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The ‘Hanukkah House’ in Brooklyn is a family tradition and a neighborhood treasure
(New York Jewish Week) — Hanukkah, the winter holiday that commemorates the triumph of Judah Maccabee and the miracle of long-lasting oil, has plenty of heroes to celebrate. But in one Brooklyn family’s home, the hero is the “Hanukkah Fairy” — or at least the mom behind it.
Starting some 25 years ago, Gail Nalven Fuchs and her husband, David Fuchs, stayed up late the night before Hanukkah began to completely decorate the interior of their Midwood house in tinsel, dreidels and blue and white decor. When their two kids awoke wide-eyed at the wonder, the Fuchs explained that the Hanukkah Fairy, who came to decorate and spread the light and joy of the holiday, had paid their house a visit.
Over the years, what began as a lark grown into a grand tradition — these days, eye-catching, illuminated Hanukkah decorations can be found on the home’s exterior and front lawn, too, including an oversized menorah, Jewish stars and inflatables, such as a giant teddy bear wearing a Hanukkah sweater and a spinning dreidel. The “Hanukkah House,” as it is locally known, is now a bonafide neighborhood treasure, attracting neighbors, visitors and children from around Brooklyn.
Fuchs and her family pose in matching sweatshirts outside their decorated house. L-R: Michael, Charlie and Alyson Kogan; Harrison and Katie Bryan; David and Gail Fuchs.
The tradition of Hanukkah decorating started in 1997 when the Fuchs’ kids, Alyson and Harrison, were 7 and 5. It was one of the family’s favorite holiday traditions to drive through the neighborhoods of Bay Ridge and Dyker Heights, where family homes have been putting out over-the-top lights and Christmas decorations since the 1980s.
“Isn’t Hanukkah called the Festival of Lights?” her son, Harrison — the playwright for “A Hanukkah Carol, or GELT TRIP! The Musical,” a Jewish take on Charles Dickens’ Christmas classic — asked one year as they drove through Sheepshead Bay. Fuchs confirmed it was.
“Then why don’t I see any Hanukkah lights?” he asked. “Everything is Christmas themed.”
Fuchs tried to explain to her son that even though the lights are Christmas themed, they are for everyone to enjoy. “He said, ‘I would enjoy it so much more. If I saw something that I know about. I don’t know about Christmas,’” she recalled.
It was a moment of realization for Fuchs. “New Yorkers always say we live in a melting pot,” she told the New York Jewish Week. “It didn’t feel that way at Christmastime.”
In response to Harrison’s questions, she helped him pen a letter to the New York Post. “It’s very hard to be a 5-year-old Jewish boy at this time of year,” the letter, which was published in 1997, opens. “I get very sad when I am driving the car in Brooklyn and I look at all the lights and decorations hanging across the avenues.” Harrison then goes on to request more Hanukkah decorations in the years to come.
The next year, a few weeks before Hanukkah, someone from the New York Post called to let Fuchs and her family know that there would be a large public menorah on Avenue U — sure enough, there it was.
“We drove by and Harrison was so excited. He went home and drew the menorah with paint and we hung it on our wall and he would look at it every day.”
Harrison Bryan as a child in front of handmade Hanukkah art, alongside an excerpt of his letter he wrote to the New York Post in 1997. (Courtesy, design by Mollie Suss)
Seeing how happy her kids were when they saw their holiday represented, Fuchs decided to start decorating her home with dreidels, menorahs, candles, Hanukkah art and tinsel. Enter the Hanukkah Fairy, who Fuchs created to add a sense of magic and wonder to the holiday — and to surprise her young kids.
“Every year there were more and more Hanukkah decorations from the Hanukkah Fairy,” Fuchs said. “The kids used to write letters to her before the holiday saying ‘Hi Hanukkah Fairy, I hope you had a nice year, I cannot wait to see my home decorated this Hanukkah.’”
The exterior decorating began slowly: David Fuchs, who owns a handmade steel manufacturing and distribution business, built the giant menorah. Over the years, the “Hanukkah Elf,” as he’s known by his family, has since built Jewish stars and various signs for the house. They also try to add a Hanukkah-themed inflatable to their collection every year — this year’s newbie is a dinosaur wearing a Hanukkah sweater.
Harrison and Alyson are now 30 and 32, respectively, but the tradition has carried on. To keep the Hanukkah spirit strong, the decorations typically start going up about a week before the holiday starts, and stay up until a week after it ends, Fuchs said.
While Fuchs considers herself a Conservative Jew, many of her neighbors in Midwood are more traditionally Orthodox. Still, she’s noticed that many in the area are eager to take pics with the inflatables — some years, a school bus from a nearby yeshiva even stops in front of the house so kids can look.
“I love sitting back on my porch — nobody sees me and I love watching all the people go by,” she said. “It’s just a joy.”
The Fuchs family has always celebrated Hanukkah to the nines — four generations of the extended family gather at their home for a Hanukkah party, complete with a gift exchange — and decorating the house has become one of their favorite parts of the holiday. Fuchs’ adult children will help decorate the house, and Alyson Fuchs now also puts up decor in her apartment in Carroll Gardens, where her two daughters, who are 2-and-a-half years old and 7 months old, now carry on the wonder and delight at the Hanukkah Fairy.
“We have Hanukkah pride,” she said. “But it’s not so much ‘Hey, I’m Jewish. Here’s my house, too.’ It’s ‘Hey, I have a holiday that’s really a lot of fun. Look how pretty it is.’”
It’s a tradition that’s become so important to the family that the “Hanukkah Fairy” even features in Harrison Fuchs’ new musical. “I really did believe in The Hanukkah Fairy,” Harrison, who uses the stage name Harrison Bryan, told the New York Jewish Week. “To me, this magical entity was just as real as the Tooth Fairy, or Santa to other kids. It was amazing waking up on Hanukkah morning — my sister and I would marvel at all the decorations — blue and white everywhere, and to such an extent that it felt impossible for this to have been done without actual magic.”
“It was only when I got a little bit older that I realized, it was real magic — the magic of having incredibly imaginative parents who wanted their children to feel loved and proud of their cultural identity,” he added.
Bryan made “The Hanukkah Fairy” a character in his musical — the fairy is the “Spirit of Hanukkah Present” who guides the Scrooge-like protagonist Chava Kanipshin through her actions. “Even though it may have been a tradition my parents made up, it was always meant to spark joy in others too,” Bryan added. “And with the show, alongside the Hanukkah Fairy, we hope to do just that.”
Hanukkah starts this year on the evening of Sunday, Dec. 18, and Fuchs welcomes visitors to come by, enjoy the decorations and take pictures. Located in Brooklyn on East 14th Street between Avenues J and K, her house will be the one all lit up with Hanukkah gear. “You can’t miss it,” she said.
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The post The ‘Hanukkah House’ in Brooklyn is a family tradition and a neighborhood treasure appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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The Netherlands Shows Her True Colors Once Again
A view shows the Peace Palace, which houses the International Court of Justice (ICJ), in The Hague, Netherlands, April 28, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Piroschka van de Wouw
I never thought I would write these words, but I have lost respect for my own country. I say that with sadness, not anger. For years, I believed in the Dutch reputation for fairness, nuance, and moral clarity. Today, that image has crumbled. The way Dutch media covers Israel is not just biased; it is intellectually lazy, historically empty, and socially dangerous. Worst of all, it fuels a rising wave of antisemitism in a nation that should know exactly where that road leads.
The most recent example came from Trouw, a newspaper that once claimed to value journalistic integrity. It published an uncritical article praising the views of Ta-Nehisi Coates, who labeled Israel an “apartheid state.” That accusation was presented to readers as if it were self-evident truth, not an opinion. No context. No history. No pushback. No mention of equal rights for all Arab citizens. No mentions of terrorism, of facts on the ground, of the repeated rejection of peace initiatives, or of the lives Israelis have been forced to defend from relentless violence. It was a piece of writing that replaced journalism with activism, and knowledge with slogans.
If Dutch journalists insist on making comparisons, then honesty requires them to explain what real apartheid actually looked like. South Africa enforced legally defined racial categories, stripped millions of their citizenship, banned interracial marriage, separated schools, hospitals, beaches, toilets, buses, universities, and neighborhoods. Black South Africans were barred from voting, from certain jobs, and from owning land in most of the country. They were forced into impoverished “homelands,” denied freedom of movement, and subject to routine torture and violence by the state. None of this resembles Israel. Not even remotely.
But the truth no longer seems to matter in Dutch newsrooms. Nuance has disappeared. Context has vanished. Emotion has replaced evidence, and ideology has replaced inquiry. Israel is guilty by default, while its critics are treated as prophets whose words require no verification.
The Dutch media’s relentless one-sidedness reveals something deeper and more troubling than mere ignorance. It reflects a renewed comfort with blaming Jews for the world’s problems, a habit with a long and ugly history in Europe. When articles like the one in Trouw are circulated without challenge, they do not educate the public; they radicalize it. They normalize anti-Jewish hostility. They transform a complex conflict into a morality play, where Israelis are cast as colonial villains and Palestinians as blameless victims, regardless of reality.
As a Dutch citizen, I am ashamed. Ashamed of the intellectual laziness in our press. Ashamed of the moral posturing that ignores Jewish suffering. Ashamed of how quickly we have forgotten our responsibility to truth after the darkest chapter in European history. And ashamed that my country, once known for moral clarity, now prefers fashionable outrage over honest reporting.
Israel is not perfect. No nation is. But the apartheid accusation is not journalism. It is propaganda. And when the Dutch media amplifies it, they are not holding power to account — but are helping to spread a lie with real consequences for Jewish communities and for the possibility of peace.
It is time for Dutch journalists to rediscover integrity. And it is time for readers to demand it.
It is also time, more than ever, to stand up for Israel, because truth still matters.
Sabine Sterk is CEO of the NGO Time To Stand Up For Israel.
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Famine Claims in Gaza Fell Apart, But Western Media Outlets Never Reported It
Trucks carrying humanitarian aid and fuel line up at the crossing into the Gaza Strip at the Rafah border on the Egypt side, amid a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, in Rafah, Egypt, October 17, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Stringer
For months, Western media outlets amplified one of the most dramatic accusations of the Israel–Hamas war: that Israel was causing famine in Gaza.
The IPC, a UN-backed hunger monitor that has been criticized for faulty methodology, published a report in August 2025, claiming that over half a million Gazans were already experiencing famine. The report was shared and repeated across major outlets with almost no scrutiny.
Headlines warned of “mass starvation,” photos of emaciated children (mostly with pre-existing conditions) filled front pages, and Israel was vilified as deliberately starving civilians.
But when new data emerged that undermined the entire famine narrative, those same outlets suddenly lost their desire to report.
The updated numbers, released in July-August by the Global Nutrition Cluster (GNC), a group of UN and other aid agencies, paint a starkly different picture.
The GNC found malnutrition rates roughly 23% lower than those used by the IPC. The highest rate measured was 11.9%, which is below the 15% malnutrition threshold that defines famine. This is not a minor revision. It is a total collapse of the most alarming claim made about Gaza’s humanitarian situation.
And yet, the media that treated the original IPC report as gospel did not cover this correction.
Not one major Western outlet ran a headline acknowledging that the famine claim had been based on flawed data. The story simply evaporated. No accountability. No follow-up. No explanation.
The Nutrition Cluster finally published the materials from their Sep 17 meeting, confirming that the IPC “analysis” was indeed based on fabricated data that misrepresented the raw, unweighted malnutrition statistics as if they were the properly age-weighted data required by IPC… https://t.co/WOk7RYOK3F pic.twitter.com/QQqfNNo41W
— Mark Zlochin – מארק זלוצ’ין༝ (@MarkZlochin) October 15, 2025
This silence matters.
The IPC’s famine declaration did not unfold in a vacuum. Its figures were used to hammer Israel diplomatically, spark UN condemnations, inflame protests, and put Jewish communities at risk worldwide.
Once “Israel is starving Gaza” became a viral talking point, it didn’t matter that Israeli officials and independent analysts questioned the report’s accuracy. It didn’t matter that key data was missing. It didn’t matter that the numbers were inconsistent or that the methodology was weak. What mattered was that the accusation fit the narrative, so it was believed.
Now we know more about those flaws. Critics pointed out that the IPC relied on incomplete datasets, pulled numbers from clinic-only screenings that do not represent the general population, and shifted to MUAC-only measurements — a quick arm-circumference test that is known to overestimate malnutrition. These issues were substantial enough to cast doubt on the entire famine declaration.
But instead of revisiting their own coverage, the same outlets that amplified the original claims chose to ignore the updated data. The famine panic was newsworthy; the correction, apparently, was not.
This is not just a journalistic failure. It’s a dangerous one. Once a humanitarian accusation of this scale is made, it becomes a weapon. It shapes protests, justifies threats, and fuels antisemitism. If the story collapses, but the media refuses to report it, the lie continues to live.
And this is exactly what happened.
Even as the GNC data undercut the famine claim, the global discourse remained stuck in August: Israel was still being accused of starving Gaza. The emotional imagery that accompanied the IPC report continues to circulate online. The outrage it generated still shapes public perception. The correction never got the same megaphone.
UN’s Gaza Famine Fraud Exposed:
IPC tested 15,700 kids for malnutrition in July and found 12%—below 15% famine threshold
Problematic. So what did they do?
Solved. Now UN can claim famine in Gaza!
Evidence & sources: pic.twitter.com/Re1grOvGsQ
— Aizenberg (@Aizenberg55) August 24, 2025
This should be a wake-up call. In conflict zones, information is a battlefield, and humanitarian terminology, like “famine,” “siege,” or “starvation,” can be misused for political ends. When journalists fail to interrogate their sources or revisit their own reporting, misinformation hardens into “truth.”
Readers should take note: if journalists won’t be skeptical, you must be. Every dramatic humanitarian claim warrants scrutiny. Every alarming statistic should be questioned. Every institution, even UN-affiliated bodies, must be held accountable for accuracy. Because if not, falsehoods travel, outrage spreads, and real people pay the price.
In this case, Israel’s reputation was smeared, global discourse was distorted, and Jewish communities were exposed to heightened risk, all based on data that didn’t hold up. And the media, which should have corrected the record, simply looked the other way.
So next time a headline declares catastrophe, treat it with the skepticism journalists should have shown in the first place.
The author is a contributor to HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.
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Why do people want ‘Zootopia 2’ to be about Israel?
This article contains spoilers for Zootopia 2.
Since Zootopia 2 takes place in a world of talking animals, it might be the last place one would expect to find commentary on Israel and Palestine. But several viewers have read the film’s plot — which concerns the division of Zootopia’s weather-controlled neighborhoods — as providing exactly that.
In this sequel to Disney’s 2016 animated hit, the sinister and wealthy Lynxley family plans to expand Tundratown, the part of the city where polar species reside, into Marsh Market. The Market is a home for already ostracized animals, such as aquatic mammals, and a hideout for reptiles, who were banished from the city. Because each neighborhood has a specific climate controlled by “weather walls,” the merging of one section with another would necessitate the immigration of those unable to live in the new climate.
The more powerful animals use a lot of hierarchical language referring to the “lower” or “lesser” species who would lose their homes because of this plan. Reptiles are also stigmatized as being “dangerous” due to a fatal incident a century earlier that involved a snake and a turtle. For viewers of the first film, which took on racial profiling, the existence of speciesism in the Zootopia-verse won’t come as a surprise. But what has captured viewers’ attention is the film’s discussion of the stolen Reptile Ravine neighborhood.
“Did Disney get tricked into making a pro-Palestine movie?” one user of the movie review platform Letterboxd wrote with their five-star rating. “Yes they did 🫡.”
Commenters under the review had mixed opinions:
“Do you seriously think a Zionist company made a pro-Palestine movie?” someone responded.
“Finally saw someone thinks so too, the ethnic cleaning theme is indeed pretty strong on this one,” said another user.
Some reviewers have also likened the plot to settler-colonialism, which feels like a bit of a stretch given that none of the animals in charge of the expansion travelled from one place to another in order to conquer it and therefore don’t really qualify as settlers. All of the contested land is already within the constituted borders of Zootopia, so the plan involves expanding the qualities of one neighborhood into another, not completely redrawing territorial boundaries.
A more apt comparison might be gentrification in American cities and the way that has impacted racial minorities. The buried reptile neighborhood feels more reminiscent of communities such as the San Juan Hill neighborhood in Manhattan that was eliminated by Lincoln Center or the Hayti community in Durham, North Carolina that was all but wiped out by a freeway and urban renewal. The accents, music, and general appearance of Marsh Market are clearly inspired by the American South, specifically the bayous of New Orleans, which have always been an important landmark in Black American culture.
Of course, it wouldn’t be wrong to also think of Palestinian towns that have been renamed and replaced with Israeli neighborhoods. And to get into the nitty gritty of gentrification versus settler-colonialism might seem futile — many activists and social scientists would probably tell you that despite being different strategies, they have the same oppressive result.
But why focus on Israel? Clearly, there are numerous examples of subjugation from across the world and across time that Zootopia 2 could be mirroring. Israel’s government is not the only entity to ever be accused of ethnic cleansing.
The focus on comparing the Lynxleys to Israel feels especially problematic in this case since the Lynxleys also operate the weather walls and are shown to secretly determine Zootopia politics. This would make the Lynxleys wealthy Jews who control the government and the weather.
Maybe because Israel and Palestine have taken over headlines, there is a recency bias influencing the comparisons people are making. It could also be because the star of Zootopia 2 has found herself at the center of controversy related to the recent Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Last year, Ginnifer Goodwin, who voices the Zootopia protagonist Judy Hopps, was criticized for allegedly condemning the statement “globalize the intifada” as a threat to Jews and encouraging defunding UNRWA. Several months ago, that post was shared to a Boycott Divest Sanction subreddit, where users called for the boycott of Zootopia 2.
The post-credits scene of Zootopia 2 hints that avians will be at the center of a future film. Who knows how viewers will interpret the birds’ role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The post Why do people want ‘Zootopia 2’ to be about Israel? appeared first on The Forward.