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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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Through missile strikes and sleepless nights, the persistent hope of being an Iranian Jew in Israel
For weeks, I lived in Tel Aviv as missiles streaked across the sky overhead. I heard sirens day and night, disrupting sleep and leaving me constantly bracing for the next alert. I ran to dozens of shelters across the city, waiting tensely as interceptions echoed overhead.
And yet, when I decided to leave Israel amid the ongoing war with Iran, I expected to feel relief. Instead, I felt a quiet, disorienting grief — as if I were stepping away from a moment I had spent my entire life waiting for.
For most of my life, Iran existed only in my mother’s memories. She was born and raised in Shiraz, Iran, one of hundreds of thousands of Jews that lived and thrived in Iran before the revolution. But as the war unfolded, I found myself thinking about it constantly — the life she had there, the one she was forced to leave behind, and the possibility it might not be lost forever.
My three identities — American, Iranian, and soon-to-be-Israeli — seemed to be converging in ways I never expected. For the first time in my life, I imagined what it might be like for all three to exist in the same physical reality — what if being American and Israeli did not mean being forever removed from my mother’s homeland? I imagined myself walking beside my mother through the tree-lined streets of Shiraz and bustling bazaars.
For most of my life that future belonged only to dreams. For the first time, it feels tangible.
A joyous Jewish life in Iran
Long before the Islamic Republic, Jews lived in Iran for thousands of years, creating a distinct culture of Judeo-Persian language, literature, and food. In photographs from Shiraz in the 1970s, my mother looks like many young women of the era. Long, wavy hair falls freely around her shoulders; she wears bell-bottoms and silky blouses in the European styles she admired, and a bright smile on her face.
She worked as an assistant for an Italian company; people of many diverse nationalities lived and worked in Iran at the time. She loved Shiraz with every ounce of her being. She loved her life and she loved her freedom.
In 1979, everything changed.
When the Iranian Revolution toppled the country’s monarchy, many people sensed that it was time to flee. Some left on the first flights out, but my mother stayed. For years, she navigated a shrinking life while holding onto hope that the turmoil would pass.
But the freedoms she once knew only vanished over time.
One day, seven years after the revolution, she was walking through a public square when a member of the morality police noticed that a small part of her hairline was visible beneath her hijab. He spat in her face, scolded her, and nearly arrested her for indecency. That was the moment that ended the waiting.
At 28, unmarried and knowing very little English, my mother decided to flee Iran alone. Leaving was not as simple as buying a plane ticket. After the revolution, the Islamic Republic restricted travel, particularly for religious minorities like Jews, and implemented strict exit visa requirements. She paid someone to smuggle her out of the country in disguise as a pilgrim traveling to Pakistan en route to Mecca.
Upon arriving in Pakistan, she spent three months in refugee housing for Iranian Jews. She lived in a crowded and unsanitary safe home, filled with rats and cockroaches. Given the proximity to Iran and that Jews were not particularly welcome in Pakistan, movement outside the facility was severely restricted.
Eventually she made it to Vienna, where HIAS resettled Jewish refugees. She waited there for months, pleading with the American embassy for entry to the United States, one of thousands of refugees awaiting resettlement. Almost a year after leaving Iran, my mother was granted asylum in the United States.
A sense of something missing
For the Iranian Jewish diaspora, the story of the rise of the Islamic Republic is not only one of political change. It is the story of families scattered across continents and futures permanently redirected by exile.
My mother built a life in America with urgency and survival in mind. Many of her choices were shaped by fear rather than possibility. She often says she is grateful for the life and family she built. But there is also a quiet absence in her story — the life she once expected in Iran, which never had the chance to unfold.
Children inherit many things from their parents: traditions, languages, recipes, and sometimes unfinished dreams. I grew up aware that my life contained possibilities my mother never had. I pursued an education she never had the opportunity to complete. I built a career that gave me financial independence. I traveled freely as an American, enjoying a life full of choices and novel adventures. And yet, something always felt unresolved.
Some of my earliest memories are of my mother listening to Iranian radio broadcasts from Los Angeles, which many in the diaspora call “Tehrangeles.” The morning broadcast always began with the national anthem of Iran from the time of the Shah. Commentators discussed Iranian politics, and the faint possibility that things in the country they loved might one day change.
At some point, my mother stopped listening. After decades in exile, she accepted that she would likely never return to her homeland.
The possibility of change
This war is certainly unsettling. But it has also brought a fragile, uneasy hope. For the first time in decades, the future of Iran’s regime seems uncertain enough that people like my mother dare to imagine change again.
I do not celebrate war. But change rarely comes without disruption.
My mother’s story is one of millions about the loss and misery inflicted by the Islamic Republic. So many people of so many different backgrounds fled Iran, carrying generations of memories and aspirations across unfamiliar continents. And so many more remained, living under oppression, under laws that restrict freedom, expression and basic human rights.
Most recently, tens of thousands died resisting that repression, fighting for the freedoms my mother once knew and cherished.
I know that many would say this war was undertaken unjustly, and that Iran’s future is not the responsibility of outside nations. But for me, and many like me, it is not so simple. After all, our futures were taken from us unjustly, too.
I left Israel for the time being, but I am grateful to have been there for the start of this strange and hopeful moment in history. Sitting in a shelter, listening to the sirens, I felt so close to what has always seemed impossible: a life in which Iranians across the diaspora are able to go home again. That hope is worth the sirens, sleepless nights, and waiting. It is a small price to pay for the promise we carry for healing from the past and securing a new future for generations to come.
The post Through missile strikes and sleepless nights, the persistent hope of being an Iranian Jew in Israel appeared first on The Forward.
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Meet the TikToker trying to revive Judeo-Arabic, the nearly extinct language Jews once spoke across the Arab world
In TikTok videos viewed tens of thousands of times, 31-year-old Dan Sheena dons a blond wig and acts out skits of a bickering Iraqi couple in a language that is nearly extinct: Judeo-Arabic.
Sheena began posting videos on TikTok in 2023, speaking the endangered language, which today is rarely spoken by anyone under the age of 60, following the mass exodus of Jews from Arab countries due to discrimination and religious persecution.
Raised by two parents from Baghdad, Sheena grew up in Israel and spoke the language at home. That’s a rarity among second- and third-generation Iraqi Jews, whose families often stopped passing it down in an effort to assimilate.
From a young age, Sheena, who still lives in Israel, knew he wanted to become an Arabic teacher. After years of teaching conversational Arabic in the public school system, he became determined to preserve the dialect he grew up with.
When Sheena told his family that he wanted to teach Judeo-Arabic, they urged him to focus on a more practical dialect. “They told me, ‘Oh, you are stupid. Why do you want to do that? No one wants to learn it. It’s going to die.’”
Despite their concerns, the initial response to his account and the Judeo-Arabic Zoom lessons he offered was overwhelming. “Many people registered. They told me, ‘Dan, this is my dream. I heard my parents speaking in Judeo Arabic, and I really want to learn it. And I finally have the opportunity.’”
He said that, for him, social media has been essential to his efforts to preserve the language. “Many people forward my videos between themselves” and “ask their parents about certain words,” he said. “This is the way to talk about Judeo-Arabic, to keep it alive. Social media lets me do that, not in the classic way of writing a book and trying to spread it and share it. This is the old way of keeping a language alive.”
In videos, he uses classic Baghdadi Judeo-Arabic phrases, including in equal measure cheeky insults like Wakka mazzalem (“may their luck run out”), and compliments like Asht eedak (“may your hands be blessed”), a phrase used to compliment someone’s cooking or hosting abilities.
Sheena has since built a TikTok following of more than 100,000 and teaches dozens of students around the world, who find him through social media, through Zoom-based courses each year.
A disappearing language
In the 1940s, nearly 1 million Jews lived across the Arab world. Today, an estimated 4,000 remain. In Iraq, where there was once a thriving Jewish community of around 120,000, just three Jews are believed to still live in the country.
Judeo-Arabic, a variety of different dialects of Arabic that were spoken by Jews in the Arab world, endured in active use for roughly 1,250 years. Since the mid-20th century, when Jews were forced to flee the region en masse, the language has been in rapid decline.
According to Assaf Bar Moshe, one of the world’s few Judeo-Arabic experts, Jews in the Middle East were usually bilingual. “They spoke one dialect with their community and families, and another dialect the moment they stepped out of their house,” to be able to communicate with their non-Jewish neighbors. A key feature of the language is words borrowed from Hebrew and Aramaic, especially for religious objects or distinctly Jewish words.
Bar Moshe said today, there are around 6,000 native speakers of the Judeo-Baghdadi Arabic dialect worldwide. That dialect, he said, offers a glimpse into what the Arab world sounded like centuries ago. “Baghdadi Judeo-Arabic is actually the original dialect of Baghdad from the Middle Ages. The Jewish community preserved it, while the Muslim dialect came later with migrations in the 17th century. That’s why they are so different.”
Over the centuries, Jews in each country developed their own dialect, often with additional regional variation. While the spoken language is extremely varied depending on where it was developed, the written language became much more standardized, with Arabic transliterated into Hebrew script, similar to Yiddish or Ladino.
When Jews left the Arab world, most fleeing to Israel, the U.S., the U.K. and Canada, they commonly abandoned the language as they tried to integrate into new societies. In Israel, Bar Moshe said, “Arabic was seen as the language of the enemy, so children were embarrassed to speak it.”
There was a similar pressure to assimilate for Jews who fled to other countries. “We wanted to be British,” said Vicky Sweiry Tsur, a Bahraini Jew who grew up in the U.K. and now lives in California. “I used to feel very embarrassed when my friends heard my parents speak Arabic. And you know, slowly, slowly, if you don’t use it, you lose it.”
According to Sheena, many students come to him with a sense of regret for turning away from the language when they were younger.
“If we just listened to my mom way back then, you know, I wouldn’t be chasing after every word and phrase that I can possibly remember now,” said Sweiry Tsur. “What I wouldn’t give to go back.”
‘You learn it from your heart’
Sheena admits his parents had reason to protest his decision to delve into Judeo-Arabic. Students come to him all the time debating whether they should learn conversational Arabic or Judeo-Arabic, which, by most measures, cannot be revived and has no practical use outside of the shrinking circle of elderly individuals who still speak it. “I always answer, to learn the spoken Arabic, you do it from your brain because you want to use it daily. But the Judeo-Arabic, you don’t learn from your brain. You learn it from your heart.”
Sheena’s student Jason Mashal, 36, whose parents were born in Iraq, said he is learning the language out of a desire to preserve it. “I don’t even want to learn Modern Standard Arabic,” he said. “My motivation has always been that this is a dying language, and I guess I’m probably going to fail to save it, but I’m still going to try, you know, to be as functional as I can.”
Inspired by his progress, Mashal later traveled to Iraq, visiting the school his parents attended (where current students had no idea it used to be a school for Jews), the only synagogue left in Baghdad, and even a nightclub his father used to frequent. “It was a very magical and electric feeling to walk through those halls in the precise place where I know both my parents went to school many years ago. Speaking Jewish Arabic in Iraq was just as electric.”
For many of Sheena’s students, the language offers a way to reconnect with memories they can no longer access. “People say to me, ‘Dan, I want to smell again my grandmother. I can’t sit with her and listen to her stories again, but I can hear her by these words by this language.’”
“He comes out with a word or a phrase that literally I can say I have not heard for like, 40 or 50 years,” said Sweiry Tsur. “There’s no way I would have been able to bring it out from the depths of my brain, but then you hear it, and you know exactly what it means, and exactly in what context you would use it — and all the emotions that are tied to it, you know, Friday night dinners with all of the family.”
The post Meet the TikToker trying to revive Judeo-Arabic, the nearly extinct language Jews once spoke across the Arab world appeared first on The Forward.
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Iran’s President Says Immediate Cessation of US-Israeli Aggression Needed to End War
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian attends the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) Summit 2025, in Tianjin, China, September 1, 2025. Iran’s Presidential website/WANA (West Asia News Agency)/Handout via REUTERS
Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian said on Saturday that there needs to be an “immediate cessation” of what he described as US-Israeli aggression to end the war and wider regional conflict, Iran’s embassy in India said in an X post on Saturday.
Pezeshkian spoke with India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi by phone earlier in the day.
Pezeshkian told Modi that there should be guarantees to prevent a recurrence of such “aggression” in the future. He also called on the BRICS bloc of major emerging economies to play an independent role in halting aggression against Iran.
The Iranian president proposed a regional security framework comprising West Asian countries to ensure peace without foreign interference, according to the country’s embassy in India.
In a separate post on X earlier on Saturday, Modi said he condemned attacks on critical infrastructure in the Middle East in the discussion with Pezeshkian.
The Indian Prime Minister further reiterated the importance of safeguarding freedom of navigation and ensuring shipping lanes remain open and secure.