Jewish Customers Call For Wayfair To Pull Inaccurate Hanukkah Merchandise

Wayfair

Wayfair is not new to controversy. The affordable furniture retailer was in hot water earlier this year for profiting off of border detention facilities that separate families and keep immigrants in inhumane conditions — and now they’re getting dragged online for not having “a single Jew on the design staff” after a confusing Hanukkah-themed shower curtain found its way online.

The shower curtain includes words like “Hanukkah,” “dreidel,” and “menorah,” but also non-Hanukkah-related terms like “Seder” (a feast during the spring-season Jewish holiday Passover), “mazel tov” (meaning “congratulations” in Hebrew), and “shalom,” which means hello or goodbye. Also, they included “seder” twice, really leaning into the religious inaccuracies.

Most critics of the shower curtain found the funny in how off-base this particular piece of merchandise is; others called for its removal from the online store.

As has been pointed out, the perfect way to avoid snafus like this are to employ designers who know something about the occasions they’re creating for — and having more diverse staffs across the board. After all, someone should have been able to catch these mistakes during the designing and manufacturing process. The site boasts the Hanukkah shower curtain was “designed and printed in the United States,” so you can’t even blame a translation error, either.

UPDATE 11/25/19, 5:30 PM: Wayfair has pulled the Hannukkah shower curtain, according to the company Twitter