Barbie invented by Russian Jew to emancipate women
By Semyon Charny
July 14, 2023
Long before the ubiquitous craze for the upcoming Barbie movie, most people could easily imagine the image of this doll: the standard of beauty, perky, white, perpetually smiling American, writes JTA journalist Shira Lee Bartov.
In fact, she was the daughter of a stubborn Jewish businesswoman, Ruth Handler, whose family fled poverty and anti-Semitism in Poland. Barbie is considered by some to be Jewish, as is Handler herself, a complex symbol of assimilation into the United States in the mid-20th century.
The doll's new life begins in Greta Gerwig's upcoming film Barbie, written by Gerwig and Noah Baumbach. It features an all-star cast including Margot Robbie as Barbie, Ryan Gosling as Ken, and Will Ferrell as the fictional CEO of Mattel.
This blockbuster could gross at least $70-80 million in the first weekend of July 21-23 alone, thanks in part to a colossal marketing campaign, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
It is noteworthy that this doll, in general, was the creation of an outsider. Here is her Jewish history.
Origin story
Ruth Handler was born in 1916 in Denver (Colorado, USA) and was the youngest of ten children. Her father, Jacob Moskowitz (later renamed Mosko), had escaped conscription into the Russian army and landed in the United States in 1907. Her mother Ida, a simple illiterate woman, arrived in the United States in 1908 at the helm of a steamer.
Jacob was a blacksmith. He moved the family to Denver, where new railroads were then being built.
By the time Ida gave birth to Ruth, she was already sick, so the baby was sent to live with her older sister Sarah. According to Robin Gerber, author of Barbie and Ruth: The Story of the Most Famous Doll and the Woman Who Made It, it was in Sarah's Jewish community in Denver that Ruth, at the age of 16, met Izzy Handler at a Jewish youth party. She immediately fell in love with him - a poor art student dressed in a torn T-shirt.
At 19, Ruth decided to leave the University of Denver and move to Los Angeles, where she found work as a secretary at Paramount Studios. Izzy followed her.
“When they were driving across the country, she asked him to change his name to Elliot,” says Gerber. “At the time, in the 1930s, she sensed anti-Semitism and thought they would be better off with more Americanized names.”
The couple never renounced their Judaism. On the contrary, they eventually helped found Temple Isaiah Synagogue in Los Angeles and became trusted sponsors of the United Jewish Appeal. But Ruth was pragmatic and never forgot how the police stopped her car in Denver to make anti-Semitic remarks.
Knowing her family's displeasure at Elliot's poverty, Ruth nevertheless married him in 1938. She continued to work at Paramount while her young husband entered the Art Center College of Design and took a job as a lighting artist. The couple quickly became business partners. Elliot was in the garage making lucite items such as bookends and ashtrays, and Ruth was thrilled to be able to sell them. They were remarkably complementary: Elliot is a quiet creative person, while Ruth is cheerful and fearless, adventurous, she said that her first sale was like "taking a drug."
World War II challenged their business as President Roosevelt restricted the use of plastic for non-military purposes. Together with his friend Harold "Matt" Matson, the Handlers began making wooden picture frames and furniture for dollhouses. They gradually achieved success and named their company Mattel, combining the names of Matt and Elliot.
In 1946, Matson sold his stake and Ruth Handler became Mattel's first president. The company soon expanded into toys, including a kid-sized ukulele called the Uke-A-Doodle, Jack-in-the-Box, and toy guns. Because the design department was all male, many of his toys were for boys.
One day, while watching her daughter Barbara, whose namesake would be Barbie, Ruth had an idea. She noticed that Barbara and other children like to play with paper dolls and pretend to be grown women. But in the 1950s, the only dolls on the market were baby dolls—girls were supposed to play mothers. Barbara and her friends wanted to play with other dolls.
During a family trip to Switzerland in 1956, Ruth saw a curvy adult doll named Bild Lilly. This toy, inspired by the seductive comic book character of the German tabloid Bild, was designed as a sexy gift for men. Ruth saw her as a Barbie prototype.
The adult female doll was such an unusual proposition that Mattel designers and even Ruth's husband dismissed the idea, stating that mothers would never buy their daughters a doll with breasts. Ruth kept pushing until finally the first Barbie, dressed in a black and white swimsuit with heels, debuted at the New York Toy Fair in 1959.
Of course, many mothers said the doll was too sexy, but their daughters loved it. Ruth interacted with children by advertising Mattel on television, which made her company a leader in the production of toys: they advertised in Disney's "Mickey Mouse Club".
“She completely changed the way we buy toys,” says Gerber. “Until then, children only saw toys when their parents handed them a catalog. But when the toys appeared in TV commercials, the kids ran to their parents and said, “I want that thing on TV!”
Mattel sold 350,000 Barbies in the doll's first year. In an effort to keep up with demand, the company created a boyfriend for her in 1961 and named him after the Handlers' son, Kenneth.
Barbie a feminist? Sexist? Assimilate? Jewish?
Barbie's thin figure drew backlash from feminists in the 1970s. The phrase "I'm not a Barbie doll!" became the slogan of the demonstrators at the women's strike for equal rights in 1970 in New York. Advocacy groups such as the South Coast Eating Disorders Collaboration have stated that if Barbie were a real woman, her proportions would cause her to walk on all fours and not have enough fat to menstruate. In the 2018 film Tiny Shoulders: Barbie Reimagined, Gloria Steinem remarked, "She was everything we didn't want to be."
Handler stated that Barbie represents opportunities for women. After all, women in the United States until 1974 could not even open a credit card in their name, but Barbie could buy any outfit suitable for any career. Her image was aimed at the American future: Barbie the astronaut appeared in 1965 - four years before Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon, and 18 years before Sally Ride became the first American in space. Ken was Barbie's boyfriend, but in over 60 years she never married or had children.
In Ruth's memoir, Dream Doll: The Ruth Handler Story, she wrote: "Barbie has always embodied the idea that a woman has a choice. Even in her early years, Barbie didn't have to be content with being just Ken's girlfriend or an avid shopper. For example, she had clothes for the activities of a nurse, a flight attendant, a singer in a nightclub.”
Years before the feminist discussion, the question of how American Jews felt about Barbie spoke of their own place in the United States.
Handler created Barbie in 1959 when many Jews opposed the idea of assimilation. Although Jews continued to face discrimination in the post-war period, they did find security—a life that, according to Emily Tamkin, author of Bad Jews: A History of American Jewish Politics and Identity, they never identified with.
Suddenly, they "moved" to suburban, white-walled America: Barbie territory.
Thus, like the fashion of Ralph Lauren, a Jewish designer who changed his last name to Lifshitz, or the Christmas carols of Irving Berlin, a Russian immigrant born Israel Beilin, Barbie paradoxically became a form of the American ideal that Jews should assimilate, Tamkin argues.
“You might think if you are safe and live in the suburbs, this is really real Jewish life,” she says. “While the Jews are in communal and individual struggles, Ruth Handler is reinforcing an American culture that Jews in general are ambivalent about.”
But was Barbie Jewish? Yes, according to Susan Shapiro, bestselling author of Barbie: 60 Years of Inspiration.
“I think Ruth assumed that Barbie was expressing herself in a certain way,” says Shapiro. “Barbie was supposed to be completely American, and Ruth really considered herself very assimilated in America. Yet she faced anti-Semitism at Paramount Pictures, and her family fled Europe due to anti-Semitism…”
The doll doesn't fit stereotypes of an Ashkenazi appearance: after all, the first version of it copied a German sex doll that "looked very gentile," Gerber notes. (There were no non-white Barbies until the 1980s.)
Tiffany Schlein, who made the 2005 short documentary The Tribe about the history of Jews and Barbies, is a blond, blue-eyed Jewish woman herself (she wrote the film with her husband, who happens to be named Ken Goldberg). She was often told that she "doesn't look like a Jewess." “Now we are experiencing a real renaissance when we see how different Jews look, and there is no “single view”, a single ideology,” Schlein notes.
Regardless of what American buyers think about it, Barbie has been labeled "Jewish" due to discriminatory bans. In 2003, she was temporarily outlawed by Saudi Arabia's religious police, who issued the message: "Jewish Barbie dolls, with their revealing clothing and shameful poses, accessories and tools, are a symbol of decadence for the twisted West." Iran has also repeatedly suppressed Barbie sales since declaring them "un-Islamic" in 1996.
Will the new movie touch on any of that?
Dont clear. Greta's associate and partner Herwig Baumbach is Jewish, but he rarely mentions this fact in his films (including "The Squid and the Whale" and "Marriage Story").
The film features several Jewish actors, such as Hari Nef, a trans actress and model who has appeared on shows such as Transparent, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, and Idol.
Little details about the plot are known, but it seems that the characters leave the imaginary world of Barbie and are transported to the real world.
The wide cast variety, with several different actors playing Barbie and Ken, is also a "commentary" on Barbie's white, all-American roots.
“We are here in a circle of people of different shapes, sizes, with different abilities, so that they all participate in this “dance”, and everything is under the slogan: you don’t have to be blonde, white or X, Y, Z to embody Barbie or Ken ,” says actor Simi Liu, who plays one of the Kens.