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Is Barbie Jewish? The complex Jewish history of the doll, explained.
(JTA) — Long before the craze over the upcoming “Barbie” movie, most people could conjure an image of the doll: She was the beauty standard and the popular girl, a perky, white, ever-smiling brand of Americana.
She was also the child of a hard-nosed Jewish businesswoman, Ruth Handler, whose family fled impoverishment and antisemitism in Poland. And some see the original Barbie as Jewish like Handler, a complex symbol of assimilation in the mid-20th-century United States.
The doll’s latest revival comes in Greta Gerwig’s hotly-anticipated “Barbie” movie, written by Gerwig and Noah Baumbach and featuring a star-studded cast, including Margot Robbie as Barbie, Ryan Gosling as Ken and Will Ferrell as a fictional CEO of Mattel. The expected blockbuster could collect at least $70-80 million in just its opening weekend of July 21-23, according to The Hollywood Reporter, fueled in part by a relentless marketing machine.
But this in-crowd doll was born from an outsider. Here’s its Jewish history.
The origin story
Ruth Handler was born in 1916 in Denver, Colorado, the youngest of 10 children. Her father, Jacob Moskowitz (later changed to Mosko) had escaped conscription in the Russian army like many Jews at the turn of the century, and landed in the United States in 1907. Her mother Ida, who was illiterate, arrived the next year in the steerage section of a steamboat. Jacob was a blacksmith and moved the family to Denver, where new railroads were being built.
Ida was sickly by the time she gave birth to Ruth, so the baby was sent to live with her older sister Sarah. It was in Sarah’s Jewish community of Denver, when Ruth was 16 years old, that she met Izzy Handler at a Jewish youth dance, according to Robin Gerber, a biographer who wrote “Barbie and Ruth: The Story of the World’s Most Famous Doll and the Woman Who Created Her.” She fell in love immediately with Izzy, a penniless art student wearing a torn t-shirt.
At age 19, Ruth decided to drop out of the University of Denver and move to Los Angeles, where she found a job as a secretary at Paramount Studios. Izzy soon followed her.
“As they drove across the country, she asked him to change his name to Elliot,” said Gerber. “She had felt the antisemitism at that time, in the 1930s, and she really felt that they’d be better off with a more Americanized name.”
The couple never renounced their Judaism. On the contrary, they eventually helped found Temple Isaiah in Los Angeles and became longtime contributors to the United Jewish Appeal. But Ruth was pragmatic, and she would not forget how police officers had stopped her car in Denver to make antisemitic remarks.
Against the pleadings of her family, who knew Elliot was poor, Ruth married him in 1938. She continued working at Paramount, while he enrolled at the Art Center College of Design and took a job designing light fixtures — but they quickly became collaborators. Elliot began making pieces from Lucite in their garage, such as bookends and ashtrays, and Ruth was thrilled to sell them. They were complementary business partners: Elliott was a quiet creative who shied away from ordering in a restaurant, while Ruth was vivacious and unafraid, a risk-taker who said her first sale felt like “taking a drug,” according to Gerber.
World War II challenged their business, as President Franklin Roosevelt restricted plastics to military use. Together with their friend Harold “Matt” Matson, the Handlers pivoted to making wooden picture frames and dollhouse furniture. They found success and named their company Mattel, a combination of Matt and Elliot’s names.
In 1946, Matson sold his share and Ruth Handler became the first president of Mattel. The company soon branched into toys, including a child-sized ukulele called the Uke-A-Doodle, a Jack-in-the-Box and toy guns. Since the design department was entirely male, many of its early toys targeted little boys.
One day, while watching her daughter Barbara — who would become Barbie’s namesake — Ruth had a new idea. She observed that Barbara and her friends were playing with paper dolls and pretending to be adult women. In the 1950s, the only dolls on the market were baby dolls, presuming that girls wanted to play at being mothers. But Barbara and her friends wanted to play being the dolls.
On a family trip to Switzerland in 1956, she spotted a curvaceous adult doll called Bild Lilli. This toy, based on a seductive comic strip character in the German tabloid Bild, was designed as a sexual gag gift for men. Ruth saw her as a blueprint for Barbie.
An adult female doll for children was so novel that Mattel’s designers and even Ruth’s husband dismissed the idea, saying that mothers would never buy their daughters a doll with breasts. Ruth kept pushing until the first Barbie, decked in a black-and-white swimsuit and heels, debuted at New York’s Toy Fair in 1959.
Sure enough, plenty of mothers said the doll was too sexual — but their daughters loved it. Ruth communicated directly with children by bringing Mattel to television, making it the first toy company to advertise on Disney’s “Mickey Mouse Club.”
“She completely shifted the way we buy toys,” said Gerber. “Up to that point, children only saw toys when their parents handed them a catalog. But when toys came to ads on television, then kids were running to their parents and saying, ‘I want that thing on TV.’”
Mattel sold 350,000 Barbies in its first year. Striving to keep up with demand, the company released her boyfriend in 1961 and named him after the Handlers’ son, Kenneth.
Is Barbie feminist? Sexist? Assimilationist? Jewish?
Barbie’s rail-thin figure sparked backlash from feminists in the 1970s. “I am not a Barbie doll!” became a chant for marchers at the 1970 Women’s Strike for Equality in New York. Advocacy groups such as the South Shore Eating Disorders Collaborative have said that if Barbie were a real woman, her proportions would force her to walk on all fours and she would not have enough body fat to menstruate. In the 2018 film “Tiny Shoulders: Rethinking Barbie,” Gloria Steinem said, “She was everything we didn’t want to be.”
Handler said that Barbie represented possibilities for women. Women could not open a credit card in their own name until 1974, but Barbie could buy any outfit to fit any career. Her fashion represented the future: Astronaut Barbie came out in 1965, four years before Neil Armstrong walked on the moon and 18 years before Sally Ride became the first American woman in space. Ken may be Barbie’s boyfriend, but in more than 60 years, she has not married or had children.
In Ruth’s memoir “Dream Doll: The Ruth Handler Story,” she wrote, “Barbie has always represented the fact that a woman has choices. Even in her early years Barbie did not have to settle for being only Ken’s girlfriend or an inveterate shopper. She had the clothes, for example, to launch a career as a nurse, a stewardess, a nightclub singer.”
But years before the feminist discussion, the question of how American Jews could or could not relate to Barbie said a lot about their place in the United States at the time. Handler created Barbie in 1959, when many Jews were wrestling with the concept of assimilation. Although they continued to face discrimination in the postwar period, they also had newfound security — a life they had never identified with, according to Emily Tamkin, the author of “Bad Jews: A History of American Jewish Politics and Identities.”
Suddenly, like so many others, they were moving to suburban, white-picket fence America — Barbie territory.
So, much like the iconic fashion of Ralph Lauren, a Jewish designer who changed his last name from Lifshitz, or the Christmas Carols of Irving Berlin, a Russian Jewish immigrant born Israel Beilin, Barbie would paradoxically become core to the American ideal that Jews were seen to assimilate into, said Tamkin.
“The thinking goes, if you’re safe and secure and in suburbia, is that really an authentic Jewish life?” Tamkin told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “And while they’re having this communal and individual struggle, Ruth Handler really enhances the Americana that they have this ambivalence about.”
But was the original Barbie actually Jewish herself? Susan Shapiro, the best-selling author of “Barbie: 60 Years of Inspiration,” thinks so.
“I think Ruth just assumed that Barbie reflects her, in a certain way,” Shapiro told Kveller in 2019. “Barbie was supposed to be all-American, and I think Ruth really considered herself to be very assimilated in America. But she did face antisemitism at Paramount Pictures, and her family fled Europe because of antisemitism.”
The doll doesn’t fit the rubric of stereotypes about Ashkenazi appearance — after all, her first form copied a German sex doll that “looks very goyishe,” said Gerber. (Non-white Barbie ethnicities were not introduced until the 1980s.)
Tiffany Shlain, who made a 2005 short documentary “The Tribe” about the history of Jews and Barbie, is herself a blond, blue-eyed Jewish woman (who wrote the film with her husband, serendipitously named Ken Goldberg). She was often told that she didn’t “look Jewish.”
“Right now, we’re in a real renaissance of seeing all the different ways Jews look, and there’s no ‘look,’ there’s no one ideology,” Shlain said.
Regardless of what American buyers think, Barbie has been labeled “Jewish” by discriminatory bans. In 2003, she was temporarily outlawed by Saudi Arabia’s religious police, who posted the message: “Jewish Barbie dolls, with their revealing clothes and shameful postures, accessories and tools are a symbol of decadence to the perverted West.” Iran has also repeatedly cracked down on the sale of Barbies since declaring them un-Islamic in 1996.
Will the new movie address any of this?
It’s unclear.
Gerwig’s collaborator (and partner) Baumbach is Jewish but doesn’t often reference that fact in his movies, which include “The Squid and the Whale” and “Marriage Story.” The film features a few Jewish cast members, including Hari Nef, a trans actress and model who has appeared in shows such as “Transparent,” “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” and “The Idol.”
Details about the movie’s plot have been scarce, but it seems to involve characters leaving a make-believe Barbie world for the real world.
The wide diversity of the cast — which features several different actors playing Barbie and Ken — also seems to be a commentary on Barbie’s white, all-American roots.
“We were able to cast people of different shapes, sizes, differently abled, to all participate in this dance — all under this message of: You don’t have to be blonde, white, or X, Y, Z in order to embody what it means to be a Barbie or a Ken,” said actor Simi Liu, who plays one of the Kens.
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The post Is Barbie Jewish? The complex Jewish history of the doll, explained. appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Brooklyn Woman Denied Bail, Claims She Didn’t Kill Anyone in Car Crash That Killed Jewish Mother, Two Daughters
An overturned auto in a car crash flipped on its roof landing on a mother and her three children, killing two children on March 29, 2025, in Brooklyn, New York. Photo: ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters Connect
A Brooklyn woman denied killing anyone when she appeared in court on Thursday, less than a week after a Jewish woman and her two daughters died when she crashed her car into them at a crosswalk.
Miriam Yarimi, 32, appeared in Brooklyn Criminal Court via a video stream from her room in NYU Langone Hospital-Brooklyn, according to the New York Daily News. She is undergoing a psychological evaluation at the hospital following Saturday’s deadly car crash.
After the crash, Yarimi told first responders she was “possessed” and believed the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was following her. She has made similar claims about being pursued by the CIA on social media several times in the past, The Algemeiner previously reported.
Yamini, who is also Jewish, faces a slew of charges that include three counts of second-degree manslaughter, three counts of criminal negligent homicide, and four counts of second-degree assault.
“The devil is in my eyes. I am haunted inside. I didn’t kill anyone. I didn’t hurt anyone. Prove it. Show me the proof. You have no proof,” Yarimi said in a statement after Saturday’s crash, according to Assistant District Attorney Jennifer Nocella. “I need CT scans in my eyes. I need to get the scanning done now … Where’s my daughter? My daughter’s always in my heart.”
“People are out to get me,” added the single mother. “I need CT scans on my entire body. F— you. I need a whole work up to get whatever is in my body out of it. I did not hurt anyone. All the evidence is on my phone.”
Nocella called Yamini a flight risk and asked the judge that she be held without bail due to the “nature and severity” of the allegations, as reported by the Daily News. Judge Jevet Johnson agreed with Nocella and ordered Yamini to be held without bail. Nocella said prosecutors are prepared to present grand jury indictment on the manslaughter charges.
New York City Mayor Eric Adams said his administration is “committed” to taking more action to prevent traffic violence and deaths following the fatal car crash that killed Natasha Saada, 35, along with her daughters Diana, 8, and Deborah, 5. Saada’s 4-year-old son Philip was injured in the crash and is still being hospitalized in critical condition.
Adams’ office announced on Wednesday that there were 41 traffic deaths during the first three months of 2025 — 24 fewer than last year and the second fewest since they started being recorded by the city. Despite the decline in traffic deaths, Adams admitted that more work needs to be done to keep New Yorkers safe on the streets, as evident by Saturday’s deadly car crash.
“In order to make New York City the best place to raise a family, we need to be safer at every level — including on our streets,” he said in a released statement on Wednesday. “Our administration’s investments in intersection safety improvements, treating traffic violence as the serious crime that it is, and our expanding automated camera enforcement are all helping ensure we’re leading the way toward a safer future for all New Yorkers — whether they are pedestrians, cyclists, or motorists.”
“We understand there is more work to do, as evidenced this past weekend’s tragic crash in Brooklyn because one lift [sic] lost to traffic violence is one life too many, but our administration remains committed to reducing traffic violence as much as any other form of violence,” Adams added.
On Saturday afternoon, Yarimi crashed her car into an Uber and then slammed into four members of the Saada family as they were trying to walk across the street at an intersection on Ocean Parkway in Midwood.
Yarimi was speeding at the time of the incident, “probably doing close to twice the speed limit,” and “ran a red light” just before the crash, Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez revealed on Wednesday while speaking to Eyewitness News. Yamini was also driving on a suspended license and has accumulated almost 100 parking and camera violations, including 21 speed camera tickets and five red light tickets.
“It actually exceeds just being reckless, it’s almost being wanton, we’re not going to tolerate that,” Gonzalez told Eyewitness News. “Her vehicle had been ticketed many times by red light cameras and speed cameras, that car was a frequent violator of both speed laws and red-light laws, and there is no excuse for running a red light.”
Saada and her daughters were buried in Israel this week. Four-year-old Philip remains at the hospital for his injuries and is facing “tough straights,” Gonzalez said. “We expect him to make some kind of recovery, but it’s going to be a long road for him.”
The boy lost one of his kidneys during treatment at Maimonides Medical Center, according to New York City Comptroller Brad Lander. “It’s heartbreaking,” Lander said after he visited the home of the Saada family, according to the New York Post. “He’s still in critical condition. He lost one kidney but they are hopeful about his prognosis.”
Five people in the Uber hit by Yarimi’s car suffered minor injuries.
Supporters of a proposed state law that would stop repeat super speeders in New York have rallied together since the car accident on Saturday, calling for the passage of the bill that they said could have prevented the crash. The legislation would require speed limiters to be installed on vehicles owned by repeat reckless drivers, like Yarimi. The device automatically limits the vehicles to within 5 mph of the legal speed of the road. The “Stop Super Speeders” bill was sponsored by New York State Assembly Member Emily Gallagher and Senator Andrew Gounardes.
The New York City Comptroller, Brad Lander, supports the bill and criticized Adams for not already implementing such measures.
The post Brooklyn Woman Denied Bail, Claims She Didn’t Kill Anyone in Car Crash That Killed Jewish Mother, Two Daughters first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Hungary Announces Withdrawal From ‘Political’ ICC as Netanyahu Visits Country, Defying Arrest Warrant
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban speaks to the media next to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in Budapest, Hungary, April 3, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Bernadett Szabo
Hungary on Thursday announced that it will withdraw from the International Criminal Court (ICC) as the country welcomed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the capital city of Budapest, defying an ICC arrest warrant against him over allegations of war crimes in Gaza.
Despite Hungary’s status as a signatory of the Rome Statute, which established the ICC, Netanyahu was not taken into custody upon his arrival in Budapest. Instead, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban welcomed his Israeli counterpart with full military honors.
GREAT meeting with a GREAT friend, @PM_ViktorOrban. Together, we’re making the GREAT alliance between
and
even stronger! pic.twitter.com/Svphzb61Gn
— Benjamin Netanyahu – בנימין נתניהו (@netanyahu) April 3, 2025
Netanyahu’s visit to Hungary, which is scheduled to last until Sunday, is his first trip to Europe since the ICC issued an arrest warrant against him last year. In February, he made his first foreign trip altogether since the ICC’s decision to the United States, where he met with US President Donald Trump.
As Orban and Netanyahu met to discuss regional developments and bilateral cooperation, Hungarian Minister Gergely Gulyas released a statement announcing that “the government will initiate the withdrawal procedure” from the ICC, which could take a year or more to complete.
After their meeting, Orban said he believes the ICC is “no longer an impartial court, not a court of law, but a political court.”
“I am convinced that this otherwise important international judicial forum has been degraded into a political tool, with which we cannot and do not want to engage,” Orban said during a press conference.
Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar praised Budapest’s decision to withdraw from the international court, highlighting the country’s “strong moral stance alongside Israel and the principles of justice and sovereignty.”
“I commend Hungary’s important decision to withdraw from the ICC,” Saar wrote in a post on X. “The so-called ‘International Criminal Court’ lost its moral authority after trampling the fundamental principles of international law in its zest for harming Israel’s right to self-defense.”
I commend Hungary’s important decision to withdraw from the ICC. FM Péter Szijjártó and I dealt with this matter extensively. The so-called “International Criminal Court” lost its moral authority after trampling the fundamental principles of international law in its zest for…
— Gideon Sa’ar | גדעון סער (@gidonsaar) April 3, 2025
In November, the ICC issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu, his former defense minister, Yoav Gallant, and now-deceased Hamas terror leader Ibrahim al-Masri (better known as Mohammed Deif) for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Gaza conflict. The ICC said there were reasonable grounds to believe Netanyahu and Gallant were criminally responsible for starvation in Gaza and the persecution of Palestinians — charges vehemently denied by Israel, which until a recently imposed blockade had provided significant humanitarian aid into the enclave throughout the war. Israel also says it has gone to unprecedented lengths to try and avoid civilian casualties, despite Hamas’s widely acknowledged military strategy of embedding its terrorists within Gaza’s civilian population and commandeering civilian facilities like hospitals, schools, and mosques to run operations and direct attacks.
After the court issued the warrant against Netanyahu, Orban rejected the decision by inviting the Israeli leader to Budapest and accusing the court of “interfering in an ongoing conflict for political purposes.”
During Thursday’s news conference, Netanyahu commended Hungary’s withdrawal from the ICC, calling it a “bold and principled action” as “the first state that walks out of this corruption and this rottenness.”
“The ICC directs its actions against us fighting a just war with just means,” Netanyahu said. “I think [this decision will] be deeply appreciated, not only in Israel but in many, many countries around the world.”
After the Israeli leader was welcomed in Budapest, Hamas issued a statement calling on the Hungarian government to reverse its decision and extradite Netanyahu to the ICC to stand trial, calling the decision an “immoral stance that shows collusion with a war criminal who is running away from justice.”
In a post on X, Israel’s top diplomat reiterated his support for Hungary’s decision, arguing that Hamas’s statement only proves the country is taking the correct stance in this matter.
“Whoever needed further proof as to how justified, moral and necessary Hungary’s decision to withdraw from the ICC is: Hamas just condemned it,” Saar wrote.
“Hamas is defending the politicized and twisted so-called ‘International Criminal Court.’ And that’s the whole story.”
Whoever needed further proof as to how justified, moral and necessary Hungary’s decision to withdraw from the ICC is: Hamas just condemned it.
Hamas is defending the politicized and twisted so-called “International Criminal Court”.
And that’s the whole story.— Gideon Sa’ar | גדעון סער (@gidonsaar) April 3, 2025
After the ICC’s decision to issue the warrants, several countries, including Hungary, Argentina, the Czech Republic, Romania, Poland, France, and Italy, have said they would not arrest Netanyahu if he visited.
US and Israeli officials issued blistering condemnations of the ICC move, decrying the court for drawing a moral equivalence between Israel’s democratically elected leaders and the heads of Hamas, the Palestinian terrorist group that launched the ongoing war in Gaza with its massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2o23.
The ICC has no jurisdiction over Israel as it is not a signatory to the Rome Statute. Other countries including the US have similarly not signed the ICC charter. However, the ICC has asserted jurisdiction by accepting “Palestine” as a signatory in 2015, despite no such state being recognized under international law.
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Jewish Individualism Will Not Work, But Solidarity Must
The Western Wall and Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
During the events of Purim, Haman approached King Xerxes I and said, “There is a certain race of people scattered through all the provinces of your empire who keep themselves separate from everyone else. Their laws are different from those of any other people, and they refuse to obey the laws of the king. So, it is not in the king’s interest to let them live.”
Queen Esther’s solidarity with her dispersed people in Persia, and her profound loyalty to her Jewish identity, saved them from Haman’s genocide and secured their self-defense when she courageously revealed her heritage to Xerxes I.
Today, Israeli Jews are once again fighting for their Jewish and Zionist survival. Since Oct. 7, 2023, this Jewish Armageddon has extended anew to Diaspora Jews, who have felt the past’s chilling draft. Antisemitism has reawakened, infecting non-Jews and Jews alike. Few people contribute to antisemitic attitudes more than “self-loathing” Jews. These “self-loathing” Jews, who cynically reveal only the negative aspects of their Jewishness, believe they can avoid antisemitic attacks if they condemn Israel. But they achieve only self-betrayal, gaining neither acceptance nor respect from those who hate all Jews. Jews are a nation of people who question, not people who answer.
Questions pervade the Jewish mind to such a degree that the adage, “two Jews, three opinions,” has become a common characteristic of Jewish identity. Moreover, the pursuit of an answer often serves as a springboard for further inquiry. For us, as Jews, the ultimate answer, akin to the messianic ideal, remains a distant, undefined future. This traditional perspective has granted Jews a sort of perpetual license to disagree. Jews enjoy engaging in debate with others, but they sometimes find particular delight in debating amongst themselves, which allows their intellects to roam and their sardonic wit to playfully engage with each other’s vulnerabilities, finding humor without causing offense.
This love for discourse, for questioning everything in sight, including Hashem himself, is by no means the only puzzle that makes up our Jewish identity. Another crucial element of our makeup is solidarity. In times of major upheavals, we have always stood together against the masses who rose against us. To our enemies, we Jews — atheists, nihilists, Reform, Conservative, Orthodox, Haredi, religious Zionists, non-religious Zionists, or undecided — look, taste, and feel the same. They care nothing for our ingrained liberalism. Our enemies seek cracks within our communities in order to break us apart and cause irreparable damage.
Years of relative peace and prosperity since the Holocaust have allowed us to gather again and engage in countless polemics over the fate of Israel, Jews, Judaism, and Zionism. However, we have failed to notice that we are at war again, and that our enemies eagerly exploit the divisions within a nation that comprises only 0.2% of the world’s population. These enemies — radical Islamists and progressive Western leftists who view Jews and Israel as white oppressors and colonizers — avidly listen to Jewish internal squabbles and criticisms of the Israeli government.
Despite the significant progress the Shin Bet and IDF have made in dismantling much of Hamas’s leadership and terrorist infrastructure, destroying its complex network of tunnels and command centers, and weakening Hezbollah, in addition to eliminating tens of thousands of Hamas terrorists, many Jews remain critical of, and disagree with, what Israel represents today. Aware of government problems, Israelis desire improvement. However, their rage and almost addictive pattern of anti-government protests have provided their adversaries with more opportunities to exploit perceived weaknesses.
This has resonated with some Jews worldwide. In New York, some Jewish intellectuals have defended “free-Palestine” and pro-Hamas protesters harassing Jewish students, invoking freedom of speech. They appear to have fallen prey to what they perceive as the lies of progressive anti-Zionist media, which systemically omits crucial facts about Israel. This includes the IDF’s efforts to minimize civilian casualties, and its role in eliminating thousands of Hamas terrorists and dismantling their terror network, which posed a significant threat to Israel (and innocent Palestinians themselves).
These “romantic” progressive Jews also forget that no matter how critical they are of that “brutal” IDF, it is still fighting on their behalf, because it is fighting on behalf of every Jew. Civilian deaths do occur, but they are either unfortunate incidents of war or, more often, a direct result of Hamas’s cruelty, as Hamas terrorists purposefully embed themselves within the civilian population. I once sat at dinner in Israel with a wealthy American Jewish couple who came on a sympathy tour a few months after Oct. 7. Nevertheless, the husband was convinced that the IDF was deliberately killing Palestinian children.
Those were wealthy, educated American Jews who thought they were charitable because they donated to Jewish causes, and therefore, believed they had the right to express their views on everything. This is where I, a Soviet Jew who grew up deprived of Judaism yet targeted by antisemitism, felt differently. To begin with, the husband was completely wrong. Second, in times of existential crisis, we, as Jewish people, must set aside our irresistible urge to disagree and criticize Israel on basic premises such as Israel’s fight to ensure Jews don’t live through a second genocide. The freedom to speak our minds has been ours for thousands of years. We conversed with Hashem, we obeyed Him, we sacrificed for Him, and then we quickly learned to disobey and question Him, even before we began arguing amongst ourselves.
Still, throughout our dotted and punctured history, it wasn’t our tongues or our disagreeable minds that kept our small nation together; it was our solidarity. In solidarity, we walked out of Egypt. In solidarity, tens of thousands of Eastern European Jews came to their promised land as early as the 1920s and began to build from nothing. In solidarity with his orphans, Dr. Janusz Korczak, despite being given the chance to save himself, chose to march with them, hand in hand, through the ghetto to the deportation point, on their way to Treblinka, where they met their final hour. In solidarity with other Jews across the Soviet Empire, Soviet Jews secretly tried to remember who they were, despite years of persecutions and purges.
In solidarity with their Soviet brethren, powerful American Jewry fought for Russian Jews to be able to emigrate to Israel and the United States. One of the main reasons our small nation has not disappeared into the abyss is because, in Diaspora, across oceans, and through impenetrable iron curtains, we never ceased to support one another. We knew we could not afford the luxury of neglecting our faith, traditions, and, most importantly, we could never abandon defending ourselves against our enemies.
Caesar’s “Divide et impera” (“Divide and Conquer”), though a cliché, is particularly relevant here. Seeing fractures within our communities, our enemies have intensified these divisions through incessant anti-Zionist and antisemitic propaganda and violence. Therefore, only as an undivided people, united by a single purpose — eradicating our enemies and protecting our promised land — do we stand a chance of survival. Perhaps only then will the day come when Jewish people gather on virtual street corners to argue and ask questions to which they seek no answers.
Anya Gillinson is an immigration lawyer and author of the new memoir Dreaming in Russian. She lives in New York City. More at www.anyagillinson.com.
The post Jewish Individualism Will Not Work, But Solidarity Must first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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