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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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Academic BDS Gains Ground in Europe, Poses Strategic Threat to Israel, New Report Warns
Anti-Israel demonstration supporting the BDS movement, Paris France, June 8, 2024. Photo: Claire Serie / Hans Lucas via Reuters Connect
Advocates of the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel have intensified efforts to sever ties between the European Union and Israeli academic institutions, according to a new bombshell report published on Thursday.
Israel’s Association of University Heads (VERA) Task Force to Combat Academic Boycotts said it has documented a surge in “academic BDS” activity across Europe and other Western countries, including the United States, since the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel.
VERA warned that mounting political pressure against Israel’s participation in the European Union’s Horizon Europe research initiative could increasingly influence the continent’s approach to academic cooperation with the Jewish state. The report went so far as to call Brussels’ stance on BDS “closer to establishing itself as an official foreign policy.”
Founded in 2021 as a seven-year EU project, Horizon Europe funds research related to sustainability, climate change, medicine, and emerging technologies. Israel’s participation in the multi-billion-euro initiative has long reflected both the country’s scientific reputation and its integration into major European research networks.
In recent years, however, several member states and activist groups have challenged Israel’s participation in the program, while the share of Horizon funding awarded to Israeli researchers has declined sharply.
According to VERA’s report, which covered the period from October 2025 to April 2026, there has been a 150 percent increase in efforts to exclude Israel from Horizon Europe.
In 2022, Israeli researchers received 5.4 percent of all Horizon grants. By 2025, that figure had fallen
to 2.5 percent — a decline of more than 50 percent.
“Israel’s participation in the ‘Horizon Europe’ association agreements is a strategic objective and
national goal of the State of Israel. For adversaries in this arena, this represents a major vulnerability
for Israel,” the report said.
It seems for this reason anti-Israel activists have specifically targeted the program. Indeed, VERA found that nearly 25 percent of all recent boycott reports were associated with Horizon Europe.
“Participation in the Horizon program provides not only an irreplaceable boost of valuable funding, but also enables Israeli researchers to establish research partnerships, maintain interactions with researchers from European countries and from countries outside Europe, and influence from within the scientific-academic agenda of Europe,” the report explained.
“This is the most prestigious and largest scientific club in the world,” VERA added. “Israel has earned a place within it, and every effort must be made to remain there in order to preserve scientific leadership and maintain our status as the ‘Start-Up Nation.’”
However, the BDS movement and other efforts to weaken Israel’s international standing create “a significant threat to Israel’s continued participation in the existing Horizon agreements,” VERA warned, “and a serious danger to its inclusion in the next Horizon agreements that will be signed during 2027 and implemented in 2028 for the years ahead.”
The report described the BDS movement’s string of victories as posing a “clear and immediate danger” to Israeli scientific and academic interests, while calling for a broader effort to improve public perceptions of Israel and its military operations in the Middle East.
VERA previously documented about 500 incidents of academic boycotts were reported just during the half-year through February 2025, a 66 percent increase compared to the six months following Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack.
Since then, the onslaught has continued, although at a slower rate.
“There has been a relatively moderate increase in the number of reports concerning new academic
boycotts of all types, whether at the level of the individual researcher, the academic institution, or
professional associations. This is most likely the result of the fact that anyone who wished to boycott
Israeli researchers and institutions has already acted in this direction over the past two years, and
therefore, there are now fewer new participants in such boycotts,” VERA found.
“At the same time, there has been no decline in the scope or quantity of the existing boycotts. The
meaning is that the broad academic boycott trend continues, and there is clearly a pattern of
gradual strengthening,” the report added.
The initiatives included efforts to exclude Israeli academics from conferences, research collaborations, publications, and other forms of scholarly exchange.
In May 2024, for example, Ghent University in Belgium banned partnerships with Israeli universities altogether.
The exact number of academic boycotts remains unclear. According to the Israeli news outlet Ynet, which first reported on VERA’s latest findings, 1,120 boycott complaints were recorded during the period examined in the report. However, Daniel Chamovitz — president of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, a member of VERA — wrote that nearly 1,000 academic boycotts against Israeli universities have been recorded since the Oct. 7 attack, and a quarter of them came last summer.
“Academic boycotts do not pressure governments,” he posted on LinkedIn. “They isolate scientists. They sever the collaborations that science depends on, and they send a message to a generation of young researchers that their work is unwelcome. Not because of its quality, but because of their passport. That is not a political position. It is a betrayal of what science is for.”
The VERA report argued that the rise in academic boycott campaigns reflected a broader surge in antisemitism and anti-Zionist activism across Europe following the Oct. 7 attacks and the ensuing war in Gaza.
As previously reported by The Algemeiner, an overwhelming majority of 2,030 EU teachers surveyed in a study released in January said antisemitic incidents occur daily in classrooms and workplaces. Seventy-eight percent “encountered at least one antisemitic incident between students,” and 27 percent “witnessed nine or more such incidents.” Another 61 percent saw students promoting Holocaust denialism, while others reported students drawing or wearing Nazi symbols. Forty-two percent said they had witnessed “other teachers being antisemitic.”
Amid the academic boycott campaign, Europe has seen a relentless wave of antisemitic incidents on campuses across the continent.
At the University of Strasbourg, a group of Jewish students was assaulted by an individual shouting “Zionist fascists,” while the University of Vienna hosted an “Intifada Camp,” a pro-Hamas encampment.
At the Free University of Brussels campus in Solbosch, a pro-Hamas group illegally occupied an administrative building and renamed it after a terrorist. Elsewhere, anti-Zionist demonstrators damaged property to the tune of hundreds of thousands of Euros, desecrated Jewish religious symbols, graffitied Jewish students’ dormitories with swastikas, and assaulted Jewish student leaders.
Antisemitic violence in the streets of Europe’s major cities is perpetrated regularly, too. In July 2025, a group wielding knives attacked Jews walking home from an event on the Greek island of Rhodes. In Davos, Switzerland, a man spat on, attacked, and verbally abused a Jewish couple — behavior he reportedly repeated multiple times against other Jewish individuals.
Jewish communities across the West continue to face similar threats and require stronger governmental protections for their civil and human rights, the Special Envoys and Coordinators Combatting Antisemitism (SECCA) group proclaimed on Tuesday after convening in Geneva.
“Antisemitism is a threat to Jews — and that alone would be reason enough to fight it,” the group said.
“But it also erodes the very foundations of democratic societies: human rights, dignity, equality, and the rule of law. A society in which Jews cannot live openly and safely is one in which fundamental rights are under threat for everyone.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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The profound internal contradiction that could spell doom for Hillel
Shortly after I graduated from Swarthmore College, it became the first campus to formally break with Hillel International. The campus Jewish organization began, instead, to call themselves an “Open Hillel,” then rebranded entirely after the parent organization threatened legal action over a civil rights panel it deemed too critical of Israel.
Swarthmore Jewish students lost the name, but they kept their integrity. Jewish students at Middlebury just faced the same question. They answered it the same way. And they were right to do so.
What happened in Vermont is not just a local story about one campus organization. It is a story about a deep contradiction at the heart of Hillel International — one that the organization may no longer be able to sustain.
Hillel presents itself, publicly and forcefully, as the Jewish student organization at colleges and universities across the United States. It’s the home of Jewish campus life, where Jewish students celebrate the High Holidays, eat kosher meals, light Hanukkah candles and gather for Shabbat. It describes itself as the world’s largest Jewish campus organization, serving nearly 200,000 students at more than 850 colleges and universities. It is, at many of those colleges, the only such institution that exists.
Precisely because of that monopoly position, Hillel and its allies have argued — with some justification — that protests targeting Hillel are a form of antisemitism. To make Jewish students feel unwelcome at the one place on campus where they can observe their religious obligations, they argue, is to attack Jewish students as Jews, not merely to criticize a political organization.
That argument has real force. Jewish students deserve to celebrate their holidays without running a political gauntlet. No one should have to defend their views on the West Bank occupation before they can get a bowl of matzo ball soup.
But the problem is that Hillel is also an explicitly political organization. And as such, it should be fair game for protesters.
Hillel International has a mandatory political line that all affiliated chapters must enforce: Its guidelines declare that Hillel is “steadfastly committed to the support of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state,” and campus chapters are prohibited from partnering with or hosting any group or individual that supports the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, “delegitimizes” Israel by Hillel’s own definition, or questions Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state.
When the Middlebury Jewish students met with Hillel International representatives, they were told that board members must universally adopt the organization’s political values about Israel. Universally. There is no asterisk, no opt-out, no room for the challenging pluralism of Jewish life in 2026.
This, from an organization that recently used imagery showing the entire territory from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea as part of Israel, without distinguishing the West Bank and Gaza.
This is not a neutral cultural position. It is a political one, and a fairly aggressive one at that. Hillel sends students on trips to Israel through Birthright and similar programs and received $22 million from a $66 million Israeli government initiative called Mosaic International to promote pro-Israel sentiment in the U.S. These are choices a political organization makes.
So which is it? Is Hillel a cultural and religious organization that provides communal Jewish life for all students, in which case it has no business enforcing political litmus tests? Or is it a politically committed advocacy organization with a defined ideological position — in which case it cannot claim special immunity from protest on the grounds that criticizing it means attacking Jewish students’ ability to celebrate Passover?
The answer, uncomfortable as it is, is that Hillel is both. For students like those at Middlebury, the tension between those two identities has become impossible to manage. I suspect more will soon follow their lead.
This contradiction matters now more than ever, because the American Jewish community is changing.
A major recent survey by the Jewish Federations of North America found that 14% of Jews ages 18 to 34 identify as anti-Zionist. Even among younger Jews who support Israel’s existence, the survey found, less than half agreed that Israel makes them feel proud to be Jewish. The Jewish Electorate Institute’s most recent survey found that only about a third of American Jews self-identify as Zionist. As the government of Israel moves further and further to the right, the divide between American Jews and the state of Israel is only likely to grow.
Under current Hillel rules, the meaningful and growing number of Jewish students who identify as non-Zionist or anti-Zionist are effectively excluded. If they choose to participate, they are required to keep their politics at the door — but the organization doesn’t require the same of itself.
The Middlebury case illustrates the absurdity with unusual clarity.
The students’ discomfort with Hillel International began, they explained, after a November 2023 challah sale raised $656 for World Central Kitchen, an organization that provides food relief in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza. That act of simple, universalist charity created friction with the chapter’s parent body. Co-president Caroline Jaffe put the stakes plainly: “How are we ever going to get to peace in Israel and Palestine if we can’t even have a Middlebury Jewish group and a Middlebury SJP” — Students for Justice in Palestine — “talk to each other in Vermont, pretty much as far removed as you could be?”
That should not be a radical question.
The solution is not to try to reform Hillel International from within; that project has been tried repeatedly, by the Open Hillel movement and others, and the structural incentives against change are too powerful. The solution is instead what the Middlebury students are pointing toward: decentralization.
Political pluralism within Jewish campus life is not a threat to Jewish students. It is a reflection of the actual diversity of Jewish opinion, which surveys consistently show to be far wider than Hillel International’s guidelines allow. An American Jewish community that can only cohere by suppressing internal dissent is far more fragile than one that has learned to argue openly and remain in relationship. The students at Middlebury, by renaming themselves the Jewish Association of Middlebury and insisting on a more pluralistic identity, are not abandoning Jewish community. They are building a community that is more honest about what it is and who it is for.
I remember the moment at Swarthmore when Jewish students stopped asking permission and started asking a different question: not “what will Hillel International allow?” but “what do our Jewish students actually need?” The answer turned out to be more interesting, more contested, and, in its way, more Jewish than anything the guidelines had room for.
The post The profound internal contradiction that could spell doom for Hillel appeared first on The Forward.
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US May Ask Israel to Put Palestinian Tax Money Toward Trump’s Gaza Plan, Sources Say
US President Donald Trump takes part in a charter announcement for his Board of Peace initiative aimed at resolving global conflicts, alongside the 56th annual World Economic Forum (WEF), in Davos, Switzerland, Jan. 22, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Denis Balibouse
The US is considering asking Israel to give some tax money it is withholding from the Palestinian Authority to Donald Trump’s Board of Peace to fund the US president’s post-war plan for Gaza, five sources familiar with the matter said.
The Trump administration has not yet decided whether to make a formal request to Israel, said three of the sources, officials with knowledge of US deliberations with Israel.
The two other sources, Palestinians with knowledge of the deliberations, said that under the proposal a portion of the tax money would go to a US-backed transitional government for Gaza and other funds to the PA if it makes reforms.
The PA puts the amount of tax being withheld at $5 billion.
The prospect of the Palestinians’ own tax money being repurposed toward Trump’s Gaza rebuilding plan, over which their government has had no input, could further sideline the Western-backed PA even as Israel‘s withholding of the funds begets a financial crisis in the West Bank.
The PA exercises limited self-rule in the West Bank but has not had any sway over Gaza since it was exiled from the territory after a brief civil war with terrorist group Hamas in 2007.
Trump’s plan for Gaza, shattered after more than two years of war, has been held up by a refusal by Hamas to lay down their weapons.
‘MONEY HELD IN A BANK DOES NOTHING’
The Board of Peace declined to comment on whether a proposal to use Palestinian tax money was under consideration.
A Board official said it had asked all parties to leverage resources to support Trump’s rebuild plan, estimated to cost $70 billion.
“That includes the Palestinian Authority and Israel. There is no doubt that money held in a bank does nothing to further the President’s 20-Point Plan,” the official said.
That appeared to refer to the PA tax revenue that Israel has withheld from the body in a long-running dispute over payments it makes to Palestinians and their families for carrying out terrorist attacks against Israelis.
Under this policy, official payments are made to Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails, the families of “martyrs” killed in attacks on Israelis, and Palestinians injured in terrorist attacks.
Reports estimate that approximately 8 percent of the PA’s budget has been allocated to paying stipends to convicted terrorists and their families.
Israel collects taxes on imported goods on behalf of the PA and is meant to transfer the revenue under a longstanding arrangement. The PA is supposed to use the funds to pay civil servants and fund public services.
The sources did not say how much of the tax money Washington was considering asking Israel to transfer to the Board.
The US State Department, Israeli government, and PA did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The US and Israel have long pressured the PA to abolish payments to Palestinian prisoners and families of those killed by Israeli forces, arguing it encourages violence.
In response to US pressure, the PA in February 2025 said it was reforming the payment system, but the US said those changes did not go far enough. As punishment, Israel has withheld taxes it collects on the PA’s behalf, an amount that Palestinian officials say has reached $5 billion – well over half of the PA’s annual budget.
That has set off a financial crisis in the West Bank, with the PA slashing salaries of thousands of civil servants.
Israel accepted a US invitation to join the Board of Peace. The PA was not invited.
Under Trump’s plan, a group of Palestinian technocrats dubbed the National Committee for the Administration of Gaza would take control of Gaza from Hamas as the terrorists lay down their weapons.
Nickolay Mladenov, Trump’s Board of Peace envoy for Gaza, said during a press conference in Jerusalem on Wednesday that reconstruction planning was in advanced stages.
“We’re doing it sector by sector. We’re costing things. We’re coordinating with donors and we’re ready to begin in earnest once the conditions allow it,” Mladenov said, without mentioning the tax issue.