemitic discourse surged to 36-38% of comments on major UK news outlet YouTube channels — nearly double the pre-crisis baseline. After the Washington museum shooting in May 2025, antisemitic content averaged 43% across major English-language news channels, with some reaching 66%.

These aren’t fringe platforms infiltrated by foreign bots — they’re mainstream digital spaces where domestic audiences actively produce and amplify antisemitic narratives.

Research on antisemitic discourse spread reveals a three-phase domestic process: elite figures make strategically ambiguous statements, digital intermediaries (podcasters, YouTubers, influencers) reframe and sharpen this messaging, and comment sections collapse ambiguity into explicit hate speech.

This “cascading radicalization” is primarily homegrown, driven by domestic actors and platform dynamics — not solely foreign infiltration.

Our analysis cannot definitively establish every anonymous commenter’s geographic origin. What we observe are linguistic and cultural markers — idiom, references, political framings — indicating domestic participation, combined with the absence of coordination patterns typical of bot networks. The antisemitic discourse we documented emerges through “dialogical warfare”: organic exchanges between users presenting as ordinary Americans who deploy antisemitism as an explanatory framework for complex issues.

When a US Congressmember amplifies antisemitic tropes, when popular podcasts platform guests trafficking in conspiracy theories about Jewish power, when partisan media deploy dual loyalty accusations — these aren’t foreign operations. They’re homegrown productions embedded in American political discourse and amplified through domestic networks.

The Missing Architecture

Most striking about celebrating X’s location feature is what remains unexamined: the platform itself.

There’s virtually no discussion about platform design, algorithmic amplification, recommendation systems, the attention economy, or structural dynamics allowing hateful content to scale. The feature is treated as inherently truth-revealing, exposing hidden foreign manipulation.

But this framing evades more important questions: why do certain narratives spread, how do platform architectures enable amplification, and how do online communication conditions — anonymity, mutual reinforcement, constant exposure to extremity — create environments where antisemitic ideas mutate and take hold?

The answer has little to do with account location and everything to do with how platforms are built. Engagement-based algorithms reward emotionally provocative content — outrage, fear, tribal solidarity. Recommendation systems create filter bubbles and radicalization pathways. Virality architecture privileges simplification, moral clarity, and villain identification. The attention economy systematically rewards polarizing, enraging content. These are design choices, not inevitable features.

Meanwhile, online communication conditions themselves — anonymity removing social accountability, mutual confirmation among like-minded voices, omnipresent hate speech normalizing extremity — create participatory environments where ordinary users become active radicalization contributors.

Contemporary antisemitism increasingly operates through coded expressions, memes, and multimodal signals evading simple keyword detection. The watermelon emoji, the paraglider symbol — these function as in-group markers regardless of geographic location. Strategic ambiguity, not foreign origin, enables antisemitic narratives to spread while maintaining plausible deniability.

The Political Convenience

The “foreign adversaries spreading antisemitism” narrative aligns with a bipartisan preference: attributing social breakdown to hostile external actors. This framing is politically convenient across the spectrum.

For Republicans, it allows condemning antisemitism without confronting how right-wing media has mainstreamed antisemitic conspiracy theories — “great replacement” narratives, George Soros accusations, “globalist” rhetoric. For Democrats, it enables criticizing online hate without reckoning with how segments of progressive activism have normalized anti-Zionist rhetoric often sliding into antisemitic tropes about Jewish power and loyalty.

The foreign influence frame permits symbolic accountability –the appearance of action without institutional change. Lawmakers can call for location transparency, celebrate platform implementations, and position themselves as defenders against external threats. What they needn’t do is examine how American political rhetoric contributes to normalizing antisemitism, push for regulatory interventions altering platform incentives, or confront how online communication creates radicalization pathways.

This isn’t analytical sloppiness. It’s moral abdication.

What Accountability Would Actually Require

Genuine accountability for online antisemitism requires confronting all three drivers — not just one.

First, acknowledging that while malicious actors (foreign and domestic) exploit divisive issues, they operate within a larger ecosystem. We must recognize the United States as an active site where antisemitic ideas are produced, circulated, and normalized through domestic political culture, media ecosystems, and participatory online dynamics — not merely as an innocent target.

Second, confronting how platform architecture shapes what spreads, and demanding transparency not just about account locations but about algorithmic recommendations, content moderation, the attention economy’s incentives, and metrics driving platform design.

Third, recognizing that high-profile domestic actors — politicians, media figures, influencers with millions of followers — bear far more responsibility for mainstreaming antisemitic narratives than anonymous accounts. We must understand the three-phase process through which elite ambiguity cascades into radicalized discourse.

Fourth, examining how partisan political discourse traffics in antisemitic tropes through strategic ambiguity — and being willing to call this out when politically inconvenient.

Fifth, acknowledging online communication conditions themselves — anonymity, mutual reinforcement, constant exposure to extremity — are creating environments where ordinary users become radicalization participants.

X’s location feature may provide useful information about one factor among many. But treating this as revelatory, exposing the “true source” of antisemitic narratives, is a dangerous misdiagnosis.

If democracies want to confront antisemitism seriously, they must address all three drivers: monitor and counter malicious actors where they exist, examine platform architectures amplifying hate, and confront participatory dynamics and communication conditions enabling antisemitic narratives to flourish in mainstream spaces.

How we diagnose problems shapes how we conceptualize solutions. Focusing exclusively on foreign actors may be politically convenient. It will not protect the public sphere.

Dr. Matthias J. Becker is the AddressHate Research Scholar at NYU’s Center for the Study of Antisemitism, a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Cambridge, and Lead of the “Decoding Antisemitism” project, which analyzes how antisemitic ideas spread and mutate in digital communication.

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‘Controversy’ Over Antisemitism List Misses the Point

Fox personality Tucker Carlson speaks at the 2017 Business Insider Ignition: Future of Media conference in New York, U.S., November 30, 2017. Photo: REUTERS/Lucas Jackson

If you would have told me 20 years ago there would be a list of prominent antisemites of the year, with 10 people on it, and that one of the world’s most famous rappers would have a video called “Heil Hitler,” I would not have believed you.

If you told me that instead of focusing on antisemitism, people instead would complain about who is or isn’t on the list, that I would have believed.

I have heard some people ask what a list really achieves. That’s certainly one question. Here’s another question: what are other groups doing to fight antisemitism when it is the worst it’s been in many years?

As a writer, I have had more antisemitic comments to some of my articles than ever before, including asking if I was paid $7,000 a post. I am not an influencer, and judging by my outfits, one could surmise I was not paid $7,000 for anything — but that’s besides the point. It goes back to the idea that we’re focusing on the controversy surrounding antisemitism, rather than the antisemitism itself.

Tucker Carlson may win this year’s award — which is hosted by the site StopAntisemitism.org — but at least the contest is bringing awareness to the issue of antisemitism. Candace Owens was the winner last year.

While doing something is not always better than doing nothing — this list is an example of how it is better to do something. There are a lot of big talkers who claim to know the best way to fight antisemitism, but when I’ve asked them how to do it, I’ve gotten mostly crickets. Many are asleep at the wheel. They don’t counter blatant antisemitism, they let their friends and others get away with anti-Israel or anti-Jewish rhetoric, and when it comes to the media, many don’t push back at all on the biased claims of their guests.

So I think it’s important to have a list to call people out. While I might have chosen a different top 10 than those listed, that’s not the point. As the old joke goes, with two Jews, there are three opinions. So it is unsurprising that Jews will blame this organization with little ideas of their own to fight antisemitism. It is both sad and predictable. I, for one, am glad that people are finding creative ways to bring attention to this issue.

The author is a writer based in New York.

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