Guestblogging at JWA - crosspost
“You know Barbie’s getting a new job,” says my friend Mimi to me. “People can vote for her new career.”
I put tefillin on a Mattel Barbie doll in 2006, unwittingly creating the Jewish icon now known as Tefillin Barbie. Tefillin Barbie has a frum-girl denim skirt, a T-shirt, the tallit and tefillin more generally worn by Orthodox men during morning prayer, and a volume of Talmud; a whimsical activity for a vacation morning, she generated a vast and wholly unanticipated amount of reaction, positive and negative.
“Hurrah,” people say. “Now we can have Rabbi Barbie!”
But why, people? Why? Barbie put on tefillin and picked up a gemara, so now she has to be a rabbi? Why can’t she be an IT engineer who prays with tefillin and learns gemara in her lunch break?
Read the rest of this post at http://jwablog.jwa.org/tefillin-barbie%27s-new-career.
Mirrored from hasoferet.com.