Jewish Invention Myths: Barbie
Barbie isn’t something you’d think of as a jewish invention but yet it was created by a jewish woman named Ruth Handler, yet it isn’t actually a jewish invention despite being presented as such.
The ‘Jewish Contemporary Museum’ declares:
‘Discover the story of the Jewish woman behind one of our most enduring pop culture icons. Before she took the world by storm in 1959, the Barbie doll was created by Ruth Handler, the child of Yiddish-speaking Eastern European Jewish immigrants living in Denver. Inspired by a doll she discovered with her daughter Barbie, Ruth envisioned a new way that little girls could play—not with baby dolls they could mother, but with representations of the women they might become. Join us for another Sunday Story to learn the remarkable history of the world's original Barbie girl and the woman who created her.’ (1)
The ‘Jewish Contemporary Museum’s’ account leaves out where Ruth Handler got the idea for Barbie from and instead presents it as Handler’s ex nihilo creation.
As Jennifer Latson explains:
‘Lilli dolls were soon coveted by children as well as adults. They caught the eye of 15-year-old Barbara Handler on a 1956 vacation in Switzerland with her mother, Ruth — a co-founder of the Mattel toy company. Ruth Handler brought three of the dolls home with her to California, per TIME. Three years later — on this day, March 9, in 1959 — she introduced her own adaptation at the American International Toy Fair in New York. The new doll was named Barbie, after Handler’s daughter.’ (2)
That ‘Barbie’ is just a modified ‘Lilli’ doll is well-attested in the literature on the origins of ‘Barbie’ as if the fact that Handler’s ‘Barbie’ of 9th March 1959 is extremely close to the ‘Lilli’ doll. (3) Indeed ‘Barbie’s’ similarities to ‘Lilli’ heavily outweigh the differences (4) so much so that ‘Lilli’ is often referred to as ‘the first Barbie’. (5)
This is demonstrated by the fact that Louis Marx and Company – a jewish-owned major American toy company of the time – bought the rights to the ‘Lilli’ doll from its German creators O&M Hausser and promptly sued Handler and Mattel for patent infringement. Louis Marx and Company lost but only because the aforementioned modifications to the ‘Barbie’ doll which protected Handler and Mattel from such a patent infringement lawsuit as they must have realised at the time when they created ‘Barbie’ from ‘Lilli’. (6)
So in essence ‘Barbie’ is not a jewish invention but rather a German invention stolen and modified by jews then passed off as a jewish invention.
References
(1) https://www.thecjm.org/learn_resources/962
(2) https://time.com/3731483/barbie-history/
(3) Eric Clark, 2007, ‘The Real Toy Story: Inside the Ruthless Battle for America's Youngest Consumers’, 1st Edition, Free Press: New York, p. 81; Robin Gerber, 2009, ‘Barbie and Ruth: The Story of the World's Most Famous Doll and the Woman who Created Her’, 1st Edition, Harper Colins: New York, pp. 10-13; https://www.dollreference.com/bild-lilli-doll-history-german/
(4) Clark, Op. Cit., p. 82; https://time.com/3731483/barbie-history/
(5) https://bild-lilli.com/
(6) Clark, Op. Cit., p. 91