Nothing says “Happy Hanukkah!” like a Menorah in the Loo at Trader Joe’s

(An Open Letter to Trader Joe’s)

To the Management of Trader Joe’s in Davis,

Of all the important things Davis Jews should be concerned about, this isn’t on the top-ten list. However, Trader Joe’s has placed a wall painting in the Davis store restroom depicting a menorah, with the words “Happy Hanukkah!” and the Trader Joe’s logo. It appears as part of a decorative series of prints otherwise unrelated to religion, holidays, or cultural identity.  The menorah depiction does not belong in the print series, and most certainly it does not belong in the bathroom.

In years past, I would have laughed at the naivety of such a decision and rolled my eyes. But times have changed for Jews in Davis, and worldwide, over the last few years. Calls for the death of Jews and the destruction of Israel have been shouted publicly on campus and in town. The morning after the Bondi Beach Massacre, a large swastika was spray painted on a silver utility box on 5^th Street. Before October 7th, 2023, there was, for most of my lifetime, a sense of acceptance and safety for Jews in Davis and in much of the USA. Today that is shattered.

With Jewish identity increasingly treated as suspect, conditional, or abstracted into slogans and symbols detached from actual people, the casual handling of Jewish symbols feels dismissive. The tokenism of a people can lend to an atmosphere of hostility. With echoes of the toxic anti-Jew bigotry of 20th-Century Europe growing again in western culture, we cannot casually laugh-off a bathroom menorah today, even as we can laugh at the absurdity.

The murderous incidents in Washington D.C., Boulder, Manchester, and Bondi Beach, and this month’s arson of a historic synagogue in Mississippi, last burned by the Ku Klux Klan 60 years earlier, illustrate how the world has changed. Not so much in the news are the numerous non-fatal hostile incidents against Jews that were much rarer before October 7th, 2023, and the vast changes Jews have felt to their acceptance and safety in society.

The menorah is not just an artistic graphic like the rest of the art series in your loo. It is a religious and cultural symbol, and for many Jews there are long-standing norms, explicitly taught, about where such symbols belong and where they do not. Public bathrooms are not neutral spaces for such symbols, not just in Judaism but in many religions and cultures. What makes this placement stand out is the casualness. The menorah appears to have been treated as interchangeable with abstract or whimsical themes, folded into a design series where meaning was secondary to visual variety. This flattening of a Jewish symbol lacks cultural sensitivity.

Perhaps one solution would be bringing symbols and images from several major world religions into the bathroom, to make it fair! It is worth asking, for each religion, how this would land. What if there were a crucifix mounted above the toilet? Or a painted portrait of the Prophet Mohammed (which, in many Muslim traditions, is itself considered offensive) on the wall? A Buddha stuck in the ceiling vent? Radha and Krishna dancing on the bathroom sink? Would any of those have made it past an internal review without anyone pausing to ask whether this was appropriate? Would those have been waved through as just cheerful, inclusive décor?

Almost certainly not.

Jews I have shown the bathroom menorah to have expressed a variety of reactions, from laughing out loud hysterically, to “Oh my!” to “No way!” to “That’s not A.I.?” to “What were they thinking?”.  What no Jew said was, “how nice of them for respecting our people by placing a menorah print in the bathroom”.

Trader Joe’s is known for its attention to detail, often charmingly so. This feels like a case where no one stopped to ask the most basic question: does this placement make any sense? The fact that the menorah print did make it through suggests the assumption that Jewish symbols are sufficiently benign, decorative, or flexible that placement does not really matter. That assumption is common. It is also wrong.

This is an easy fix, but it is reasonable to ponder why this was not caught before the print was placed on the bathroom wall in the first place. Thank you for applying the same care in this matter going forward that Trader Joe’s is known for. I look forward to a bountiful display of Jewish foods, wares, and symbols out on the display floor for the upcoming Passover and the next Hanukkah.

Sincerely,

Alan C. Miller, Davis