Ayelet Raymond, also known as Kosher Barbie on social media. Photo: Instagram

A social media personality who goes by the moniker Kosher Barbie said she thinks the late Jewish creator of Barbie dolls would be proud of how the upcoming film about the iconic Mattel figure has some Jewish aspects.

“It’s a big reward for Ruth Handler,” Ayelet Raymond, who has almost 90,000 followers on Instagram, told The Algemeiner, mentioning Barbie’s inventor. “If she would be alive, she would be thrilled and proud [that] they still kept some identity of her roots and culture.”

The rom-com Barbie premieres July 21 and follows the fashion doll as she leaves Barbieland and enters the real world. The film’s director Greta Gerwig was raised a Unitarian Universalist but her partner and the movie’s lead writer, Noah Baumbach, is Jewish. The movie also stars Jewish actress Rhea Perlman, who plays Handler.

Gerwig told The New York Times in a recent interview that she wants viewers of the Barbie movie to achieve the same feeling she had as a child when she was a guest at the Shabbat dinners of close family friends. She said she felt “so safe and… so, like, enough” at those Friday night dinners.

“Whatever your wins and losses were for the week, whatever you did or didn’t do, when you come to this table, your value has nothing to do with that,” she recalled being told by her friend’s father on Shabbat. Gerwig additionally remembered the father blessing her and saying: “You are a child of God. I put my hand over you, and I bless you as a child of God at this table. And that’s your value.”

The daughter of Polish Jewish immigrants who came to America to escape antisemitism, Handler founded Mattel with her husband, Elliot Handler, whom she met at a Jewish youth dance in 1929.  She invented Barbie and the names of her real-life children – Barbara and Kenneth — inspired the names of the Barbie and Ken dolls she created. Ruth died in 2002.

Mattel’s CEO since 2018 is Israeli-American Ynon Kreiz.

Raymond, who is also a film and musical director, was raised in an ultra-religious Hassidic community in Jerusalem but broke away from that lifestyle and moved to America in her early 20s after wanting to pursue a secular education, which was taboo in her community.

During her early years in the US, she attended a Shabbat dinner with a friend where she saw a young girl playing with something she had never seen before — a Barbie doll. Raymond herself was not allowed to play with Barbies while growing up because of the doll’s immodest attire and since parents in the Hassidic community felt it was “unsuitable” for children to dress and undress the dolls and see adult body parts, she told The Algemeiner.

However, her nickname Kosher Barbie did not take hold until she began studying filmmaking at the New York Film Academy. Fellow classmates who could not pronounce her Israeli first name and instead called her Barbie because of her blonde hair. When she began working with a film crew, someone asked where she was from and if she ate bacon. She replied, “no, I’m Kosher Barbie.”

“Every person can find a little ‘me’ in Barbie. A little of themselves,” said Raymond, talking about the doll’s universal appeal and citing the fact that Mattel has made Barbie in different nationalities, skin colors, body types and even a Barbie doll with down syndrome. She further said that Barbie is inspirational for all women because she has been depicted as having numerous careers, and applauded Mattel for trying to show Barbie as “an independent woman.”