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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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Jewish moderate Julie Menin claims victory as next City Council speaker
(JTA) — Julie Menin, a Jewish New York City Councilwoman in Manhattan, declared victory on Wednesday in the race for council speaker, positioning herself as a potential moderating influence on Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s progressive agenda.
The election does not officially happen until January, but Menin, a moderate Democrat who represents neighborhoods including the Upper East Side, announced that she had gained the support of a “super majority” of 36 votes out of the council’s 51 members.
“I am honored and humbled by the trust and faith that my colleagues have put in me to lead the City Council as a force of action for New York families,” Menin said in a statement on Wednesday.
If elected, Menin would be the first Jewish speaker in the City Council’s history.
The council serves as a separate branch from the mayoral office and is responsible for passing laws and controlling key aspects of the city’s budget, this year set at $116 billion. A supportive speaker is seen as essential to carrying out a mayor’s agenda.
Menin secured support from many moderate Democrats and Republicans. Her opponent, Brooklyn’s Crystal Hudson, has been backed by the council’s progressive bloc and is widely seen as more aligned with Mamdani, who takes office Jan. 1.
Menin, whose grandmother and mother survived the Holocaust before immigrating to New York City, has frequently advocated for Holocaust education and efforts to combat antisemitism as a councilwoman.
She has also made pro-Israel advocacy a part of her public image, marching in the Israel Day Parade in May to advocate for the release of the hostages and going on a solidarity trip to Israel to visit Kibbutz Kfar Aza in February 2024. (Mamdani has said he would not visit Israel or attend the Israel Day Parade as mayor.)
While Mamdani has frequently reiterated his commitments to protecting Jewish New Yorkers, his record of support for the boycott Israel movement and past anti-Israel rhetoric stoked fears in some Jewish New Yorkers during his campaign, including in Menin’s district, which supported his opponent.
Last week, after pro-Palestinian protesters demonstrated against an Israeli immigration event at the Park East Synagogue, which is located in Menin’s district, Mamdani said that he believed “sacred spaces should not be used to promote activities in violation of international law.” In contrast, Menin said that the protest was “not acceptable” in a post on X.
“Congregants must have the right to worship freely and to enter and exit their house of worship without impediment,” Menin wrote. “Protests must have reasonable time, place, and manner restrictions.”
But while Menin has been seen as a potential moderating force on Mamdani, she has also cast herself as willing to collaborate with the incoming mayor.
“With this broad five-borough coalition, we stand ready to partner with mayor-elect Mamdani’s administration and deliver on a shared agenda that makes New York more affordable through universal childcare, lowers rent and healthcare costs, and ensures that families across the city can do more than just get by,” Menin said in a statement.
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Jewish leaders must work with educators to battle antisemitism — not demonize us
To the editors:
A conversation about education and antisemitism was held at last week’s Jewish Federations of North America General Assembly that did not significantly feature educator voices. That’s truly unfortunate. As an educator, union leader, deeply committed Jew and the wife of a rabbi, I can attest that this issue is always on my mind.
I was troubled by the attacks on teachers’ unions that marked the JFNA gathering, with some leaders attacking unions like the National Education Association. I lead another teachers union, the American Federation of Teachers, and though we weren’t mentioned, we all face similar issues.
I see and engage with young Jews all the time. Many are members of my union — young, idealistic teachers who want to make a difference in the classroom, and who know that public education is the key to a more equal and just United States. Many teach in the public schools precisely because of their Jewish values. But they, like many Americans and many American Jews, are alienated from Israel because of the actions of the Israeli government.
We can’t ignore the anti-democratic actions of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, the settler violence in the West Bank or the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. We need to honestly confront these issues head-on, just as we simultaneously demand that Jewish voices are not silenced and Jewish students and teachers feel safe.
The American public education system has deeply benefited our extraordinary American Jewish community. Today’s families deserve the same stellar education, one that offers economic opportunity and social advancement. To treat teachers as the enemy, rather than allies to work with, puts that goal at risk. By demonizing teachers’ unions rather than engaging with us, Jewish organizational leadership is supporting those who seek to undermine public education.
And we are eager to work toward these shared goals. My union spends significant time educating teachers about antisemitism. We have a national partnership with the Jewish Council on Public Affairs through which we pair union locals with local Jewish leaders across the country with the aim of bettering understanding and cooperation.
Our New York City local, the UFT, has partnered with the city’s Department of Education to promote a new curriculum called “Hidden Voices,” about prominent Jews through the decades. And while leaders at JFNA suggested that teachers’ unions are contributing to poor education about Israel, the AFT proudly partners with Israeli organizations, including the Jewish/Arab Hand in Hand Schools network. We host Israeli NGOs and trade unionists at our conventions and in special meetings with our leadership.
Instead of continuing to point fingers and gloss over the reality that we face in today’s truly complex world, we need to create partnerships and include everyone who seeks Jewish safety.
To combat the many threats that face the Jewish community, inside of schools and beyond them, we need to show partnership and promise — not division.
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More than 25% of Israelis want to leave the country. How did we get here?
Amid this brutal cycle of war, trauma and sacrifice, more than 25% of Israelis are now considering leaving Israel behind.
The stunning results of this survey, conducted in April 2025 and published on Sunday by the Israeli Democracy Institute, reveal an existential fissure in the country. Israelis are losing faith in their nation’s future, and they don’t believe they can get it back.
It’s a shocking turnaround, after narratives of Israeli society’s exemplary resilience and social cohesion sprang up in the aftermath of Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023 massacre. And while this survey predates major events like the Israel-Iran war and the ceasefire and hostage deal, its findings align with other concerning trends.
“Tens of thousands of Israelis have chosen to leave Israel in the past two years,” Gilad Kariv, chairperson of the Knesset’s Research and Information Center, said at a Knesset meeting in October. “This is not a wave of emigration; it’s a tsunami of Israelis choosing to leave the country.”
Since the beginning of 2022, 125,000 more people have emigrated from Israel than have immigrated to it. The number of official requests to terminate residency in 2024 was more than double the total requests made between 2015 and 2021.
It’s not just because war is difficult. It’s because the last few years have posed a fundamental challenge to Israel’s promise to global Jewry — and Israel is failing.
Israel has never been an easy country to live in. Residing there means facing economic hardship, a constant threat of violence, existential dread and insufferable bureaucracy. What drew immigrants in and kept citizens around was their shared commitment to the Jewish state’s ultimate vision: a renewed Jewish homeland serving its inhabitants, built on “freedom, justice and peace.”
That sense of shared purpose was crucial to Israel’s founding. “The State of Israel and the Jewish people share a common destiny,” David Ben-Gurion, the country’s founding prime minister, wrote in a 1954 letter. “This state cannot exist without the Jewish people, and the Jewish people cannot exist without the state.”
As Anita Shapira explains in her 2015 book Ben-Gurion: Father of Modern Israel, Ben-Gurion recognized the need to keep all Jews invested and connected to the state of Israel — and the danger of severing that connection.
But in recent years, Israel’s leaders have failed to nurture that investment and connection. What distinguishes this period from the conflict-ridden years around the 1948, 1967 and 1973 wars is how out of sync a vast number of today’s Israelis are with their own state and government.
And the IDI’s survey reveals just how far the country has strayed from Ben-Gurion’s vision.
Those more likely to leave are less religious and more liberal — a demographic politically isolated in a country steered by a power-hungry and extremist right-wing government. While the Oct. 7 attack and the first months of war pulled many Israelis toward new or deeper religious commitment, the grueling conflict, which dragged on for months without a clear endgame, also pushed others further and further away.
Just before the United States-brokered ceasefire went into effect on Oct. 5, the Institute for National Security Studies reported that 72% of Israelis were dissatisfied with the government’s handling of the war, while more than 40% thought the country was worse off since Oct. 7. More than half believed another Oct. 7 could happen again.
But this fundamental mistrust of the country’s leadership took hold well before Oct. 7. It goes back to 2022, when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu brought far-right extremists like Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich into the Israeli political mainstream. Then, his government’s widely reviled plans for a judicial overhaul in 2023 brought fears of Israeli authoritarianism into reality.
The Oct. 7 attack could have been a wake-up call that Israel desperately needed to reverse this course. Instead, within a year’s time, it became clear that Netanyahu was still guided by his own interests — prolonging the war, sabotaging hostage deals and turning Israel into an international pariah.
Israel’s economy has also suffered from this turbulence. The tech sector has seen investment decline and talent flee, while the cost of living has worsened.
Yossi Klein Halevi, a senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute, warned me of the consequences of all these trends during a podcast interview in August 2024.
“My deepest fear is for a mass emigration of young secular Israelis, those Israelis who are the backbone of the next generation of startup nation, of Israel as an economic success story,” he told me. “I’m terrified of that, and I see this government ultimately as a threat to the Israeli success story.”
It is understandable why much of the Israeli electorate feels disillusioned, unsafe, nihilistic and betrayed. And those feelings ought to be a cause for major concern.
Jewish tradition repeatedly warns that civil fragmentation can lead to a break between Jews and the land of Israel. The Talmud explains that senseless hatred and a breakdown of trust between Jews have historically led to ruptures between our people and our homeland. This is precisely what organizations like The Fourth Quarter — a grassroots movement seeking to build consensus among Israelis through dialogue — seek to repair. We cannot know if it will be enough.
What we do know is that Israel — both its citizens and its leaders — must respond to those who feel abandoned by the country that promised to be a Jewish homeland for all.
If we want Israelis to remain committed to their country, the government must make good-faith efforts to show they still have a home here.
That means, first, political reform. There must be real political accountability with independent probes into Oct. 7 — not the internal probe the government currently plans — long-overdue elections, and a fresh focus on creating economic stability backed by strategic foreign policy. Above all, there must be restored democratic norms, and a shelving of authoritarian plans.
Unfortunately, Netanyahu and his government seem uninterested in repairing what they have broken. The Jewish state will not crumble overnight if Netanyahu and his ilk remain indifferent to these needs. But the country’s morale will weaken. And everything that has kept it strong and surviving — its defenses, its international supporters, its belief in its own mission — will do the same. The educated, the entrepreneurial and the young will leave, and they will not look back.
Israelis need something to believe in. Without that, they will flee a country unrecognizable to them.
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