Ms. Rachel and the Endangered Children’s Show Host
It’s difficult to overstate the popularity of children’s entertainer Ms. Rachel. As a woman of non-children having experience, she has existed largely outside of my periphery. Still, she is instantly recognizable by her denim overalls, her pink undershirt, and her matching pink headband. Parents regularly post videos online of their restless babies being lulled by Ms. Rachel’s cavity-inducing voice. “Can you say mama?” Ms. Rachel says at the beginning of her most viewed YouTube video (1.3 billion views to be exact.) If the baby on the other side of the screen is too young to speak, they usually just flail their little bodies in excitement.
It's been years since a children’s entertainer has captivated both parents and kids alike. “[Ms. Rachel] is heralded a hero by parents everywhere,” The Today Show said during an interview with her back in 2022. It is always emphasized in any interview she does how much parents also love Ms. Rachel — full name Rachel Griffin Accurso — maybe even more than their children do. Accurso began making videos as Ms. Rachel for YouTube in 2019, but not until a year later, when Covid forced many families to stay at home, did Accurso’s views begin to skyrocket.
It’s easy to understand what attracts parents to Ms. Rachel. She’s not just a person who is a conduit to the world for their children, but also someone who soothes a part of a person looking for consistency in an otherwise unpredictable world. She’s terminally cheery. When she isn’t singing, she speaks in mostly short, uncomplicated sentences. She’s kind, patient, and hospitable to a fault. Like most children’s entertainers, she deploys a call and response technique for learning that makes it easy for the audience to insert any meaning they want into her words. There’s a perceived blankness to her that allows people to project their own thoughts and feelings onto her.
In recent months, however, Ms. Rachel’s veneer of vacancy has begun to crack, causing friction between her and her adult audience. In May, the New York Times published an article where Jewish parents have reported feeling “quite isolated” as of late by Accurso after she began posting about Israel’s continued genocide against Gaza.
In November 2024, Accurso posted what appears to be her first video referencing the situation in Gaza. “There’s something I think about every day and it’s always on my heart and I’m gonna start talking about it, and I’ve been learning about it and figuring out ways to take action,” she says in the clip. A few days later, is the first time she’d make explicit reference to Gaza in a post where she also mentions other countries, including Haiti, Sudan, and Mali. “In Gaza, a recent report showed that 90% of Gaza’s population is facing extreme food insecurity. And 1 in 3 children under 2 are acutely malnourished in northern Gaza,” she writes in the caption. Since that post, she has made over fifty posts related to Gaza.
Accurso’s advocacy for Palestinian children is part of a shift in the potency of Israel’s once impenetrable propaganda machine. Before recently, the conversation of Israel’s assault against the Palestinian people has been mostly sequestered to the worlds of journalism, activism, and politics. But then came October 2023. Since then, the topic of Palestine has been found nearly everywhere, including the Oscars, the Super Bowl, and all over Hollywood.
