Hollywood actress Reese Witherspoon is co-producing and possibly starring in a film in the works about the Barbie doll’s Jewish creator. Witherspoon, who won an Academy Award for her performance in “Walk the Line” in 2006, is partnering with Bold Films on an adaptation of the 2010 book “Barbie and Ruth: The Story of the…
Getty Images It’s probably a good thing that Barbie’s days are numbered, as Elissa Strauss noted. But would you believe me if I said I was a little nostalgic, a little wistful? Rarely do you encounter a self-identified, fairly radical feminist who also hand-wrings over the demise of doll-playing, but as I’ve noted before I’m…
February 13, 2014 “The reality is, we just didn’t sell enough Barbie Dolls.” — Bryan G. Stockton, chief executive of Mattel, shortly before the Barbie brand joined forces with Sports Illustrated’s anniversary swimsuit issue. Mattel paid for the “opportunity” to appear in the issue according to The New York Times and has used #unapologetic to…
I’ve already blogged here at the Sisterhood about my childhood proclivity for Disney Princesses. Perhaps it won’t surprise you, then, that I was also an unabashed doll player. Barbies, paper dolls, American Girl dolls, Madame Alexander. You name it; I played it. Guided by the imaginations of a few close friends sitting together on someone’s…
Philip Roth received his Man Booker International Prize June 29 in absentia. Meanwhile, the prize committee is a mess. Robin Cembalest writes about the Klimt-inspired Barbie doll. Is Jean-Luc Godard’s new movie, “Film Socialisme,” anti-Semitic? Menachem Wecker, who has a piece in this week’s Forward about a musical celebration of Bulgarian heroism during the Holocaust,…
Filmmaker, Internet pioneer and Webby Awards founder Tiffany Shlain believes that “when you speak your truth, you speak the universal.” This seems to be the case, given the buzz surrounding her new, partially autobiographical film, which premiered January 21 at the Sundance Film Festival. Best known among American Jews for ““The Tribe,” a 2006 short…
The first time I saw Tefillin Barbie, — the brainchild of Torah scribe Jen Taylor Friedman — she was on the back of the stub of an entrance ticket to the Jewish Museum Berlin. She wasn’t on my ticket stub, but rather on that of my companion. But seeing that I just had to have…
“You know Barbie’s getting a new job,” says my friend Mimi to me. “People can vote for her new career.” I put tefillin on a Mattel Barbie doll in 2006, unwittingly creating the Jewish icon now known as Tefillin Barbie Tefillin Barbie has a religious-girl denim skirt, a T-shirt, the tallit and tefillin more generally…
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