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The Hanukkah merch market has exploded. But are Jews feeling more represented?
(JTA) — It was early November when Nicholas Wymer-Santiago walked into his local Target in Austin, Texas, and realized it was beginning to feel a lot like Hanukkah.
Instead of an endcap with a limited array of Hanukkah basics, as he had seen in past years, there stretched out a whole aisle of holiday products: pillows; dreidel-shaped pet toys; window decals; menorahs in the shape of lions, corgis and whales; and so much more. Even the $5-and-under impulse-buys section filled with seasonal products had a supply of Hanukkah goods, including a Star of David-shaped bowl and a set of dishes labeled “sour cream” and “applesauce.”
“In a good way, it was overwhelming at first, because there’s so much and I kind of want to buy it all,” Wymer-Santiago recalled feeling as he stood in the holiday section, looking up at a large photograph of a Hanukkah celebration alongside others showcasing Christmas.
The higher education administrator at the University of Texas decided to limit himself, at first taking home just a tea towel and a matching mug printed with a Hanukkah motif.
“And then I came back twice, maybe three times and each time I bought more and more items that I know I probably don’t need,” he said. “I think I’ve just had so much excitement about the novelty of it all, and having the ability to purchase these items, many of which I’ve never seen before.”
Wymer-Santiago is hardly alone in loading his cart with Hanukkah merchandise. Across the United States, big-box stores appear to be stocking more Hanukkah products than ever — and while off-color items such as Hanukkah gnomes and “Oy to the World” dish towels have raised eyebrows, the real story might be that American retailers have decked their shelves with menorahs, tableware and other items that are appropriate, affordable and often downright tasteful.
For many American Jews, the result is a sense of inclusion at a time of unease — although some are wrestling with what it means to have access to a fast-fashion form of Judaica.
“It is very exciting to go into Target or Michaels or a Walmart and to see Hanukkah merchandise,” said Ariel Scheer Stein, an influencer who shares crafting and holiday content for Jewish families on Instagram, where she has more than 20,000 followers.
Social media influencers in Miami, New York City and Denver respond to the flood of Hanukkah products at their local Target shops in 2022. (Instagram/@jamwithjamie/@cupofjo)
“The feeling is almost like pride and like we’re being seen and represented,” Stein added. “In a sea of Christmas … it feels really great, even if it’s a much smaller representation, that the Jewish holiday is there also and the Jewish community is being acknowledged and represented.”
The idea that retailers have stocked up on Hanukkah goods to make Jews feel represented is tempting, but it’s probably not the only reason for a shift in the market, according to Russell Winer, deputy chair of the marketing department at New York University’s Stern School of Business. He said that while an endcap — the small set of shelves at the end of an aisle — might sometimes be given over for symbolic purposes, the devotion of an entire aisle at the busiest time of the year is purely a business decision.
“These stores are very sophisticated in what they put in them,” Winer said. “They’re not going to put stuff on the shelves, especially at the holidays, if they don’t think they’re going to sell.”
There are signs that the Hanukkah market might be much wider than the proportion of Americans who identify as Jewish, 2.5%, would suggest. Numerator, a respected consumer trends polling firm, found in a survey of 11,000 consumers conducted in January 2022 that 14% of respondents said they were “definitely” or “probably” celebrating Hanukkah this year, compared to 96% for Christmas. More than half of the Hanukkah celebrants said they expected to spend more than $50 on the holiday — suggesting that retailers can expect hundreds of millions of dollars in Hanukkah spending this year.
Part of that marketplace is the growing number of families in which Hanukkah is celebrated alongside other holidays, usually Christmas. Most American Jews who have married in the last decade have done so to people who are not Jewish, according to the 2020 Pew study of American Jews; most of them say they are raising their children exclusively or partly as Jews. They may want to have products that allow Hanukkah to share the stage equitably with the other celebrations in their family.
“I’m not terribly surprised from a cultural standpoint that there’s more merchandise,” said Winer, who is Jewish. He said he and his wife had purchased Hanukkah stockings for their grandchildren, who are being raised in two faith traditions. (Evangelical Christians and Messianics, those who adopt Jewish practices while believing in the divinity of Jesus, also represent an emerging market for Jewish ritual objects.)
Stein offered another theory to explain the uptick in interest in Hanukkah products: the fact that social media and Zoom meetings have made home lives more transparent than ever.
“The communal sharing of lives, whether you’re an influencer or even my friends on Facebook showing what their display is this year or taking a picture of a recipe they were really proud of, making latkes from scratch — there’s just more visibility than there has been in the past,” she said. “And that’s probably a factor.”
Whatever the reasons, shoppers are noticing. Like Stein and countless other Jewish influencers, Rabbi Yael Buechler, a devoted observer of Jewish consumer trends, has offered tours of Hanukkah merchandise to her social media followers. Wearing Hanukkah pajamas that she designed and sells, Buechler has posted 14 videos to TikTok showcasing the Hanukkah collections of national retailers and assigns each store a “yay” or “nay” based on several metrics, including whether items display accurate Hebrew or appear to be generic blue-and-white items being passed off as made for the holiday. The videos, which have been viewed hundreds of thousands of times, have given her a broad view of what’s available to the Hanukkah consumer.
Welcome to the second installment of Hanukkah merch: YAY or NAY? .@target edition .Items were rated by:If the product was beyond blue & white Correct Hebrew Whether the Hanukkiyah was kosher If the Hanukkah pun was goodWhether animal was Hanukkah punnable (i.e. Menorasaurus) .#hanukkahiscoming #hanukkahfails #hanukkahcountdown #hanukkahyayornay #yayornay #hanukkah2022 #targetfinds #hanukkahpresents #hanukkahpjs #hanukkahgifts #hanukkahcheck #chanukah2022
“I see a lot more products this year than any other year,” said Buechler, who works at a Jewish school outside New York City. “I see a lot of new prints. I see more creativity in the market. I see more humor in the market.”
Like Wymer-Santiago, Buechler said Target, which has 2,000 locations across the United States, stood out as offering the widest array of products and the lowest proportion of “fails,” or products that miss the mark religiously, culturally or aesthetically.
“They have really stepped it up,” Buechler said. “Target also carries the Nickelodeon ‘Rugrats’ Hanukkah sweatshirts that are just brilliant. … I would definitely say they get the biggest ‘yay’ for this year.”
Target, which has a track record of using inclusive imagery in its advertisements and in-store promotions, declined to answer questions about its offerings, including how much bigger its Hanukkah collection is this year than in the past and how widely the products for Jewish buyers have been distributed. But a spokesperson said the feeling Wymer-Santiago and Stein described after visiting their local stores is exactly what the company is trying to cultivate.
“Target is committed to creating an inclusive guest experience in which all guests feel represented,” the spokesperson wrote in an email. The spokesperson noted that Target’s Hanukkah assortment “was developed in collaboration with Jewish team members and input from our Jewish employee resource group” and crosses several of the retailer’s in-house brands.
One of those lines, Opalhouse by Jungalow, was created by a Jewish artist, Justina Blakeney. Last year, Blakeney’s first Hanukkah collection included plates and pillows, as well as a gold menorah shaped like a dove. This year, Blakeney added new pillow designs and a clay menorah.
Target’s website prominent promotes Hanukkah products, including from a house brand by a Jewish creator named Justina Blakeney. (Screenshot)
“If I could go back in time and tell elementary-school-aged Justina (or ‘Tina’ as I was called back then) that I would have a chance to design a Hanukkah collection for Target, I would have lost my mind,” she wrote in an October blog post revealing the collection.
Hanukkah goods have always been widely available through Jewish merchandisers and at synagogue bazaars — but those products have been available only to people who already engaged in Jewish communities. Amazon and other online retailers have increased access, but only for people who are hunting for Hanukkah supplies. A Hanukkah aisle at Target, in contrast, reaches the many Jews who may not already have robust holiday traditions.
Stein, who said she particularly regretted not snapping up a marble dreidel sculpture that quickly sold out at Target, said she saw only benefits in promoting major retailers’ Hanukkah offerings, even if doing so has made her something of an unpaid advertiser at times.
“Right now, especially with the rise of antisemitism, if there are ways that we can spur Jewish joy — and for me, that’s by sharing and inspiring people with different kinds of Hanukkah merch and home decor and jewelry — I think that’s great,” she said.
Not everyone is thrilled by the shift in the marketplace. The sweeping Hanukkah displays are drawing criticism from those who have long lamented that the American primacy of Christmas has caused Jews to focus too much on a minor holiday, while leaving holidays with more religious significance relatively uncelebrated.
“I think: What would it feel like to see a giant Shavuot display?” Wymer-Santiago said.
The fast-fashion aspect of the big-box retailers’ offerings, many of which are imported from China, also raises concerns about whether easy access to trendy Judaica comes at environmental and cultural costs.
“How about we don’t extract fossil fuels to make crap that no one needs and that makes Jewish communities less distinctive?” asked Dan Friedman, a writer and longtime climate activist, though he emphasized that systemic change, rather than tweaks to purchasing decisions by Jewish consumers, is needed to avert climate catastrophe.
For Buechler and others, the benefits of a mass-market Hanukkah merchandise boom outweigh any possible drawbacks.
“As a rabbi, I am all for anything that will make Hanukkah celebrations more engaging and potentially lengthen a family celebration,” said Buechler, who said her own collection had outgrown the four tubs it occupied several months ago, and that one of her favorite purchases was of a Hanukkah sweater for lizards that she bought for a friend’s guinea pig.
“I really do believe that owning different kinds of Hanukkah merch, whether apparel or otherwise, will increase the likelihood that a family will celebrate with friends with family for more nights than they would have last year,” she added.
Nicholas Wymer-Santiago takes a selfie showing off his menorah collection, mostly acquired at his local Target in Austin, Texas. (Courtesy of Wymer-Santiago)
Wymer-Santiago plans to celebrate the holiday with his family in Ohio, meaning that he will be leaving behind much of this year’s Target haul in his Austin apartment: the device that makes dreidel-shaped waffles, the window decals that advertise the holiday to passersby, the giant dreidel-shaped jar that he has filled with, well, dreidels. He said he planned to make room in his suitcase for at least one item: a $5 menorah that reminds him of his dog.
Wymer-Santiago said a piece of him worried that Target was taking advantage of his excitement about Jewish representation, the way it has been criticized for doing around LGBTQ Pride celebrations, to sell him stuff he doesn’t need.
“Every time I buy something from Target in general, but definitely for Hanukkah, I think about this,” he said. “But then I think: This thing is so cute. And I just need it.”
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Romania’s secret police trailed a Jewish photographer. Decades later, their files have become a film.
(JTA) — BERLIN — He had wild hair and wore jeans. He was American — and Jewish. He had a camera.
That was enough to trigger surveillance by the notorious secret police of communist Romania, the Securitate.
Now, 41 years after photojournalist Edward Serotta boldly stepped behind the Iron Curtain, we can see just how obsessed the Romanians were with him, thanks to a short documentary by renowned Romanian director Radu Jude and historian Adrian Cioflâncă.
“Plan contraplan/Shot Reverse Shot,” which had its world premiere at the Berlinale international film festival last month, gives equal time to Serotta’s reminiscences about Romania in the 1980s, and to the Securitate’s observations of him.
And of course, to the photos: After his Romania adventure, Serotta put down new roots in Europe, and has spent decades documenting the Jewish life that was nearly obliterated in the Holocaust. He has published several books of photographs documenting Jewish communities. He also documented the fall of the communist regimes in which he’d set foot as a young man.
Twenty-two minutes long, the film was one of several shown at the festival with themes related to Jewish life and history, or to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The obsessive spying of the communist regime, as documented here, appears absurd today. But it was fully serious at the time.
In his narration, Serotta — born in 1949 in Atlanta — recalls how communist authorities in 1985 “had given me the permission to come to Romania under the idea that they would have glowing and fine articles and positive articles about Romania.” His stated intention was to document World War II memorials, of which at the time there were only a handful. Today, there are many more.
“He will be put under surveillance,” declares the spy, narrated in the film’s second half by Romanian political scientist Diana Mărgărit, “in order to prevent contact with parasitic protest elements.”
While Serotta was aiming his lens, the informants were sneaking around, snapping quick shots and jotting down observations. They also slipped into his hotel room one day, and exposed a roll of film.
The things they frantically recorded are “funny right now,” a reminder of a bygone regime that at the time was deadly serious, said Cioflâncă in an interview. Cioflâncă is on the advisory college of the National Council for the Study of the Securitate Archives, a state institution that deals with the history of communism. “I lived for 15 years when I was a child under communism. And it was not fun.”
For 41 years, until the regime’s fall and the execution of president Nikolae Ceaușescu and his wife, Elena, in 1989, the Securitate spied on and terrorized citizens of Romania, suppressing dissent. According to the virtual Cryptomuseum, based in the Netherlands, the Securitate had up to 11,000 agents and 500,000 informants monitoring a population of 22 million.
In 2006, a governmental commission reported that more than 600,000 Romanians — and potentially around 2 million — were incarcerated for political crimes, and more than 100,000 died.
Western journalists, though suspect and surveilled, were to some extent wooed — at least in the 1980s. When Serotta requested to visit in 1985, Ceaușescu had been president for some 11 years (after heading the communist party from 1965). Ceaușescu was seen as more friendly to the west: He had refused to contribute troops to invade former Czechoslovakia in 1968; and he kept up relations with Israel when other communist countries severed their ties.
At the time, the regime wanted to gain “most favored nation” economic status from the United States, which depended on their allowing some freedom of movement to its population.
“There were 855 western journalists coming to Romania during the Ceaușescu period, and 80 of them were American,” said Cioflâncă, who also directs the Bucharest-based Center for the Study of Jewish History, under the Federation of Jewish Communities in Romania.
“Many of these visits were organized as a propaganda instrument. In all the cases, they wanted to interfere with the journalist and to influence his work. They tried something similar with Edward when he came,” he added.
“They felt that the Jews are so influential, especially in the relationship with the United States,” Serotta said in an interview.
“In their mind, everything that was Israeli, Jewish, or American Jewish was deemed like an important piece of influence to use for their political PR at that time,” said Serotta, who eventually moved to Europe and in 2000 founded the Centropa nonprofit archive aimed at preserving Jewish memory in Central and Eastern Europe, the Balkans, the Baltics, and the former Soviet Union.
Centropa was purchased by the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2024.
Given Serotta’s obsession with documenting history, Cioflâncă said he was surprised to learn that his friend had never viewed his Securitate files. Several years ago, he asked Serotta if he’d like to see them.
“The funny thing is, I didn’t think I was important enough to have any,” Serotta recalled.
Cioflâncă found some 300 pages of documents. The informants had tried to influence the photojournalist, saying that the World War II killings of Jews in the region were “a marginal moment,” Cioflâncă noted. “They wanted to make sure that their reputation remained clean, that they were not collaborators” with the Nazis.
According to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and Yad Vashem, at least 380,000 Romanian Jews were killed during the Holocaust.
“I was there for a matter of several weeks,” Serotta said. He recalled “a very tense atmosphere. Nothing worked properly. We barely found food in stores. It was awful.”
And he is still astonished that the Securitate spent so much time following him. “It’s funny stuff.”
“Many Securitate officers were pretty stupid,” Serotta said in the interview. “They were so distorted in doing their job that they didn’t have this sense of [the] ridiculous and humor.”
Moreover, “their [photo] equipment, first of all, was not very good. Secondly, they were usually doing it surreptitiously: behind a wall or a door or something or something like that. But as the old expression goes, the pictures are great because I look young. I look like a casting reject from ‘Flashdance.’”
Serotta, for the most part, ignored or was unaware of the surveillance, except for when the only two cars on remote roads, hour after hour, were his and that of a spy on his tail.
And yet the trip to Romania was priceless. On one of his first visits to a Jewish community in Romania, he said to himself, “Wow, this is interesting. This is like the old country.”
“Then I said, ‘It’s not like the old country. It is the old country, and I’m in it,’” he added. “From that moment on, I felt like I had opened a door, and I’ve never come back through it.”
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Avraham Burg, longtime fixture of Israeli left, meets Tucker Carlson on his own turf
(JTA) — Tucker Carlson has set off alarm bells among many Jewish groups and even some conservative allies by hosting conspiracy theorists, grilling the U.S. ambassador to Israel and dabbling in sinister-sounding theories about Benjamin Netanyahu and Chabad.
But on Monday a notable Israeli opted to appear on Carlson’s show: former politician and left-wing figurehead Avraham Burg. And their talk was demonstrably cordial — though not without some gentle ribbing.
“Listen, Tucker, I cannot stand you,” Burg told his interviewer over a video call. “But you’re a nice person, so I talk with you.”
“I’ll take that as a half compliment,” Carlson responded, laughing.
A former speaker of the Knesset, interim Israeli president and onetime chair of the Jewish Agency for Israel and World Zionist Organization, Burg today remains an outspoken member of Israel’s dwindling left. A proponent of positions like post-Zionism and the Palestinian right of return that are deeply unpopular in Israel, he is also a frequent Netanyahu critic and current member of Hadash, an Israeli far-left party with Communist roots.
In his newsletter, Burg explained his decision to appear on Carlson’s show by saying the influential podcast host was “one of the most powerful voices in today’s American Right.”
“This interview was born out of a genuine desire to step outside familiar patterns and meet the person behind the public image that has been built around him, not out of prior agreement and not out of any need to adjudicate, but out of a willingness to seriously engage with the challenges he poses to the political and cultural discourse of our time,” Burg wrote in his Substack.
In a veiled swipe at other Jewish groups and Israeli leaders that have denounced Carlson, he added, “Carlson manages to touch a raw nerve of an American society whose doubts are deepening, and the temptation is to dismiss that with slogans. I chose not to do that.”
Indeed, throughout their 90-minute conversation, Burg did not push Carlson on the more outlandish claims the pundit has made on his shows in the past, even as he noted he watched the show frequently. He did object to Carlson’s past contentions that Israel would consider using nukes against Iran, as well as to Carlson’s rejection of the question of whether Israel “has the right to exist.”
Another area of pushback came when Burg insisted that, contrary to Carlson’s claims, Israel doesn’t have a consistent security policy, let alone a grandiose religious or conspiratorial vision.
“I listened to you very carefully in the last couple of weeks, and the way you try to conceive the Israeli strategy, from Netanyahu’s 40-year life mission to the greater land of Israel,” as biblical, “Messianic” or “eschatological,” said Burg. “I envy you that you really believe that we have something like that.” However, he added, “It doesn’t work that way.”
He instead focused on what he referred to as the Israeli mindset, which he called “a very, very hard, stiff-necked” one. Israelis, Burg said, do not believe in a “win-win” solution to their conflicts with their neighbors: “We live in a zero sum game.”
“‘I want to win alone. I want you to be dead. I want to humiliate you. I want to cancel you,’” Burg said, explaining that mindset. “‘Whomever you are, you are my enemy.’ And when you look at this philosophy, you understand where comes the political rhetoric that every adversary, never mind who [he is], minor or major, but at the end of the day, he is a Hitler.”
Israelis, Burg claimed, are also isolated from much of the English-language media, and reflexively dismiss any media criticism of their actions as antisemitic, creating “a thick filter that enables us to reject any kind of legitimate criticism.”
Carlson, who himself has offered various denunciations of the Israeli mindset on other episodes, took a soft approach to interviewing Burg. He praised Burg as “a pretty brave guy,” citing a recent op-ed in which the Israeli had opposed war with Iran, and ended by stating, “This conversation has really been a blessing for me.”
He avoided testier subjects he had raised with U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee and other guests in recent episodes, such as suggesting genetics testing for all Israelis to test the Jewish claim to the Holy Land, or musing that the Chabad Hasidic movement orchestrated the war as a means of building the Third Temple.
Whether his audience appreciated the apparent sincerity is an open question. On YouTube, commenters variously described Burg as complicit in Israel’s failings despite his politics or offered backhanded praise for the ways he confirmed their worst suspicions about Israelis. “If what he’s saying is true then what an unbearable group of people,” read one comment.
On X, Carlson’s other main platform, prominent pro-Israel Jews denounced Burg as a Communist and traitor to Israel.
Burg’s willingness to find common cause with Carlson was the latest sign of how some on the Jewish left, finding little appetite among institutional Jewish groups and Israeli society for sustained pushback against Israel’s actions in Gaza and Iran, may be looking instead to fringe voices on the right, where anti-Israel sentiment is also growing.
American Jewish left-wing intellectual Norman Finkelstein has appeared on Candace Owens’ podcast, while Israeli left-wing activist Miko Peled has aligned with Carrie Prejean Boller, a former religious liberties commissioner under Trump who was ousted over her stated Catholic opposition to Zionism.
Also this week Jewish journalist Peter Beinart, a leading progressive critic of Israel, praised former Trump counterterrorism director Joe Kent — another recent Carlson guest — as “a brave man” for resigning from his post while citing his opposition to war with Iran. Kent’s resignation letter accused Israel not only of manipulating Trump into war but also of having started the Iraq War and the Syrian Civil War, raising concern among American Jewish groups and providing further fodder for antisemitic elements on the right. (Beinart criticized aspects of the letter as “faulty” in his Jewish Currents essay, which was publicly assailed by a former magazine board member.)
For Burg and Carlson, the meeting revealed more similarities than differences in their worldviews. Toward the end of their talk, Burg expressed optimism that his grandchildren’s generation “will stand up and say, ‘We are ready to defend the legitimate Israel, but we’re not ready to sacrifice our life or to sacrifice the life of others on the altar of this craziness.’ This day is close.’”
“That’s a very reassuring thing to hear,” Carlson responded, in agreement.
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King Charles named patron of British Jewish security nonprofit following ambulance attack
(JTA) — King Charles has been named the first-ever patron of a British Jewish security nonprofit, a move announced in the wake of an arson attack that targeted four ambulances owned by a Jewish volunteer emergency service in north London.
The Community Security Trust, Britain’s main antisemitism watchdog, announced that King Charles had accepted the role — indicating a royal’s endorsement of a cause — during an annual fundraising dinner Monday night, where British leaders condemned the attack.
“His Majesty’s longstanding commitment to promoting tolerance, inclusion and interfaith understanding align closely with CST’s mission to protect British Jews and CST is honoured by this recognition and looks forward to working under His Majesty’s patronage to further its vital work across the country,” CST wrote in a statement.
While the attack is being investigated as an antisemitic hate crime but not a terrorist incident, counterterror officers have been leading the investigation after an Islamist group claimed responsibility for the attack. (The same group also claimed responsibility for synagogue bombings in Belgium and the Netherlands.)
“It is too early for me to attribute last night’s attack in Golders Green to the Iranian state … but whoever was responsible, the impact is serious,” London police chief Mark Rowley said at the annual dinner on Monday.
Police believe three suspects were involved in the attack, although no arrests have been made yet. Security footage of the scene of the attack in Golders Green, a heavily Jewish neighborhood of London, appeared to show three individuals approaching the ambulances parked outside the Machzike Hadath Synagogue.
In the wake of the attack, Rowley pledged to deploy over 250 additional police officers to protect Jewish communities and the British government announced it would provide four replacement ambulances to Hatzola.
In a speech at the dinner, British Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood said that antisemitism was on the rise and vowed that those responsible would be “pursued and made to face the consequences of their vile actions.”
“It is so warped it defies words,” Mahmood said of the arson attack. “This was more than an attack on four ambulances; it was more than an attack on one organisation or on one community. It was an attack on this country and on us all.”
In the days following that attack, donations to fundraising campaigns on behalf of Hatzola reached nearly $2 million following a plea from the organization for urgent support.
“We are launching an urgent appeal to rebuild what has been lost — we cannot to afford to let our life-saving work be put on pause,” Hatzola said in a statement. “We need immediate support so we can source: new ambulances, strengthening security, equipping the teams, restocking and ensuring we can continue to respond safely and effectively in every emergency.”
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