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Meet the real-life sister act behind the two new ’90s Jewish American Girl dolls
(JTA) — As children in upstate New York, twin sisters Julia DeVillers and Jennifer Roy went to Hebrew school three days a week, spent their summers at a JCC summer camp and got to know local Holocaust survivors through their father, who survived the Nazis as a child in Poland. They also celebrated Christmas with their mother’s family.
Aware of their dual religious and cultural backgrounds from a young age, DeVillers and Roy personally sent their public elementary school principal a letter asking to place a menorah next to the school Christmas tree. The girls gathered a couple of the other Jewish students together to present the letter to the principal, to resounding success: A real menorah was added to the school’s holiday display.
It was something straight out of an American Girl story. And as of this week, in a sense, it is one.
On Wednesday, American Girl released its first twin dolls, Isabel and Nicki Hoffman, who are also the first characters from an interfaith family. Their stories take place in the late 1990s and were written by DeVillers and Roy, inspired by the sisters’ own childhood experiences. The twin dolls’ parents are, respectively, Jewish and Christian, and their mother, Robin, is named after the authors’ own mother.
“It’s incredibly special to us that the twins bring this Jewish and interfaith representation that so many kids will relate to,” DeVillers told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Roy added, “People are not necessarily one thing or another these days. And while we are Jewish, we did grow up with both holidays and both cultures in our family. And that’s how we wanted our characters to be and to feel.”
Isabel and Nicki’s stories are loosely based on the childhood experiences of authors and real-life twins Julia DeVillers and Jennifer Roy. (Courtesy of American Girl)
The dolls are a milestone in how the lived experience of many American Jews is reflected in popular culture. Recent surveys of Jewish Americans consistently note high rates of interfaith marriage, and show that a significant portion of those couples raise their children either fully or partly Jewish.
Isabel and Nicki are the second and third historical Jewish American Girl dolls, joining Rebecca Rubin. Rebecca’s story reflected an earlier generation’s perception of normative American Jewish identity: Her family immigrated from Russia and lives in New York’s Lower East Side in 1914, while navigating issues of assimilation and religion.
Stories of joint Hanukkah-Christmas celebrations are not exactly new. A TV episode Isabel and Nicki’s character’s might have watched as teenagers, “The Best Chrismukkah Ever” from the drama “The O.C.,” aired nearly two decades ago. But the dolls and their stories are “super innovative and relevant for 21st-century Jewish interfaith families,” said Keren McGinity, the interfaith specialist for the Conservative movement of Judaism and a professor of American studies at Brandeis University.
“Anytime there’s cultural representation that depicts real life, it’s a good thing,” McGinity said, though she added that some depictions of interfaith families are more robust than others.
“On the one hand, it’s terrific that they’re reflecting contemporary American Jewish life by depicting an interfaith family through these characters and reinforcing the fact that it only takes one Jewish parent to raise Jewish children,” she added. “And it remains to be seen how they are Jewish beyond celebrating the December holidays, and how they’re interfaith beyond celebrating the December holidays, plural.”
The new twin dolls are the latest in American Girl’s iconic series of dolls, which hail from different eras of American history and come with novels about their lives. American Girl has historically aimed to present a diverse set of dolls. Other recent offerings include Evette Peeters, a biracial girl who cares for the environment, and Kavi Sharma, an Indian-American girl who loves Broadway musicals.
The new historical characters, Isabel and Nicki, retail for $115 each. Their stories are written by DeVillers and Roy, respectively, and begin on Dec. 11, 1999, when they receive their journals as a gift for the last night of Hanukkah.
They have their own distinct personalities, which the authors say somewhat resemble what they were like as kids: Isabel has a preppy style and loves dancing, and is advertised wearing a pink cable-knit sleeveless sweater over a pinstripe shirt, with a plaid skirt, platform shoes and a beret. Nicki likes skateboarding and writing song lyrics, and appears on the American Girl website wearing a backwards baseball cap, choker necklace, blue T-shirt dress and sneakers, with a flannel shirt tied around her waist.
Isabel’s book begins with a nod to a late-1990s fad: “Hi, New Journal! You’re my present for the last night of Hanukkah!! I was going to save you for after Christmas and New Year’s, but we also got NEW GEL PENS!”
In Nicki’s book, her interfaith identity is mentioned two weeks later: “Did I mention my family celebrates Hanukkah AND Christmas? Well, we do.”
The two journals, “Meet Isabel” and “Meet Nicki” are filled with text and sold with the dolls. The stories take place during the same time frame, as the girls celebrate the winter holidays, face their fears, make new friends and worry about Y2K. A longer novel, “Meet Isabel and Nicki” is set for release in August as the first in the Isabel and Nicki historical series. It will take place during the same month as the shorter journals, but will delve further into the time period. Readers will get to spend the last night of Hanukkah with the Hoffmans, lighting the menorah and playing dreidel.
“Meet Isabel and Nicki,” the first novel in the series about the Hoffman twins, will be released in August. (Photo courtesy of American Girl. Design by Jackie Hajdenberg)
McGinity said she would have to wait until the new book comes out to see what the girls’ representation looks like, given that the journals are so short.
“I feel like we don’t have enough intel other than ‘OK, the authors are Jewish, the characters are Jewish, they grew up in an interfaith household,’” she added.
The crowded flagship American Girl store in New York City has already begun promoting Isabel and Nicki by showcasing the twins’ different outfits and bedroom and accessory collections, with dozens of the dolls positioned throughout the store.
“While we’re not able to provide specific sales information, I can say we’ve been happy to see the positive response for the new characters,” a representative for the company said.
Roy and her sister have previously written a series of children’s novels about twins, and Roy also authored “Yellow Star,” a 2006 children’s book about her aunt’s remarkable survival as one of the only children to be liberated from the Lodz Ghetto. Roy said she and her sister are grateful for the chance to tell their family’s story in a new way.
“So we don’t know what cultures, faiths, religions are coming beyond this,” said Roy, referring to future American Girl products. “But what we did know was that if we were writing in the holiday season, we really wanted to include parts of ourselves and that’s what American Girl editors all said: ‘We’d love to have you remember from your childhood.’ And this was our childhood.”
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The post Meet the real-life sister act behind the two new ’90s Jewish American Girl dolls appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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They survived Oct. 7. At Rock Camp, they found a way to feel alive again.
(JTA) — ”They tried to kill us. We survived. Let’s eat.”
Alan King’s joke about Jewish holidays gets to the essence of Jewish persistence in the face of horror. He might have added “Let’s sing.” Music has accompanied the Jewish people for millennia through periods of joy and sorrow. Moses and the Israelites praised God for His salvation from the Egyptians in the “Song of the Sea.” Weddings, the Shabbat table and kumsitzes all come with joyous soundtracks.
In times of overwhelming devastation, songs have served as expressions of survival, determination and memory. During the Holocaust, Jews continued to compose and perform it in ghettos and concentration camps, including Theresienstadt. ”The Partisan Hymn,” “Zog nit keyn mol” (“Never Say”), was composed in the Vilna Ghetto.
Three years ago this week, music and tragedy once again intertwined when Hamas-led terrorists attacked the Nova Music Festival as part of the Oct. 7 assault on Israel. Approximately 1,200 people, including 364 civilians at the Nova festival, were killed that day, and 251 were abducted to Gaza.
Two months later, David Fishof, who founded Rock ’n Roll Fantasy Camp, saw music and trauma bound together at the funeral for Yotam Haim, the red-headed hostage who escaped with two others but was killed by friendly fire.
“Yotam’s brother, Tuval, and father, Raviv, are drummers,” said Fishof, an L.A. sports agent and entertainment producer. “They performed a 20-minute drum solo in Yotam’s honor, after which Tuval threw the sticks in the grave. At that moment, it hit me: I wanted to bring Tuval and nine other Oct. 7 survivors to Rock Camp in L.A.”
With the help of Sam Grundwerg, former world chairman of Keren Hayesod – United Israel Appeal, the 10 survivors were flown to Los Angeles in March 2024 to participate in the sold-out camp.
Now, their experience is chronicled in “The Bridge,” a new documentary produced by “Friends” executive producer Kevin Bright that highlights how music can become a pathway from trauma to healing. Its message: “When tragedy strikes the Jewish people, we play louder.” Ahead of a wider theatrical release in November, the film is now playing at select North American venues.
Rock Camp, founded by Fishof in 1997, brings amateur rockers alongside music legends for four days of mentorship, rehearsals and performances at such iconic clubs as Whisky a Go Go and The Viper Room.
Music, memory and trauma informed Fishof’s upbringing. Music saved the life of his father, Mark, a survivor of Auschwitz and Buchenwald.
“My dad would sing to the Nazis, just to entertain them,” Fishof said. “They would say, ‘Sing this song,’ and he would. Music saved him. It was a way for him to take his mind off of what he was going through.”
His father served as a cantor in Hackensack, New Jersey, for 33 years.
Fishof said his memories of his father’s sufferings made Oct. 7 the worst day of his life.
By contrast, their four days at Rock Camp offered the Oct. 7 survivors a rare respite from their trauma and a chance to reconnect with the joy of making music. The Israelis jammed with rock legends Michael Anthony of Van Halen, Sebastian Bach of Skid Row, Warren DeMartini of Ratt and Tommy Aldridge of Whitesnake, and met Richard Fortus and Slash of Guns N’ Roses.
Among the Israeli rockers was 27-year-old vocalist and guitarist Raz Shifer of Ramat Gan, a Nova Festival survivor who was close friends with two hostages, including Inbar Hayman, who was murdered in captivity.
After that Black Saturday, Shifer says in the film, “I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t eat. I just sat on my couch, literally in shock, trying to figure out what the f— had happened. I forgot who I was — the happy, smiley, energetic Raz. Rock Camp was my first time getting back on stage and letting it all out. For me, it was a really big step. I was able to remember myself again. Music is my victory. It’s the reason I get out of bed every day and the power that keeps me alive.”
Also among the group was 28-year-old vocalist and guitarist Bar Rudaeff of Tel Aviv, the son of Kibbutz Nir Yitzhak’s former deputy security coordinator Lior Rudaeff, who was murdered while defending the kibbutz on Oct. 7. His remains were returned to Israel in November 2025.
For Rudaeff, performing with Tommy Aldridge, the legendary hard rock and heavy metal drummer who played with Ozzy Osbourne and Whitesnake, was a way of reaching his father — through a joy they shared.
“My dad really liked ’80s rock, like Deep Purple, Bon Jovi, Foreigner and Ozzy Osbourne, so when we played with Tommy, it was really meaningful and emotional,” he says in “The Bridge.” “Rock Camp gave me the opportunity to stop thinking, for a little while, about my dad not being here. Music really helped me cope and pulled out a lot of feelings that I was repressing. It was a ray of hope in the middle of one of our darkest periods and gave me the strength to move on.”
At Rock Camp, Fishof said, “Each survivor played on behalf of loved ones — whether family members or friends who had been killed or were still being held in captivity. Every note meant something to them.”
Bright added, “Music enabled them to take a break from Oct. 7 for a week. I think it was a well-deserved respite from everything that was going on in Israel at the time. One of the survivors says in the film, ‘I’m still living Oct. 7. The trauma doesn’t go away.’ At the time that ‘The Bridge’ was made, their trauma was even stronger, and so their ability just to participate was really impressive.”
Three years after that devastating day in October, the survivors are continuing to do what their people have done in the face of adversity for millennia: sing and make music.
Tuval performs regularly and has released two albums, including “Ahim” (“Brothers”), a nod to Yotam. Bar now produces music, including a fellow camper’s upcoming album. And Raz is touring as a full-time vocalist.
“Music is what kept my father alive during the Holocaust,” said Fishof. “It’s what kept him going, and it’s what keeps me and many others going. Because no matter what happens, no one can ever take away our music. If we have that, we have life.”
They tried to kill us. We survived.
Let’s sing.
And eat.
To find local screenings, visit thebridgedoc.com
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post They survived Oct. 7. At Rock Camp, they found a way to feel alive again. appeared first on The Forward.
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The battle for Sderot still rages in the minds of its survivors
(JTA) — SDEROT, Israel – Shalom Aida was at home when the first air raid siren sounded at 6:29 a.m. on October 7, 2023, but he wasn’t initially fazed.
Rocket sirens were a common occurrence in his city of Sderot, which is less than a mile from Gaza at its closest point.
It wasn’t until he heard gunshots that Aida, a retired police officer, realized that dozens of heavily armed Hamas terrorists had infiltrated Sderot and were gunning down any civilian, soldier or police officer they came across.
By the time he arrived at the police station “it was a battlefield,” he said. The sight almost paralyzed him.
“The entire street in front of the station was full of bloodied people. Police, civilians, dead or dying. Hamas kept firing.”
One of the police officers killed that day was Aida’s cousin. Many others were his friends.
Three years later, he is still haunted by the memories.
“Sderot seems quiet now, but it’s not quiet or peaceful inside our heads,” he said as he watched groups of visitors walk around the Sderot Memorial and Heroes Park. It is situated at the site of the police station, which was destroyed on that day and built elsewhere.
Despite the ongoing trauma of Oct. 7 and its aftermath, Aida said he wouldn’t dream of moving elsewhere.
“I never once thought about leaving,” he said, shocked by the question. “The best people in the world live in Sderot.”
Not all residents of the “Gaza Envelope” who experienced the horrors of Oct. 7 returned home when the government gave the all-clear, after ordering them to evacuate for their own safety. But the vast majority of Sderot’s residents — set at over 37,000 by the Central Bureau of Statistics in 2024 — who had already lived through two decades of rocket barrages from Gaza, returned to the city within months.
Once it was a struggling development town where successive governments sent immigrants who had just arrived from the Middle East and the former Soviet Union.
It generated domestic and international headlines over the last two decades, as it became the first city hit by Hamas rockets as early as 2001, and remained one of the places the Gaza-based terror group has most frequently targeted.
International dignitaries including U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in 2009 and then Sen. Barack Obama during his 2008 presidential campaign visited Sderot.
Initially a city without adequate protective shelter for its residents, it became the only place in Israel where every single apartment and bus stop has its own bomb shelter.
Despite it all, the city has prospered: gleaming new apartment buildings, parks and a sprawling mall greet visitors as they enter.
“If you were to input all the data about Sderot into OpenAI, the 25 years of rockets and Oct. 7 and the bomb shelters, it would say this must be a ghost town. But that’s not the reality here,” said Ilan Abecassis, a retired educator and now tour guide who has lived in the city all his life.
Rather than shrinking, he said, the city’s population has grown by about 5,000 people since the Oct. 7 attack.
“I know it’s counterintuitive, but the more they try to destroy us, the stronger we become,” Abecassis said. “In the Torah, a new pharaoh sees the Israelite population growing and enslaves them. But the Torah tells us ‘the more they afflicted them, the more they multiplied and grew.’ We are like those Israelites.”
Arie Yagudaev, 30, from Sderot, and his cousin Eitan Izayev, 28, who lives in nearby Kibbutz Nir Am, said they are also committed to staying, even after they encountered terrorists in the street on Oct. 7.
Drinking strong coffee outside his family’s grocery store in Sderot, Izayev recounted how he had begged his cousin to pick him up from the kibbutz, which terrorists were trying to infiltrate, so he could help defend loved ones in Sderot. Along the way, they picked up two teenage girls, survivors of the Nova music festival.
“As we approached the roundabout into Sderot, we saw some pickup trucks ahead of us,” Izayev recalled. “We thought the men in the bed of the truck were IDF soldiers. But when the terrorists saw us, they shot at us nonstop.”
“One of the bullets shattered my car’s back window. It’s a miracle we survived,” Yagudaev said. Even though he suffered from PTSD every night as an evacuee in an Eilat hotel room, he said, “I wanted to go home.”
“It wasn’t just because the hotel room was cramped,” he said “Leaving Sderot and Israel is exactly what the terrorists want. We’re not going anywhere.”
One Sderot restaurant owner, who was born and raised in Sderot but moved to Kibbutz Nir Am several years ago, feels the same way.
“Not to return would be rewarding Hamas for its terrorism,” said the restaurant owner who requested anonymity because of his ongoing stints in the IDF reserves.
As it was, he and his wife and baby spent almost a year in a small Tel Aviv hotel room before returning to their kibbutz two years ago. It wasn’t an easy homecoming, he said. For one thing, IDF soldiers had lived in their empty house, and it needed major repairs. Returning to the area also triggered traumatic memories from the Hamas attack.
“For 22 hours I stood outside our house to protect my wife and newborn baby,” he recalled, sitting at a table in his restaurant. “Eventually we decided to flee in our car with just the clothes we could throw into a trash bag. We placed the baby under the seat of the car, hoping to protect him.”
Once the owner of three restaurants, he now owns only one. He needed to sell the two popular restaurants he owned at another kibbutz because he couldn’t operate them from Tel Aviv, and, back then, the Gaza border was an active war zone.
Although the Gaza border is much more secure due to the buffer zone the IDF maintains in Gaza, “it’s not quiet on the border,” he said. “We live one kilometer from Gaza. Every day we hear the choppers and the shooting.”
Still, he and his wife have no plans to leave.
“My parents live here, my grandparents live here,” he said. “On Oct. 7 I saw an apocalypse, bodies on the ground. I knew 100 people who were killed or kidnapped. The ground beneath us is soaked with their blood. I can’t leave.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post The battle for Sderot still rages in the minds of its survivors appeared first on The Forward.
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Maine Senate candidates spar over military aid to Israel
(JTA) — Troy Jackson, Maine’s Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate, said he opposed “giving a blank check” to Israel at a debate on Tuesday, while also linking American military assistance to the killings of Palestinians.
“I didn’t want any more offensive weapons going to murder people in Palestine,” Jackson explained, in a rebuttal to his opponent, Republican incumbent Sen. Susan Collins.
The two candidates were participating in their first general election debate, aired on CBS13 and moderated by news anchor Gregg Lagerquist, without a live audience. Jackson, who holds a narrow lead over Collins, has rattled many members of the Jewish community in recent weeks, as he has intensified anti-Israel rhetoric and made controversial comments to Maine Jews.
A former state lawmaker and union advocate, Jackson secured the Democratic nomination at the end of July in a landslide victory. He won the nomination after the former Democratic nominee, staunch Israel critic Graham Platner, left the race amid a sexual assault allegation, which Platner denies.
Jackson had previously said little publicly about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but during the contest to replace Platner, he accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza and called for an end to U.S. military aid to Israel.
Collins, a five-term senator, has been a staunch supporter of Israel over the past three decades.
Asked by Lagerquist during a lightning round whether the U.S. should increase, decrease or keep military funding for Israel the same, Collins responded that “the current level is good,” adding that she is “a strong supporter.”
Jackson, meanwhile, argued that “it’s kind of unfair to ask that like this,” while also noting that he has the endorsement of J Street, the liberal pro-Israel organization.
After Jackson then declared that the U.S. should not be “giving a blank check” to Israel, Collins accused him of making comments that were “very different” from his past remarks. Jackson denied this claim, while arguing against the supply of more offensive weapons to “murder people.” Calling Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “a war criminal,” he noted that “Senator Collins likes him.”
Jackson’s remarks came just a week after he apologized to members of the Jewish community for controversial comments he had made in a News Center Maine television interview.
During the interview, he had described the war in Gaza as “a genocide,” adding that “there are people here in Maine that don’t like to use that term only because, you know, they’re Jewish and, you know, what that means to them with the Holocaust.”
Although he did not retract his views on the conflict, he acknowledged that the word genocide “carries particular weight for many Jewish families given the Holocaust – the genocide of six million Jews.”
“In trying to acknowledge that, I misspoke and made a generalization about Jewish Mainers’ views that doesn’t reflect what I meant to say. I apologize for the pain that caused,” he added.
Just before the Democratic nominating convention this past summer, Jackson vowed that he would “never vote in favor of U.S. taxpayer-funded military aid to Israel.”
The Pine Tree State Poll, released by the University of New Hampshire two weeks ago, found that the two candidates were in a statistical tie, with 51% of voters polled favoring Jackson and 47% opting for Collins.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Maine Senate candidates spar over military aid to Israel appeared first on The Forward.
