Uncategorized
This Brooklyn family’s Hanukkah celebration is all over New York’s subway
(New York Jewish Week) — For photographer and Instagram blogger Mordechai Rubinstein, seeing his face plastered all over the subway this holiday season has been an unexpected delight.
Rubinstein is decidedly not a dermatologist (a la subway-famous Dr. Zizmor), nor is he hawking subscription meds or beauty products. Rather, Rubinstein is featured in Nordstrom’s prominent “Make Merry” holiday campaign, where he’s seen celebrating Hanukkah alongside his wife Sara Brown-Rubinstein and their 5-year-old daughter, Isabella.
The ads have been prominently displayed in subway and bus lines across the city. “We first saw it in the wild — we didn’t even know until people started sending us pictures,” said Rubinstein, who assumed the family photo shoot, which happened over the summer in their Greenpoint, Brooklyn home, would be used exclusively on social media. “It was a huge surprise, I don’t know how else to say it.”
The ads spotlight the family of three eating latkes and lighting the menorah together. Rubinstein — who’s known to his 127,000 Instagram followers as @mistermort and describes himself in his bio as “SHMUCK AT LARGE, GARMENTOLOGIST, ANTHROPOLOGIST, photographer, photojournalist and author” — wears a bright pink sweater over a floral shirt and mustard pants, completing the look with a green knit kippah. Meanwhile, Sara and Isabella keep it more simple, wearing a black sweater and white maxi skirt, and a blue and white dress, respectively.
Each member of the family lights their own menorah on Hanukkah, the couple said. (Courtesy of Nordstrom)
The campaign features other notable New Yorkers celebrating the holidays, including actress Christina Ricci and her hairdresser husband, Mark Hampton, and actor and singer Leslie Odom, Jr., his wife Nicolette Robinson and their two kids. (Actress Robinson is Jewish, and though the Nordstrom ads mostly focus on their family’s Christmas situation, there is also a menorah in the photos.)
“When they came to us for the project, we actually didn’t realize how public facing it was going to be,” Brown-Rubinstein, an interior designer for Ralph Lauren stores, told the New York Jewish Week. “But we love Nordstrom and everything they stand for, and we feel like we’re just a great team of people. They are always featuring such great people from different communities and we love working with them.”
For the shoot, the couple said they had nearly complete creative control — they picked out the decor, food, prayer books and outfits they would be wearing for their pretend Hanukkah party.
“Everything was kosher, obviously. It’s pretty sick to have our yarmulkes and latkes in a Hanukkah ad and not some wack pajamas,” said Rubinstein. “They [Nordstrom] let it be authentic to us.”
Even the latkes — which one observer likened to a hockey puck — are legit: they brought them in from Russ and Daughters, Brown-Rubinstein said.
“Inclusivity is important to us as a company, and we know it is something our customers value too,” Red Godfrey, vice president of creative at Nordstrom, told the New York Jewish Week via email. “Our campaign spreads cheer by showing the real human connection through warm and intimate moments shared amongst loved ones in their most personal settings.
“We aimed to capture the authenticity of real families making merry together and giving us a glimpse of what the holidays look like in their homes,” Godfrey added.
Rubinstein is part of the Lubavitch community and was raised in Rhode Island, Maryland and Brooklyn — his parents now live in Crown Heights. Brown-Rubinstein, who grew up in Connecticut, attended Modern Orthodox synagogues as a child, but now considers herself more culturally Jewish. The couple is dedicated to raising their daughter with a strong Jewish identity.
“I’m Lubavitch — I live for mivtzoim,” Rubinstein said, referring to Chabad’s outreach to less observant Jews, such as the practice of Chabad emissaries asking New Yorkers on the street if they are Jewish during Sukkot and inviting them to shake the lulav.
Rubinstein said the experience of representing and reaching out to other Jewish New Yorkers via the Nordstrom campaign felt very similar. “It’s an honor,” he said.
Alongside the ads, Rubinstein collaborated with Nordstrom to design two handmade, luxury menorahs in the shape of a car and a truck that can be purchased on Nordstrom’s website for a cool $585 and $800 each.
Mordechai Rubinstein and Sara Brown-Rubinstein live in Greenpoint with their daughter Isabella and are committed to creating a Jewish life for her. (Courtesy of Nordstrom)
The couple also curated their ideal holiday entertaining items on Nordstrom’s website, including menorahs, cutlery, dishes, and other gifts and shared their Hanukkah traditions with Nordstrom, which include making a latke recipe courtesy of Rubinstein’s sister, Chani.
Now that the eight-day holiday is officially here, the family, just like in year’s past, will light their own menorahs; eat latkes, sufganiyot and gelt; and spend time with family and friends at Hanukkah parties.
Though they have worked with Nordstrom before on a Father’s Day campaign, this is the first time the Rubinsteins have showcased their Jewish identity in such a public, outward-facing way.
“I’m like, very Jewy — I’m the most Jewish,” Rubinstein said. “I love sharing when I’m in Crown Heights with my family, or on Jewish holidays and stuff, I try to share as much as I can. But it’s not often that I get to incorporate it into work — like, never.”
“A big part of my work is documenting and capturing how people wear their clothes, so I’ll put up pictures [on Instagram] if I’m in Crown Heights or Hasidic Brooklyn. I’ll definitely photograph and post from there. But as far as modeling in a campaign like this, it’s something I’ve never really done. To be able to wear a yarmulke [in a campaign] is brand new,” he added.
Interestingly, unlike many American department stores — Macy’s, Neiman-Marcus, Bloomingdales and Bergdorf Goodman, to name a few — Nordstrom does not have Jewish roots. Founded in Seattle 1901 by Swedish immigrants who made their first fortune during the Alaskan gold rush, Nordstrom has been expanding ever since. They opened a seven-story flagship store on 57th and Broadway at the end of 2019.
“We’re proud to be a part of the community,” Godfrey said. “We’re particularly excited about the way this campaign is showing up in New York City and have received positive feedback from customers and local New Yorkers who are seeing the images on billboards, in the subway and on buses.”
For the couple, who met at a concert at now-closed Hiro Ballroom in 2007, the reactions to the ad from friends, family and strangers have also been their favorite part of the experience — a teacher at Isabella’s school called with excitement after seeing the family’s photos on the subway. Even strangers have taken to posting and tagging Rubinstein on Instagram when they see spot the ad.
“It’s really been very heartwarming, so many we haven’t spoken to in a long time have reached out,” Brown-Rubinstein said.
The family hasn’t seen the ad all together yet — Brown-Rubinstein and Isabella rarely take the subway — but Rubinstein said he travels on the train specifically so he can see it. “All I want is to get my family in front of the picture of ourselves on a city bus framed,” he said.
—
The post This Brooklyn family’s Hanukkah celebration is all over New York’s subway appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
Russia Rules Out Big Concessions on Ukraine as Leak Shows Witkoff Advised Moscow
Russian President Vladimir Putin welcomes US President Donald Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff during a meeting in Moscow, Russia, Aug. 6, 2025. Photo: Sputnik/Gavriil Grigorov/Pool via REUTERS
Russia will make no big concessions on a peace plan for Ukraine, a senior Russian diplomat said on Wednesday, after a leaked recording of a call involving US envoy Steve Witkoff showed he had advised Moscow on how to pitch to Donald Trump.
Witkoff is expected to travel to Moscow next week with other senior US officials for talks with Russian leaders about a possible plan to end the nearly four-year-old war in Ukraine, the deadliest in Europe since World War II.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Tuesday he was ready to advance the US-backed framework for ending the war and to discuss disputed points with the US president in talks that he said should include European allies.
Kyiv and its European allies are worried that details of the plan leaked last week show it bows to key Russian demands – barring Ukraine‘s NATO entry, enshrining Russian control of a fifth of Ukraine, and limiting the size of Ukraine‘s army.
Trump later said progress was being made and Moscow was making concessions even though the war – in which Russian forces have been advancing – was only going to move “in one direction.”
But, while welcoming the Trump administration’s efforts, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov told reporters in Moscow on Wednesday: “There can be no question of any concessions, or any surrender of our approaches to those key points.”
TRANSCRIPT OF WITKOFF-USHAKOV CALL LEAKED
Moscow also raised concerns about the leak to Bloomberg News of the transcript of a call between Witkoff and Putin’s foreign policy aide Yuri Ushakov in which the US envoy advised Ushakov on how to pitch a peace plan to Trump.
Trump, on Air Force One, brushed aside a question from a reporter about why Witkoff appeared to be coaching Russian officials as simply “what a dealmaker does” and “a very standard form of negotiation.”
But Russia said the leak was an unacceptable attempt to undermine peace efforts and amounted to hybrid warfare.
Ushakov said he had used WhatsApp to speak to Witkoff on several occasions and the Russian newspaper Kommersant, which interviewed Ushakov, ran a story headlined: “Who set up Steve Witkoff?”
Bloomberg said it had reviewed a recording of the call. It was not clear how Bloomberg got the recording of the conversation.
A Bloomberg News spokesperson said: “We stand by our story.”
TOO EARLY TO TALK OF PEACE, KREMLIN SAYS
Trump said on Tuesday Witkoff would meet Putin and that Jared Kushner, who helped negotiate the deal that brought about an uneasy ceasefire in the Gaza war between Israel and the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas, would also be involved.
“As for Witkoff, I can say that a preliminary agreement has been reached that he will come to Moscow next week,” Ushakov told reporters.
Asked by reporters whether a peace deal was close, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov was quoted by Russian news agency Interfax as saying: “Wait, it’s premature to say that yet.”
Russian forces control more than 19% of Ukraine following Moscow‘s 2022 invasion, and have advanced in 2025 at the fastest pace since 2022, although the advances remain slow and Kyiv says Russia has incurred heavy losses to achieve them.
Ukraine and its European allies echo former US President Joe Biden in saying the invasion is an imperial-style land grab for which Moscow must not be rewarded.
Putin casts the war as a watershed moment in relations with the West, which he says humiliated Russia after the Soviet Union fell in 1991 by enlarging NATO and encroaching on what he considers Moscow‘s sphere of influence.
Uncategorized
Vast Trove of Medieval Jewish Records Opened Up by AI
A researcher of MiDRASH, a project dedicated to analyzing the National Library of Israel’s digital database of all known Hebrew manuscripts using Machine Learning, including manuscripts from the Cairo Geniza, holds up a 12th century fragment of a Yom Kippur liturgy in Jerusalem, Nov. 24, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun
Researchers in Israel are hoping to make new discoveries about Jewish history by loading a digital database of manuscripts stretching back a thousand years into a new transcription tool that uses artificial intelligence.
The Cairo Geniza, the biggest collection of medieval Jewish documents in the world, has been the object of countless hours of study by scholars for more than a century but only a fraction of its over 400,000 documents have been thoroughly researched.
Although the entire collection has already been digitized and is available online in the form of images, most of its items have not been catalogued, many are disordered fragments from longer documents, and only around a tenth have transcriptions.
By training an AI model to read and transcribe the old texts, researchers will now be able to access and analyze the whole collection far more quickly, cross referencing names or words and assembling fragments into fuller documents.
“We are constantly trying to improve the abilities of the machine to decipher ancient scripts,” said Daniel Stokl Ben Ezra of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris, one of the principal researchers in the MiDRASH transcription project.
The project has already made significant progress and could open up the documents – written in Hebrew, Arabic, Aramaic, and Yiddish in a wide variety of handwritten scripts – to many different researchers, Stokl Ben Ezra added.
Transcriptions from more difficult manuscripts are reviewed by researchers for accuracy, helping to improve the AI training.
“The modern translation possibilities are incredibly advanced now and interlacing all this becomes much more feasible, much more accessible to the normal and not scientific reader,” he said.
Funded by the European Research Council, the project is based on the National Library of Israel’s digital database of the Cairo Geniza documents and brings together researchers from several universities and other institutes.
ANCIENT STOREROOM
One document transcribed by the project is a 16th century letter in Yiddish from Rachel, a widow from Jerusalem, to her son in Egypt with his reply written in the margins telling of his efforts to survive a plague sweeping through Cairo.
A Geniza is a synagogue’s repository for significant documents that are ultimately intended for ritual burial, and the one found in the Ben Ezra synagogue in historic Cairo had a dry atmosphere ideal for the preservation of old paper.
Cairo surpassed Damascus and Baghdad in the Middle Ages as the greatest city of the Middle East, a center of global trade, learning, and science and home to a thriving Jewish community, later expanded by refugees fleeing newly Christian Spain.
The great Jewish philosopher Maimonides, who was physician to the family of Saladin, the famous Muslim sultan who ousted the crusaders from Jerusalem, worshipped at the Ben Ezra synagogue while living in Cairo.
As dynasties and empires rose and fell, the community quietly went about its daily life, its religious authorities filling the Geniza with the rabbinical arguments, civic records and other detritus of administrative and intellectual business.
The Geniza’s astonishing haul of records and papers, including some written by Maimonides himself, was discovered by scholars in the late 19th century but, although it has been studied ever since, its enormous size means huge gaps remain.
“The possibility to reconstruct, to make a kind of Facebook of the Middle Ages, is just before our eyes,” Stokl Ben Ezra said.
Uncategorized
Pro-Hamas Group Palestine Action’s Appeal Over UK Ban Begins
Protesters from “Palestine Action” demonstrate on the roof of Guardtech Group in Brandon, Suffolk, Britain, July 1, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Chris Radburn
The British government’s ban on the anti-Israel, pro-Hamas campaign group Palestine Action as a terrorist organization amounted to an authoritarian restriction on protest, lawyers representing a co-founder seeking to overturn the ban argued on Wednesday.
Palestine Action was proscribed in July, putting it on a par with Islamic State or al Qaeda and making it a crime to be a member, which carries a maximum sentence of 14 years in prison. Since then, more than 2,000 people have been arrested for holding signs in support of the group.
The group had increasingly targeted Israel-linked defense companies in Britain with “direct action,” often blocking entrances, or spraying red paint, particularly focusing on Israel’s largest defense firm Elbit Systems.
Britain’s Home Office [interior ministry] argues the group‘s escalating actions, culminating in a June break-in at the RAF Brize Norton air base when activists damaged two planes, amount to terrorism.
But lawyers representing Huda Ammori, who co-founded Palestine Action in 2020, say the move flies in the face of Britain’s long history of direct action protests and is “so extreme as to render the UK an international outlier.”
It was the first time a “direct action, civil disobedience organization that does not advocate for violence” had been proscribed as terrorist, Ammori’s lawyer Raza Husain told London’s High Court.
He compared the response to the group to that of other civil disobedience campaigns, such as Rosa Parks, the late US civil rights figure who refused to give up her seat on a segregated bus in 1955, and the suffragette movement which campaigned for women’s right to vote in the early 20th century.
GROUP‘S ACTIONS ESCALATED AMID WAR IN GAZA
Lawyers representing the Home Office said in court filings that the right to freedom of expression does not protect “speech and activity in support of a proscribed organization that commits serious property damage.”
Palestine Action has frequently targeted defense companies. It stepped up its actions during the Gaza war, with six members arrested on suspicion of plotting to disrupt the London Stock Exchange in January 2024.
Six people went on trial last week for aggravated burglary, criminal damage, and violent disorder over a raid on Elbit, with one charged with causing grievous bodily harm by hitting a police officer with a sledgehammer. They deny the charges.
Ammori’s lawyers say the ban has led to pro-Palestinian protesters being questioned by police at demonstrations without expressing support for Palestine Action.
The British government argues proscription only prevents support for Palestine Action and has not prevented people from protesting “in favor of the Palestinian people or against Israel’s actions in Gaza.”
The case is due to conclude next week, with a ruling at a later date.