Marcia Bricker Halperin

Marcia Bricker Halperin (b. 1953) is a photographer who has specialized in photographing Brooklyn and Brooklynites as well as locations in other boroughs of New York City. In 1978, she was selected to be a part of the federally funded Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA) Artists Project, as implemented in Manhattan. As recently as 2022, in about 35% of the households in the neighborhood, nicknamed "Little Odessa", the primary language was Russian or Ukrainian.

She photographed Dubrow's in Brooklyn and in Manhattan's Garment District, the Concord Cafeteria in Miami Beach, the Paradise Cafeteria (on West 23rd Street and Eighth Avenue in Manhattan), and the Art Deco Horn & Hardart of West 57th Street (between Sixth and Seventh Avenues in Manhattan). Christopher Porter characterized her photographs this way:

While Hopper's Nighthawks represents that spectrum of "liveliness and sorrow of urban life" all in one painting — based on my interpretation, anyway — Halperin generally captures one or the other emotions in her photos, not both simultaneously. In addition, she produced a series of photos of Hasidim celebrating Jewish holidays at Coney Island.

She had a career as a high school photography and special education teacher in New York City. During her 35 years as a teacher, her photography largely fell by the wayside. However, she noted in 2023, "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", and returned to photography. includes many of her photographs of the Dubrow's on Kings Highway and East 16th Street in Brooklyn. The book documents the lives of the mainly elderly Jews who frequented the cafeteria. Julia Gergely, writing for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, underlined the importance of Bricker Halperin's preserving the memory of a vanished world of secular Jewish culture.

Bricker Halperin began frequenting the Dubrow’s on Kings Highway in 1975 and continued until it closed in 1978, and was a regular visitor to the Garment District's Dubrow's until its closure in 1985.

Exhibitions In 2020, before the publication of her book Kibbitz and Nosh, the University of Michigan's Institute for Research on Women and Gender, the Women’s Studies Department, the Jean and Samuel Frankel Center for Judaic Studies, and the Department of American Culture organized an exhibition of Bricker Halperin's photographs of vanished cafeterias.

Awards and nominations Bricker Halperin was a finalist for the Lucie Foundation's 2022 photography award in the "Linked Generations" category. Her photographs included several that became part of her book. Bricker Halperin, in 2024, won the Jewish Book Council's Jane and Stuart Weitzman Family Award for Food Writing and Cookbooks for Kibbitz and Nosh.

Personal life Halperin is a lifelong resident of Brooklyn. As a child, she attended a "Conservadox" synagogue, and had "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."