For some millennial Jewish women, Natalie Portman arrived on the scene as the ultimate aspirational Nice Jewish Girl. She was proud to be Jewish. She was beautiful. She went to Harvard! She was the mother of Luke and Leia. She was your Jewish summer camp crush’s dream girl. (A chapter of Mindy Kaling’s book “Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me” included a section addressed to her Jewish guy friends that said, “I know a small part of you thinks you could have ended up with Natalie Portman if you had played things a little differently. That’s nice. You can have that. That’s not hurting anybody.”)
So it’s comforting to know that Natalie Portman might have had something in common with us mere mortals: She was obsessed with The Baby-Sitters Club book series and wished that there was a Jewish babysitter.
“I loved that book series so, so much,” Portman told Drew Barrymore earlier this year on Barrymore’s daytime talk show. “Ann M. Martin, the author, came to do a signing [at a local kids’ book store in my hometown] and I waited 4 hours to meet her… I was like, we need representation. I had a whole presentation why there should be a Jewish babysitter character in the book.”
Back in 2020, Natalie told a longer version of the story while promoting her children’s book, “Fables.” In a 2020 video for Popverse, she said, “During sleepovers, my best friend Julie and I would dial all the Ann M. Martins in the New York phone book to see if we could give her our feedback, but after we called like 30 with no luck we got bored.”
When she finally got the chance to meet Martin in the flesh, Portman was ready. “I remember preparing my presentation for her and choosing my best newsboy cap and Doc Martens for the big day,” she said. “I presented a new character for [Martin] to introduce. I remember picking her favorite colors (purple and yellow), and her favorite subjects in school (English and biology) and her favorite extracurricular activities (singing and dancing).”
“I wanted to see someone specifically from my culture there to be seen and acknowledged and counted. When my whole world was ensconced in all things Baby-Sitters Club, if someone like me wasn’t in the story in an essential way, I didn’t exist,” Portman explained. “I understood then how much representation matters.”
Portman’s advocacy may have indeed played a part in influencing Ann M. Martin. In 1995’s “Welcome to the BSC, Abby,” the 90th book in the Baby-Sitters Club series, a new babysitter joins the club — and she’s Jewish. (She also has anxiety, asthma and an impressive array of allergies.)
In a letter to readers at the beginning of the book, Martin wrote that she was very intentional when adding a new character. “I wanted a character who was different from the other girls in ‘The Baby-Sitters Club,’” she wrote. “Many readers had asked for a character who is a twin. Many others had asked for a character who is Jewish. So we took these and other things into consideration.”
Abby and Anna Stevenson, the Jewish twins written into the series, moved to the fictional town of Stoneybrook from Long Island — the very place where a young Natalie Portman made her case to Ann M. Martin.
Coincidence? Probably, but Martin does seem to know about Portman’s love of the series. In 2019, Portman shared a photo of herself on Instagram holding “Kristy and the Walking Disaster” (editor’s note: a great choice, that Jackie Rodowsky was such a character), signed “For Natalie Portman – BSC 4-ever! With admiration, Ann M. Martin.”
Portman captioned the post, “Today was a VERY IMPORTANT day for me. I read every single Baby-sitter’s Club book when I was a kid. Once when I was 9, I waited in line for 4 hours at my local bookstore to meet Ann M. Martin. And today I got this in the mail from her.”
Crucially, she added, “I still identify as a Kristy mixed with Stacey and a dash of Dawn.”
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