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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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In a family divided over Israel, which side would Tevye choose?
Sixteen members of my family spent two terrifying years concealed in the attic of a peasant’s home in rural Poland during the Holocaust. Their lives depended on the extraordinary courage of the Polish couple and on the hope that the world outside would eventually become a place where they could live freely again. When liberation came, the 13 survivors emerged carrying memories that would shape generations to come.
My mother was among them. Like so many survivors, she rarely spoke of the past, but its presence was unmistakable in our childhood. We inherited our parents’ anxieties, their sense of vulnerability and their understanding of how suddenly the familiar world could become dangerous.
For the generation raised in the shadow of the Holocaust, the establishment of Israel represented an extraordinary transformation in Jewish history. After centuries of persecution, culminating in the systematic murder of six million Jews, the Jewish people possessed a sovereign state capable of providing refuge and defending its citizens. For families such as mine, whose survival had depended on the willingness of a stranger to risk her life on their behalf, the significance of Jewish self-determination carried an emotional weight far beyond the ordinary language of politics.
For many younger American Jews, their understanding of Israel has been shaped by the occupation of the West Bank, the expansion of Jewish settlements there, the suffering of Palestinians and now the Oct. 7 attacks and the devastating consequences of the war in Gaza.
The result is a profound generational divide in which people who share a historical inheritance increasingly struggle to recognize one another’s moral reasoning. For parents whose understanding of Israel emerged from the Holocaust and its aftermath, challenges to the legitimacy of the Jewish state can awaken deeply embedded fears about Jewish vulnerability. For their children, expressions of unconditional loyalty to Israel can seem incompatible with the moral responsibilities they associate with their Jewish upbringing.
As I began thinking about how to explore these divisions dramatically, I found myself returning to Sholem Aleichem and Fiddler on the Roof. Tevye the milkman struggles to reconcile his love for his daughters with their rejection of traditions he has spent his life upholding. His conversations with God, his humor and his anguish capture something timeless about Jewish family life: the painful realization that the next generation may not embrace the values and beliefs that have sustained its parents.
I wondered what Tevye’s dilemma might look like in an American Jewish family today. The questions have changed, but the underlying struggle remains remarkably familiar. Where Tevye wrestled with his daughters’ choices about marriage and religious tradition, today’s Jewish parents may find themselves confronting children whose views about Israel challenge their deepest understanding of Jewish history and survival. Like Tevye, they must ask themselves how far they can bend without betraying what they believe, and whether holding too tightly to those beliefs risks losing the people they love most.
Marc Chagall’s paintings provided another source of inspiration. His floating violinists, suspended above the rooftops of Eastern European villages, evoke a Jewish world that has largely vanished but whose traditions, memories and anxieties continue to shape succeeding generations. The image of a violinist hovering above a modern Manhattan street became a way for me to connect that lost world to the lives of an American Jewish family struggling with questions their ancestors could scarcely have imagined.
Such tensions form the central conflict of my new play, The Blue Violinist Over West End Avenue, which unfolds during a gathering in the Upper West Side apartment of a Jewish family. The evening descends into confrontation when the youngest son arrives with his anti-Zionist girlfriend, whose convictions challenge the father’s understanding of Jewish history and survival.
As the argument deepens, the son insists that Jewish identity carries no automatic obligation of loyalty to a state, while his father, for whom Israel embodies the aspirations and sacrifices of generations, demands an affirmation of the Jewish state’s importance. Their disagreement becomes so painful that the father orders the young couple to leave, turning a family celebration into an occasion of rupture and exposing the fragility of relationships that had seemed secure.
The father’s anguish emerges from a history that has shaped his deepest convictions, while his son’s resistance reflects a different understanding of the responsibilities that accompany Jewish identity. Each approaches the argument with the conviction that something essential is at stake, and each experiences the other’s position as a challenge to values that have become inseparable from his sense of self. Their inability to recognize the emotional and historical foundations of each other’s beliefs transforms a political disagreement into a crisis of familial belonging.
I recognize in this conflict an echo of the questions that first led me to explore my history. In 1988, I made a documentary about my family’s experiences, returning to Poland with my aunt and cousins to meet the couple who had sheltered our relatives. The journey was an attempt to recover a history that had shaped our lives while remaining largely beyond the reach of ordinary family conversation.
My mother’s generation carried experiences whose enormity often exceeded the possibilities of language, while their children absorbed the consequences of those experiences through the atmosphere of family life. The silence surrounding the Holocaust became a form of communication in itself, shaping our understanding of danger, responsibility and the precariousness of Jewish existence.
Today, the challenge facing many Jewish families arises from the intensity of their disagreements and the difficulty of sustaining meaningful conversation across them. The language of political conviction can leave little room for complexities, and can seem to contradict inherited experience, particularly when arguments about Israel become measures of moral character or Jewish authenticity.
I have experienced some of these tensions within my own extended family, particularly in conversations with younger relatives whose understanding of Israel differs sharply from mine. One nephew has been intensely critical of Israel’s conduct during the war in Gaza and deeply sympathetic to the Palestinians, while firmly rejecting Hamas. He accepted many of the accusations made against Israel during the war, including some that were subsequently disputed or discredited, such as an early account of a hospital bombing. Our disagreements reflected the different sources of information we trusted, as well as the different assumptions and experiences we brought to the conflict.
My nephew and I eventually recognized how quickly our conversations became heated and decided to try a different approach, exchanging articles, podcasts and other material that might help each of us understand the other’s perspective. Even that effort generated tension, and we gradually abandoned it, leaving Israel as a subject we largely avoid when we are together. I have often wondered whether the play might help us find a way back to those conversations, allowing us to recognize in the characters something of ourselves and perhaps understand why the same events can provoke such different reactions among people who love one another.
The fears of older generations deserve to be understood within the historical circumstances that produced them, just as the ethical concerns of younger Jews deserve serious consideration on their own terms. Acknowledging the suffering of Palestinians and the legitimate aspirations of their people can coexist with an understanding of Jewish historical vulnerability and the importance of Israel to Jewish collective life. Such recognition requires a willingness to engage with the experiences and convictions that give different perspectives their emotional force.
Families possess a particular responsibility in this regard because their bonds reach beyond the political positions of any given moment. Parents transmit values, memories and traditions to their children, but the meaning of that inheritance inevitably changes as children encounter the world through their own experiences. The continuity of a family depends in part on its capacity to accommodate that transformation while preserving the relationships through which its history is passed along.
In my play, the father eventually encounters a form of ancestral wisdom through a dream in which his family’s long-departed relatives return, including the milkman who, according to family lore, inspired Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye. These ancestors urge him to apologize for the harm he has caused and to leave the door open for his son, an appeal that places the preservation of their relationship alongside the convictions that have divided them. Family can and must prevail, even when the questions at stake touch the deepest elements of identity.
When I think of the 16 members of my family who survived together in that attic in Poland, I think of the extraordinary value of the lives that were preserved and of the generations that followed because a courageous woman chose to shelter them. Their story belongs to a history of persecution and survival, but it also attaches to the human capacity for solidarity and the responsibility we bear toward one another.
The generations that followed inherited both the memory of that vulnerability and the opportunity to build lives enriched by freedoms their ancestors could hardly have imagined. Honoring that inheritance requires an understanding of the fears that shaped our parents, together with an openness to the different moral questions that confront our children.
The future of Jewish family life will depend in part on our ability to sustain those conversations with generosity, humility and a recognition of the profound bonds that connect us across generations. Our disagreements over Israel may remain intense, and the questions they raise will continue to demand serious engagement. Yet the preservation of our relationships is itself an expression of the continuity that our ancestors struggled so desperately to secure.
We can honor their memory by keeping our doors open to one another.
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This 90-year-old Jewish performer and promoter is the Zelig of folk music
Harry Tuft was in a taxi with Judy Collins, who had her guitar with her. The cab driver looked back and asked if the two of them were folk singers. They replied in the affirmative.
“Folk music is dead,” the cab driver asserted.
“We kind of chuckled a little and said, ‘Oh, really, how come?’” Tuft recalled.
“Did you see Ed Sullivan last night?”
The passengers replied that they hadn’t.
“There was a group on there called The Beatles. Folk music is dead.”
To paraphrase Mark Twain, the reports of the death of folk music were an exaggeration.
“That was a time when, really, we didn’t know what was going to happen,” Tuft said during a recent Zoom interview from his home in Denver.
“I think it’s thanks to groups like Peter, Paul and Mary and maybe somebody like Joan Baez and Judy Collins and John Denver — people who were popular enough and smart enough to appeal to a larger segment of the population. They really kept folk music alive.”
The genre lived on, also, thanks to the efforts of the now-90-year-old Tuft, who was more than a bit player in the folk music revival during the 1960s. He founded the Denver Folklore Center in 1962 and, with others in 1979, founded the Swallow Hill Music Association, which presents concerts, teaches music classes for all ages and offers outreach programs. In 2012, Tuft was inducted into the Colorado Music Hall of Fame.
Tuft was also a link in the chain that led to Bob Dylan meeting the Beatles. He also may be the only nonagenarian who released an album this year.
“Friends, Lovers & Other Strangers” includes songs by artists like Bob Dylan and Paul Simon, as well as ones by some of Tuft’s friends. It also includes a cover of the Nat King Cole Trio’s “Nature Boy.”
“I grew up in Philadelphia listening to pop music of the day on radio stations WPEN and WIBG, and R&B stations at night,” Tuft writes in the album’s liner notes. “This song was popular across the board.”
Tuft’s paternal grandfather, Dr. Jacob L. Manasses, was the founder of Bushkill Farms Camp, a Jewish boys camp in the Pocono mountains. Tuft went to Indian Lake, another Jewish camp in the Poconos. A counselor at his camp played the ukulele. Tuft, who played piano and clarinet, soon acquired a ukulele. “I found out there was such a thing as a baritone uke and it turns out that the tuning of the baritone is the same as the four highest strings of the guitar, so I was already two-thirds of the way to a guitar,” he said. “It was very customary in those days for Jewish kids somewhere in their college years to go to Europe so I bought a Chimes guitar and carried it with me.”
Tuft intended to become a doctor like his father and paternal grandfather. But his grades weren’t good enough to get into medical school. Instead, he graduated from Dartmouth in 1957 with a degree in philosophy. He went to graduate school for architecture at the University of Pennsylvania with thoughts of being a city planner.
“But music won out,” said Tuft.
While at Dartmouth, Tuft met Pete Seeger at a folk club. Seeger met with the club members in the afternoon and performed that night.
“He was really intent on getting us as a group to go out into the community and see if we could find people who had songs to offer. He arrived in a blue Plymouth station wagon with his kids on a mattress in the back. His wife, Toshi, set up a display in the hall and sold Pete’s Folkways Records after the concert. Here was this icon, this important person in my musical life in the moment, and he was just getting along,” he said.
“He requested a large log, and did a song called ‘Didn’t Old John (Cross the Water).’ It included a place to swing the axe. Unfortunately, the podium was very slick and Seeger ended up chasing the log all over the ‘stage.’”
After graduating from Dartmouth, Tuft joined the growing folk music scene that was centered around the Gilded Cage in Philadelphia. There, he met his lifelong friend Dick Weissman, a banjoist and guitarist who was in the Journeymen with John Phillips, who would go on to found the Mamas and the Papas.
Tuft eventually ventured out to Colorado, where he auditioned at The Exodus, a Denver folk club.
Tuft was told about the owner: “If he was going to hire you he would be critical and if he was not he would be nice to you. And he was nice to me, so I knew that I wasn’t going to get a job there.
“I had a repertoire that was out of the ordinary, and I was never really attracted to the ‘quote’ popular folk songs,” Tuft said. “As a matter of fact, when it came to trying to make a living playing in the bars what they wanted to hear were the popular songs by the Kingston Trio or Peter, Paul and Mary or the Brothers Four, and I didn’t know those songs.”
“I’m a sucker for a story, I’m a balladeer. I love ballads. Quite often, I do ballads of 10, 12, 14 verses because I like the form so much.”
The Exodus owner said that he thought someone could make a part-time living opening a folklore center like Izzy Young’s Folklore Center in Greenwich Village. “I sometimes joke and say that he was right. I opened a full-time folklore center in order to make a part-time living.”
Tuft also sold records, instruments, strings and accessories and it was the strings and accessories that paid the rent.
The shop became a way station for up-and-coming folk musicians traveling between Chicago and the West Coast. When Bob Dylan made his first cross-country tour and played in Denver, he had his mail forwarded to Tuft’s store.
“Even then, he had an attitude about him,” Tuft recalled. “The following summer I saw him at the Kettle of Fish in the Village, and he grudgingly acknowledged that we had met.”
After a visit to Chicago’s Old Town School of Folk Music, he started a school for Denver musicians and soon branched out into promotion. His first job was for Joan Baez who sold out a 2,400 seat house in March 1964.
Baez was involved with Dylan at that time and wanted to get him to meet The Beatles, who were playing Red Rocks on August 26. Baez was scheduled to play at the venue a couple days earlier, so a plan was hatched for her to come out a few days early so that she could meet the lads and arrange for them to meet Dylan in New York, where The Beatles were going after Denver.
The day before The Beatles’ show, Tuft and Baez went to see A Hard Day’s Night. The musicians met before The Beatles show and Tuft recalled that Baez and the band members were deferential to one another. Except for Ringo, who wasn’t interested and was reading a comic book.
Tuft also brought the Mamas and the Papas to Denver’s Municipal Auditorium Theater with 7,600 seats in 1966. Richard “Dick” Lamm, a friend and lawyer, fronted him $5,000 for the guarantee. Lamm later admitted that he had absolutely no idea who the Mamas and the Papas were. “That showed the amount of trust he had in me,” Tuft said. “And he said he was nervous until a week before the concert until they were on the cover of Life magazine.” Lamm used his profits to fund his first run for the Denver statehouse.
Later, John Denver offered his services for a benefit Tuft organized and helped raise more than $40,000 for Lamm’s successful run for governor.
Folk music endures, Tuft said, “because the best of folk music involves music. And the best of music is melodic. And whatever it is in our physical makeup that involves not just the heartbeat, which is our basic rhythm, but something about our voice, maybe, and the way we speak and our desire to communicate that all put together leads to somebody creating a song about something that happened, and if the kernel of it, either the music or the words, or both are such that people like it and repeat it and you get musical history, and history of countries and our country in particular, of the songs.”
Tuft is already putting together his next album — a double album of cowboy and western songs, traditional on one side and contemporary on the other.
“I’m a song addict,” Tuft said. “And I like to think that I have pretty decent taste in songs. Nothing pleases me more than to be able to find a new song, make it my own, and pass it on and open it up to whatever audience I’m able to bring together.”
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Israel has a lot riding on Nvidia, whose CEO resigned today
Jensen Huang, who co-founded Nvidia and has run it for 33 years, resigned as chief executive on Thursday, ending a tenure that turned a maker of video-game chips into the engine of the artificial intelligence boom. The decision followed revelations of an affair with a businesswoman whom U.S. intelligence officials suspect of being a Chinese spy, and allegations of a second relationship, with an executive who reports to him.
Colette Kress, Nvidia’s chief financial officer, will serve as interim chief executive while the board searches for a permanent successor.
The turmoil is a Silicon Valley story with a significantIsraeli subplot. Nvidia employs roughly 6,000 people in Israel, including on 18 floors of office space in a Tel Aviv skyscraper. Israel is home to the company’s largest R&D hub outside of the U.S. As well, Huang has been the driving force behind a plan to build a giant new campus in the country’s north. Huang has courted Israel for years, and the open question now is what happens to that commitment without him.
Nvidia’s Israeli business traces back to 2019, when it agreed to buy Mellanox, an Israeli chip company, for $6.9 billion. Mellanox made the technology that lets thousands of chips in a data center work together as one machine. That technology is now central to how AI data centers are built.
Huang kept Mellanox in Israel, along with its patents and its sales. The Israeli teams’ work is now woven into Nvidia’s newest products, and includes building a chip meant to rein in AI tools that act on their own.
In the second quarter of 2026 alone, Nvidia’s Israeli operation booked $17.5 billion in sales, nearly a fifth of the company’s worldwide revenue and more than four times the sales of Teva Pharmaceuticals, the multinational Israeli drugmaker. Analysts credit Nvidia with largely driving a 13% jump in Israeli tax revenue, and its workforce there has roughly doubled since Oct. 7, 2023.
A personal stake
Huang’s attachment to Israel is not purely commercial. On Oct. 7, Avinatan Or, a chip engineer at Nvidia’s Israeli operation, was captured at the Nova music festival along with his then-girlfriend, Noa Argamani, in a video seen around the world. She was rescued eight months later. Or remained a hostage for 738 days.
Nvidia colleagues held vigils with his mother, Ditza, and Huang stayed in touch with the family throughout. When Or was freed in Oct. 2025, Huang wrote to employees that “Avinatan has come home.” Huang later hosted Or and Argamani at the company’s headquarters in California. This March, as the war with Iran broke out, Huang told Israeli employees that he was “very worried” about them.
Huang has called Israel a “second home” for Nvidia.
That attachment is intended to last. In December, Nvidia announced plans for a campus in Kiryat Tivon, near Haifa, reportedly second in size only to its Silicon Valley headquarters. Construction is set to begin next year, and the offices are expected to open by 2031, with room for up to 10,000 employees.
What lies ahead
The next CEO has become a question in Israel, too. Kress, 59, has been Nvidia’s finance chief since 2013. The board says it will look both inside and outside the company for a permanent chief executive.
Haaretz speculated Thursday that two Israeli executives could be potential candidates. Both men studied at the Technion in Haifa. Michael Kagan, who was born in St. Petersburg, Russia and moved to Israel with his family after high school, co-founded Mellanox in 1999 and has been Nvidia’s chief technology officer for six years. Johny Srouji, born in Haifa to an Arab Christian family, joined Apple in 2008 and now leads its hardware work, including the chips inside its products.
Nothing so far suggests Nvidia’s plans in Israel will change. The Israeli teams work on products the company depends on, and the new campus has long been in the works.
Nvidia’s stock has fallen by about a third since early October, a loss of more than $1.5 trillion in market value, and the company is due to report earnings on Nov. 17. The numbers will matter in Israel. So will something they can’t show: whether Nvidia’s affection for the country outlasts its last CEO.
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