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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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Jews decry UK newspaper for appearing to justify attack on bakery founded by Israelis
(JTA) — A Guardian column that seemed to rationalize the targeting of a popular Israeli-founded bakery has ignited controversy in the British Jewish community.
The March 14 piece in the British daily, by sports and culture writer Jonathan Liew, came days after the newly opened north London branch of Gail’s was repeatedly vandalized, with its windows smashed and red paint and pro‑Palestinian slogans daubed on its doors.
The Board of Deputies of British Jews denounced the vandalism, saying that “targeting a business on the basis of alleged or perceived Israeli and or Jewish connections reflects a very worrying trend.”
Liew, meanwhile, described the bakery chain’s expansion into diverse neighborhoods as a form of “aggression,” implying that its presence near a Palestinian-owned cafe was inherently provocative.
Critics, including British Jewish media, communal leaders and online commentators, accused Liew of rationalizing an attack on a business they say is being targeted solely because of its founders’ Israeli heritage. Gail’s was founded in the 1990s as a wholesale bakery by Israeli baker Gail Mejia, who with an Israeli partner opened a storefront bakery in 2005. In 2021, the company, today with close to 200 stores, was acquired by the American investment firm Bain Capital.
“We are a British business with no specific connections to any country or government outside the UK,” a spokesperson for Gail’s told the Jewish News. “Our focus right now is on working with the authorities and making sure our people feel safe and supported.”
Although the Guardian piece acknowledges Bain’s ownership, it also notes allegations that the investment firm “invests heavily in military technology, including Israeli security companies.” As a result, wrote Liew, “its very presence 20 metres [65 feet] away from a small independent Palestinian cafe feels quietly symbolic, an act of heavy-handed high-street aggression.” High Street is the British equivalent of “Main Street.”
Pro-Palestinian demonstrators had protested the opening of the branch in the days before the vandalism.
A spokesperson for the Israeli embassy in the U.K. told The Daily Mail that Liew’s article was “an astonishing exercise in bigotry disguised as moral commentary.”
“Beneath its surface lies a familiar and ugly trope: the repackaging of anitsemitic prejudice in fashionable political language,” said Alex Grandler.
The debate, playing out in fiery messages on social media, has highlighted broader concerns about Jewish-owned businesses in Britain being cast as proxies in disputes over the Middle East. In 2025, the Community Security Trust, Britain’s main antisemitism watchdog, recorded 20 incidents involving vandalism at Jewish businesses and organizations.
“In the Guardian’s hall-of-mirrors morality, smashing up a shop because it was founded by Jews is just a touching little political tantrum,” Jewish News editor Richard Ferrer wrote in a column.
In the Guardian piece, Liew seemed to sympathize with the Palestinian-owned cafe in the neighborhood, Cafe Metro, for having been the frequent victim of “pro-Israel activists” who “regularly descend on it to slap stickers on its windows reading ‘Stop killing people’ and ‘One of these days you’ll thank us.’” At the same time, he referred to the window-smashing at Gail’s among the “small acts of petty symbolism” that grow out of Palestinian frustration with their failure to exert influence on the Israel-Palestine debate.
Hadley Freeman, a former columnist for the Jewish Chronicle who now writes a column for The Times, called out Liew for applying an apparent double standard.
“So let me get this straight,” she wrote on X. “1. Petty activism against a Palestinian-owned cafe is bad (agreed!) 2. But *violent* activism against a cafe that people associate (wrongly!) with Israel is justified and understandable.
“Update your rule book accordingly!” she added.
CAMERA UK, a media watchdog group that monitors coverage of Israel, said it had contacted the Guardian, asking if Liew’s column met its “editorial standards.”
“We know the answer, but are nonetheless hoping to see how they justify Liew’s latest defense of antisemitism,” CAMERA said in a statement.
A Guardian spokesperson did share a terse reply with The Daily Mail. “Complaints about Guardian journalism are considered by the internally independent readers’ editor under the Guardian’s editorial code and guidance,” the spokesperson said.
The controversy even reached across the Atlantic. “Good grief — Gail’s is just a bakery!” Patricia Heaton, the actress and conservative political activist, wrote on X. Heaton said she ”had no idea it had any connection to Israel or the Jewish people. But now I want to support it even more.”
Public defenses of the article have been limited, though some pro-Palestinian activists online argued that Liew was only describing the motivations of the protesters rather than endorsing vandalism.
Liew hasn’t responded to the criticism of his column, although he pinned the article to the top of his Bluesky social media account, with the message “the war at home.”
The post Jews decry UK newspaper for appearing to justify attack on bakery founded by Israelis appeared first on The Forward.
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Report: Israeli group quietly organized charter flights evacuating Palestinians from Gaza
(JTA) — An Israeli organization headed by a right-wing activist quietly arranged a series of charter flights that evacuated Palestinians from Gaza last year, according to an Associated Press investigation.
The organization, Ad Kan, a right-wing Israeli organization founded by Gilad Ach, an Israeli combat reservist and West Bank settler activist, coordinated the flights via another company called Al-Majd, which describes itself on its website as a humanitarian organization “supporting Palestinian lives.”
Among the evacuations facilitated by Ad Kan was a flight in May that transported nearly 60 Palestinians to Indonesia and other locations, as well as two flights in October and November that transported over 300 Palestinians to South Africa.
It was not clear who had planned or paid for the flights. South African Foreign Minister Ronald Lamola decried the evacuations as representing “a broader agenda to remove Palestinians from Palestine,” and an investigation was launched into one of the flight’s origins.
At the time, President Donald Trump had walked back his proposal to relocate the population in Gaza to other countries amid criticism, despite getting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s endorsement.
The AP investigation found that Ach had stuck with Trump’s plan after the U.S. president dumped it, publishing a report detailing how he would implement the “voluntary exit.”
The newly revealed origins of the charter flights adds to a history of controversy surrounding small-scale efforts to evacuate Palestinians from Gaza. Last August, France suspended its effort to evacuate Palestinians after a woman who took part in the program was accused of making antisemitic comments online. The same month, the United States also suspended a program designed to give Palestinian medical care after the far-right Jewish influencer Laura Loomer called the effort a “national security threat.”
Several of the passengers on the South Africa flights told the Associated Press that they were unaware of who was behind the flights, but said they did not care and were more concerned with leaving the besieged territory. (Six Palestinians who spoke to the outlet said they paid up to $2,000 per person for the transportation.)
“There was famine, and we had no options. My children were almost killed,” said a 37-year-old Palestinian who arrived in South Africa in November. “Death and destruction was everywhere, all day, for two years, and nobody came to the rescue.”
In a statement to the Associated Press, Ach rejected South Africa’s allegations that the evacuations amounted to ethnic cleansing and decried the “profound hypocrisy” of countries unwilling to accept Palestinian refugees.
“Their continued presence in Gaza, under dire conditions, serves as a tool to pressure Israel internationally and allows Hamas to maintain its rule over this suffering population,” Ach said.
While it was unclear if Ach had coordinated with the Israeli government to facilitate the evacuations, Muayad Saidam, a Palestinian identified on the group’s website as its Gaza humanitarian project manager, told the outlet that travel arrangements for Palestinians must be made with Israeli authorities.
The post Report: Israeli group quietly organized charter flights evacuating Palestinians from Gaza appeared first on The Forward.
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Illinois primary pits Jewish candidate with deep Israel ties against AIPAC spending
Daniel Biss might seem like the kind of candidate the American Israel Public Affairs Committee could live with. The two-term Evanston mayor grew up partly in Israel, where his family spent summers. His mother is Israeli. He speaks Hebrew. And in his political career, he regularly engaged with pro-Israel groups, including AIPAC.
But with voters going to the polls Tuesday in Illinois for a closely watched Democratic congressional primary, Biss, 48, finds himself in the unusual position of defending himself against nearly $6 million in spending from an AIPAC-aligned super PAC. His district includes Evanston and Chicago’s North Shore suburbs, with one of the largest Jewish populations in the Midwest and a history of Jewish representation. An estimated 11% of the electorate is Jewish.
Speaking with the Forward, Biss acknowledged that the barrage of negative ads has been unpleasant. But he said the outside spending has become central to his campaign, as he seeks to highlight who is behind the attacks. Once voters learn about AIPAC’s role, he said, “they are repelled.”
Biss is the latest target of the major Israel lobby group’s campaign to eliminate candidates for Congress who have substantial engagement on Israel aimed at taking a more moderate path for U.S. policy — even if that means helping get far-left candidates who denounce Israel nominated instead.
That’s what happened in AIPAC’s first intervention in Democratic primaries this year, in a New Jersey special election for a House seat. There, progressive candidate Analilia Mejia — who described Israel’s military campaign in Gaza as a genocide — prevailed after an AIPAC-associated super PAC spent more than $2 million targeting former Democratic Rep. Tom Malinowski.
Elect Chicago Women, a super PAC aligned with AIPAC, has invested more than $5.7 million in attacking Biss and boosting State Sen. Laura Fine, who is also Jewish.
Recent polling, however, showed the spending has not necessarily reshaped the race in Fine’s favor. Kat Abughazaleh, a young Palestinian-American progressive candidate, has risen to second place in recent weeks. She is backed by Justice Democrats and a newer pro-Palestinian political group called Peace, Accountability, Leadership PAC. Her surge has fueled concerns among some Democrats that the race could produce another member of the progressive “Squad” in Congress and make it harder to win the general election.
Biss had tried to get into AIPAC’s good graces. He acknowledged that he had previously engaged with local AIPAC representatives in “good faith,” even submitting a position paper outlining his views on Israel. But he now believes the organization’s approach has become too inflexible to allow for meaningful dialogue.
He called “absurd” AIPAC’s stance opposing any conditions on U.S. military aid to Israel. “And then try to enforce it with millions of dollars of dark money, is certainly bad for democracy and bad for our politics here in America,” Biss added.
Biss said he supports a pair of measures that would restrict certain offensive arms sales to Israel and increase oversight of Israel’s policies in the occupied West Bank and in Gaza. Current Rep. Jan Schakowsky, who is Jewish and has held the seat for nearly three decades, is a co-sponsor of both the Block the Bombs Act and the Ceasefire Compliance Act.
Biss’ views on Israel are shaped in part by his own family’s history. All four of his grandparents were born in Europe. His father’s parents fled Nazi-era Europe in the late 1930s, settling in Decatur, Illinois, where his grandfather established a medical practice.
His mother’s family had a more harrowing journey. Ethnic Hungarians living in what was then Romanian-controlled Transylvania, they were deported to Auschwitz in 1944. Biss’ grandmother, her sister and one brother survived, while her parents and two other siblings were killed. After the war, the surviving members of the family returned to their hometown before immigrating to Israel, where Biss’ mother was raised. Much of his extended family still lives there today.
He said he visited Israel nearly every year from childhood through his early adulthood and speaks Hebrew, which he learned as a child from his mother.
“My connection to Israel is very deep, real and personal,” Biss said. “This is not some political position I take for a questionnaire.”
At the same time, he said, his Jewish upbringing also shaped how he thinks about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
If elected to Congress, Biss said, he would push the United States to bring diplomatic and economic pressure to bear on Israel, measures backed by J Street, a more liberal alternative to AIPAC. “I think that it’s important to have people in Congress who advocate for that kind of position, from a standpoint of supporting Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish democratic state, understanding Israel’s need to defend itself, and advocating for a vision of Israeli defense and security that is not inconsistent with basic humanitarian principles, and with the Jewish values of treating every life as equally sacred,” he said.
Steve Sheffey, a longtime Chicago Democratic activist who writes an insider politics newsletter, said that AIPAC’s attacks on Biss seem perplexing — until understood as targeting someone who poses a threat to uncritical U.S. backing. “Biss’ background on Israel is so much deeper and more extensive than almost any member of Congress in either party,” Sheffey said. “When Daniel Biss says something about Israel, it comes with authority.”
Sheffey suggested that independent thinking may be exactly what worries AIPAC.
“AIPAC sees me as a threat because they know that in Congress, I can’t be dismissed,” Biss said in a recent statement.
More districts, more division
The contest is not the only Illinois primary where hardline Israel advocacy groups are playing a major role.
In the 2nd District, a crowded race to replace Rep. Robin Kelly — who is running for the U.S. Senate — has drawn attention after Schakowsky withdrew her endorsement of Cook County Commissioner Donna Miller over her ties to AIPAC-aligned donors. One of Miller’s chief rivals is State Sen. Robert Peters, a Black Jew who has been endorsed by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, accused Israel of genocide and signed on to the Block the Bombs Act. Peters wrote in an op-ed for the Forward that AIPAC’s opposition to him is driven by concern that outspoken Jewish critics of Israeli policy like himself will prompt “others who may have been nervously hanging back…feel like they can take bolder action as well.”
In the crowded race to replace retiring Rep. Danny Davis in the 7th District, the campaign of Chicago City Treasurer Melissa Conyears-Ervin has received about $5 million in spending from AIPAC’s United Democracy Project and an endorsement from Democratic Majority for Israel. Jason Friedman, who is Jewish and previously got AIPAC support, has been “approved” in the primary by J Street.
AIPAC is also boosting former Rep. Melissa Bean, vying to replace incumbent Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, who is running in a Senate primary. Elect Chicago Women spent $3.9 in the race. Bean’s campaign also received more than $400,000 in donations from AIPAC donors. Her chief rival is Junaid Ahmed, a critic of Israel who supports an arms embargo on the Jewish state. Chicago Progressive Partnership, a group that shares vendors and donors with other AIPAC-affiliated PACs, aired an attack ad against Ahmed, attacking his personal wealth and investments in Tesla.
In an email to its supporters, AIPAC attempted to frame the races as a fight against potential “Squad” members. It listed Abughazaleh, Peters and Ahmed, along with an additional three progressive lower-tier candidates, as people with “dangerous visions for America,” who need to be stopped. “The pro-Israel community is taking the political fight to them, and we are not backing down,” Jake Braunstein, AIPAC senior director, wrote.
Biss, the candidate most heavily targeted by AIPAC-aligned spending, was not mentioned.
“AIPAC is backing a candidate who has almost no chance of winning,” Sheffey said, referring to Fine.
Joe Rubin, a Democratic commentator and foreign policy expert, said the Biss-Fine-Abughazaleh race differs from AIPAC’s earlier intervention in New Jersey in ways that could prove more embarrassing for the group. In the New Jersey election, AIPAC sought to defeat Malinowski without backing a clear favorite and was willing to take that risk. In Illinois, however, the group is investing heavily to elect Fine — so far unsuccessfully.
“I don’t believe AIPAC is necessarily heartbroken” if they empower a far-left candidate, Rubin said. “But I do think that they’re trying to defeat who they feel will be a very strong opponent.”
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