This Brooklyn Family’s Hanukkah Celebration Is All Over New York’s Subway

NEW YORK (JTA) – 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.)

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.

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.