The warm backstory of this year’s Chanukah stamp
As an art director at the United States Postal Service, Antonio Alcalá has designed stamps honoring Woodstock, the Emancipation Proclamation, and Ezra Jack Keats’ children’s book classic “A Snowy Day.” But this year’s Chanukah stamp is the first that honors an important piece of his own heritage.
“My mother escaped Nazi Germany on the Kindertransport,” Alcalá said. “So when I was a child, we would celebrate multiple holidays, including Chanukah, and as the youngest of three boys, I was the one who always got to light the first candle.”
The postal service has issued Chanukah stamps since 1996, more than three decades after it first started issuing Christmas stamps. Previous versions have drawn on traditional Jewish art forms — the 2022 stamp went with a synagogue stained-glass look — included dreidel imagery and shown a range of menorahs, real and illustrated.
Alcalá’s stamp also showcases a menorah. But unlike the others that Americans have used to mail Chanukah cards, his doesn’t feature any candles.
That’s by design.
“The flames are shown, but the candles themselves are not present,” Alcalá said. “They’re implied. And to me, that sort of alludes to this sort of aspect of faith that’s both tied to this and also to the larger sort of religious experience.”
In drafting this year’s stamp — a process that began in 2022 — Alcalá began on the computer, and eventually shifted to paper and ink, which he said “conveyed a lot more humanity to it, than sort of more mechanical, perfectly created geometric illustration.”
His influences included the mid-century pop artist Andy Warhol and Ben Shahn, the Jewish artist known for his work in social realism.
“I don’t think it’s anything that I invented, but it was the language that I thought was appropriate,” Alcalá said. “I was really interested in something that was not so sterile-feeling, but also very simple.”
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
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