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How Judy Blume’s ‘Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret’ broke taboos around interfaith marriage
(JTA) — When Judy Blume’s young adult novel “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret” appeared in 1970, intermarried families were a small segment of the American Jewish population. Perhaps 17% of Jews were married to someone who wasn’t Jewish; today, 42% of married Jews have a spouse who is not Jewish, and in the past decade, 61% of Jews married non-Jewish partners.
Through the 1960s, middle-grade and young adult fiction rarely acknowledged the existence of these families, reflecting and reinforcing their outsider status. Today it is routine for authors to address the reality of inter-religious and culturally mixed families, portraying them with insight and compassion. (See “Not Your All-American Girl” by Wendy Wan-Long Shang and Madelyn Rosenberg, “Becoming Brianna” by Terri Libenson and “The Whole Story of Half a Girl” by Veera Hiranandani.)
This change was made possible partly by Blume’s story of sixth-grader Margaret Simon and her one-sided conversations with God.
Blume’s status as a pioneer in young adult literature is usually associated with her honest approach to the emotional, physical and sexual milestones of growing up, with her works still attracting readers and still finding an honored place on lists of banned books. That legacy is being celebrated in April with a new documentary, Amazon Prime Video’s “Judy Blume Forever,” and a theatrical release by Lionsgate of a feature film version of “Are You There God?”
Yet her treatment of contested identity in intermarried families is as revolutionary as her openness about bras, menstruation and sexual feelings. Actors Lena Dunham and Molly Ringwald, comedian Samantha Bee and many authors, including Raina Telgemeier, Tayari Jones and Gary Shteyngart, have cited Blume’s influence on both their lives and their work. Book lists for intermarried families frequently list the novel as a resource.
Margaret Simon is 11 years old at the start of “Are You There God?” Her Jewish dad and Christian mom have pointedly ignored the possibility that their daughter might have questions about her identity. Along with other issues of teen angst, she feels compelled to decide if she is Jewish, Christian or neither. Without any guidance, the last alternative leaves her in a frightening void. As she pointedly asks God, in her ongoing series of questions for Him, “I can’t go on being nothing forever, can I?”
Margaret’s parents, Barbara Hutchins and Herb Simon, fell in love and defied their respective parents by marrying out of their faiths. They assure Margaret that she has no religion, but can choose one when she is older, oblivious to the fact that this solution seems more of a burden than a promise of future freedom. Their avoidance of any serious engagement with either religion or culture renders any possible choice unlikely.
Blume situates Margaret’s search within the specific landscape of post-World War II America. When the Simons decide to leave their Upper West Side home in New York City and move to suburban New Jersey, their decision suggests a coded reference to their religious status. Long Island is “too social,” an implied euphemism for “too Jewish.” Living there might have made it harder for their relatively unusual situation to be discreetly ignored. On the other hand, the more affluent Westchester and Connecticut are “too expensive” and “too inconvenient.” Farbrook, New Jersey has enough Jews for it to feel right for Herb, but not so many as to make their mixed family stand out.
Margaret also suspects that her parents’ are determined to put distance between the Simons and Sylvia, her paternal grandmother, who lives in New York City. This gregarious woman shows up at their new home unannounced and toting deli foods, making it clear that Margaret’s one unambiguous connection to Judaism is not going to disappear. While Barbara’s parents utterly rejected her when she married a Jew, Sylvia has pragmatically decided to accept what she cannot change. In the postwar era, more Jews began to abandon or minimize religious practice, while still maintaining ethnically distinct customs. Like holiday observance or synagogue attendance, ethnic Jewish culture is also absent from the Simon home. Sylvia’s Jewish food, her frequent trips to Florida, even her combination of sarcasm and smothering warmth, provide Margaret with markers of the tradition her parents have eschewed.
Still, when Sylvia repeatedly asks Margaret if her (nonexistent) boyfriends are Jewish, the young girl is baffled. Given her own lack of consciousness of herself as Jewish, why would Margaret care?
Rachel McAdams and Abby Ryder Fortson in the forthcoming film adaptation of “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.” (Dana Hawley/Lionsgate © 2022)
In the larger world of Farbrook, Margaret’s new friends seem to have more secure identities, conveniently defined by membership either in the “Y” (Young Men’s Christian Association) or the Jewish Community Center. Perfunctory attendance at Hebrew school until after one’s bar mitzvah is the furthest extent of her peers’ Jewishness. Margaret explains that her parents are “nothing” and that, prior to their marriage, they were Jewish and Christian, as if those identities could be cast off like an article of clothing. When Mr. Benedict, her enthusiastic young teacher, distributes a questionnaire, Margaret completes the prompt “I hate” with “religious holidays.” He attempts to draw her out about this troubling answer, and she scornfully observes that her teacher acted as if “he had uncovered some deep, dark mystery.”
On one level, he has. Her mother’s blandly universal definition of God as a “nice idea,” who “belongs to everybody,” is clearly a denial of the fractures in her family members’ lives.
Blume also captures the essence of mid-century non-Orthodox Judaism as comfortably accessible, yet also somewhat empty. On a visit to Grandma Sylvia’s elegant temple, the atmosphere is quietly decorous, the sanctuary filled with well-appointed congregants and beautifully arranged flowers. Sylvia’s rabbi greets Margaret with an enthusiastic “Good Yom Tov,” which he translates as “Happy New Year,” although it is actually a generic holiday greeting.
When Margaret later visits Presbyterian and Methodist churches, she notes the remarkable similarity among all three experiences.
The novel’s one incident of specific religious practice involves Margaret’s brief, unfinished confession in a classmate’s Catholic church. Having participated in bullying, Margaret tries to assuage her guilt through a ritual alien to both her father’s Judaism and her mother’s Protestant Christianity. She even momentarily confuses the priest with the silent God of her conversations. Nothing could be further from her parents’ rejection of religion, or from Grandma Sylvia’s loving assurance to Margaret that “I knew you were a Jewish girl at heart.”
When Margaret’s Christian grandparents decide to resume contact, the suppressed anger in the Simon home finally erupts. Herb is furious, and accuses his in-laws of only wanting to meet Margaret “to make sure she doesn’t have horns!” — a caustic reference to a persistent antisemitic myth. Blume had subtly foreshadowed this disruption of the status quo in a parallel event at school. When a Jewish student, backed by his parents, refuses to sing Christmas carols, the implicit agreement of the town’s Jews to quietly conform is broken. A Christian girl, in what seems an act of retaliation, then refuses to sing Hanukkah songs. These acts of resistance reinforce Margaret’s marginal status. Her intermarried family represents neither conformity with postwar norms nor an assertion of Jewish pride.
Blume appears to tip the scales in her portrayal of Mary and Paul Hutchins, Margaret’s maternal grandparents. Entirely unlikeable, simultaneously pushy and cold, they insist that the granddaughter they had never acknowledged is Christian. After their failed visit, Grandma Sylvia returns, along with her sweet and obviously Jewish new boyfriend, Mr. Binamin (“rhymes with cinnamon”). Readers rooting for the triumph of Margaret’s Jewish roots may breathe a sigh of relief here, but hope for a satisfying ending is illusory. Margaret’s search for a stable sense of self is still unfinished, and will not be satisfied by choosing membership in either the Y or the JCC.
For young readers, the novel’s discussion of religious identity proved as life-changing as its honest portrayal of puberty and menstruation. “I related to that kind of conflict of religion,” the comedian Chelsea Handler, who grew up in a mixed Jewish-Mormon home, told Blume in 2020. “At that time, I just found out my mom was Mormon, on top of thinking she was Jewish, and your books were such a reprieve for me and such a joy.”
More than 50 years ago, Judy Blume tackled a difficult subject, about both changing demographics and the search for authenticity in American Jewish life. Margaret’s conclusion that “twelve is very late to learn” about the essence of who you are still poses a challenge, while her persistent search for a meaningful identity offers a degree of optimism.
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Pomona College Agrees to Settlement Over Civil Rights Complaint Alleging Antisemitism on Campus
A pro-Hamas activist posts a banner near an encampment to demonstrate at the Claremont Colleges on May 7, 2024, in Los Angeles, California. Photo: Qian Weizhong via Reuters Connect
Pomona College in Claremont, California, has settled a civil rights complaint which accused school officials of having “permitted severe discrimination of Jewish students” in the months which followed Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, invasion of and massacre across southern Israel.
The Anti-Defamation League (ADL), Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, and Hillel International were part of the coalition of civil rights groups that brought legal action on behalf of Jewish students. According to a statement they released this week, the settlement calls for the college’s adopting the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism, updating its non-discrimination policy to stress that antisemitism is verboten, and hiring a new official to manage the college’s compliance with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.
“After Oct. 7, Jewish and Israeli students and teachers across the country were forced to live in fear on their own campuses. But there were many, including those at Pomona, who exemplified strength and stood up to the bigotry and hatred that threatened them,” Brandeis Center founder and chairman Kenneth Marcus said in a statement commenting on the resolution of the case. “The action steps outlined in this settlement will address the blatant and egregious antisemitism faced by Pomona’s students, therefore protecting students from facing similar treatment in the future. And we hope it encourages others to take legal action against those who violate our constitutional rights.”
Pomona College president Gabrielle Starr issued her own statement on Wednesday, saying, “Antisemitism has persisted for thousands of years, and this settlement is not a one-size-fits-all toolkit. It’ll be up to our community to put it in place — and to live it. We will work with the Executive Committee of the Faculty, Staff Council, and [Associated Students of Pomona College] to navigate the complexities and challenges together. I am grateful to their leadership in these times.”
The settlement announcement comes just over a month after Pomona College, working with its sister institutions in the Claremont consortium of liberal arts colleges in California (5C), imposed severe disciplinary sanctions on some of the members of a pro-Hamas student group who attempted to raid a campus Jewish event held to commemorate the victims of the Oct. 7 massacre, which claimed the lives of 1,200 people and resulted in 251 hostages being kidnapped and taken to Gaza.
As previously reported by The Algemeiner, footage of the incident showed the group, whose members concealed their faces with keffiyeh scarves, attempting to storm the event venue while screaming expletives and pro-Hamas slogans. They ultimately failed due to the prompt response of the Claremont Colleges Jewish chaplain and other attendees who formed a barrier in front of the door to repel them, a defense they were forced to mount on their own because campus security personnel did nothing to stop the disturbance.
Later, the group behind the incident issued a disturbing open letter on social media.
“Satan dared not look us in the eyes,” the note said, while attacking event guests and Oct. 7 survivor Yoni Viloga. “Immediately, zionists [sic] swarmed us, put their hands on us, shoved us, while Viloga retreated like he did on October 7th, 2023.”
Appearing to threaten murder, the group added, “We let that coward know he and his fascists settler ideology are not welcome here nor anywhere. zionism is a death cult that must be dealt with accordingly [sic].”
After an exhaustive investigation which drew in every member of the 5C, Pomona College determined that two of the young people involved in the raid are enrolled in sister schools it would not identify due to privacy laws. It has banned them from the Pomona campus. Two other individuals remain at large.
“Given the gravity of the alleged offense — and the published statement that has raised significant concerns about similar disruptions in the future — I have initiated an interim campus ban for both individuals, pending further inquiries, and in line with our policy,” Starr said in her last update on the matter. “The alleged behavior here is serious, and to ensure an appropriate adjudication is reached, the college is committed to maintaining a fair process.”
She added, “I assure you that Pomona hopes for — and will advocate for — an outcome that ensures our campuses are free of the kind of targeted harassment we witnessed.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Bill to Help Recovery of Nazi-Looted Art Passes US Senate Unanimously, Heads to House of Representatives
A drone view of the “Arbeit macht frei” gate at the former Auschwitz concentration camp ahead of the 80th anniversary of its liberation, Oswiecim, Poland, Jan. 10, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Kacper Pempel
The US Senate on Wednesday unanimously passed a bill that would help Holocaust survivors and their families reclaim artwork stolen by Nazis during World War II.
The Holocaust Expropriated Art Recovery (Hear) Act of 2025 updates and expands on the original 2016 HEAR Act, which created a six-year window for a Holocaust survivor or their family to file a legal claim starting from the time they discovered the location of their stolen art. The 2016 HEAR Act is set to expire at the end of 2026.
The new bill passed by the Senate this week clarifies legal protections for Holocaust survivors and their families who are seeking the return of art looted by the Nazis by making sure that their claims are considered based on factual merits and not dismissed due to legal deadlines or time-based technicalities. The new bill states that if a Holocaust survivor or their family members file a claim within six years of discovering their artwork’s location, their case cannot be dismissed just because of how much time has passed.
The bill now heads to the House of Representatives, and if it’s passed there, it will be sent to US President Donald Trump to be signed into law.
“This bipartisan effort will assist Holocaust survivors and their families who are seeking the return of artwork now held in museums and collections across the United States,” said Mark Weitzman, chief operating officer of the World Jewish Restitution Organization, which supports world Jewry in pursuing claims for the restitution of Jewish property stolen during the Holocaust.
“By clarifying and strengthening the legal framework, the bill helps ensure that these claims can be evaluated on their merits, advancing justice and accountability,” added Weitzman. “The bill now moves to the House of Representatives, and we encourage swift support to bring us closer to ensuring that claims for Nazi-looted art can be heard on their merits.”
The bill was cosponsored by US Sens John Cornyn (R-TX), Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), Thom Tillis (R-NC), Cory Booker (D-NJ), Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), John Fetterman (D-PA), Eric Schmitt (R-MO), and Katie Britt (R-AL). Cornyn spearheaded the 2016 HEAR Act.
“The thousands of missing pieces of art looted from Jewish families by Hitler’s regime during the Holocaust are a painful reminder of a time when cruelty and hatred reigned,” Cornyn said in a released statement. “This legislation renews our commitment to Holocaust survivors and their families by ensuring cases are heard on their merit, offering a path to restitution and assurance that such injustices are never forgotten.”
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Middle East Scholars Hope New Book on Oct. 7 Will Combat the ‘Promotion of Fallacies on Campus’
Pro-Hamas demonstrators at Columbia University in New York City, US, April 29, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Caitlin Ochs
A consortium of Middle East scholars, as well as one student, has published a new book examining the impact of Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel on geopolitics, media, and the landscape of higher education, The Algemeiner recently learned.
Edited by Scholars for Peace in the Middle East executive director Asaf Romirowsky and Smith College professor Donna Robinson-Divine, the book, titled October 7: The Wars Over Words and Deeds, includes essays by esteemed thinkers such Andrew Fox, KC Johnson, and Alex Joffe and it has already been acclaimed by professors representing higher education institutions across the Western world, from the University of California, Berkeley in the US to Kings College London in the United Kingdom.
On Friday, The Algemeiner spoke with Romirowsky and Robinson-Divine for nearly two hours to discuss their hopes for the project. One hope, they said, is breaking higher education’s dialogue on the Middle East out of a conceptual prison in which the convulsions of campus activism preclude careful analysis of a region whose rich history and effect on global stability demand seriousness. Wars Over Words and Deeds, they said, achieves this objective by contributing to “the academy” sound scholarship on the Middle East which respects the complexities it has posed to statesmen, scholars, and presidents since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire following the conclusion of World War I.
“We saw constantly a dearth of information and the promotion of fallacies on campus — a kind of rapid fire of lies and disinformation. We felt that we needed to actually look at the question of Israel and the Middle East from a rigorous academic standpoint,” Romirowsky said. “As historians, politic scientists, and analysts, we came together as a group to actually look at the historical patterns of behavior and historical evidence and describe the events which led up to Oct. 7 and what has transpired since.”
As previously reported by the Algemeiner, since the Oct. 7 massacre college faculty and students have treated the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as well as the subject of regional order in the Middle East, as a political and ideological issue, holding rallies, occupying buildings, and demanding sweeping policy changes such as divestment from Israel and the expulsion of Jewish academics. In dozens of incidents documented by The Algemeiner, they translated their zeal into speech which drew from Nazi-era rhetoric and other classic antisemitic tropes.
These activists have created an unusual convergence of interests connecting political Islamists, classical, white supremacist antisemites, and even far-left activists who advocate non-heteronormative gender roles and sexualities, Robinson-Divine noted.
“Anti-Zionism seems to be a vehicle for cementing ties between progressives who might not otherwise share a policy consensus,” she explained. “Muslim activists might have little in common with LGTBQ activists striving freedom and expanding social rights but they can unite around the issue of Israel.”
A coalition comprising factions which are normally at odds over the biggest political questions can only arise in a climate of deception, she noted.
“The incentives for distorting terms and concepts, for pushing an agenda, have been powerful over the past 10 years,” Robinson-Divine continued. “Higher education confers valuable material and social rewards to those who join the anti-Israel movement. But there are people who want information and accuracy, and I haven’t entirely despaired.”
One of the issues explored by The Wars Over Words and Deeds is the anti-Zionist left’s denial of reports that Hamas fighters sexually assaulted men and women on Oct. 7 and continued to do so after the fact to hostages it kidnapped and transported to Gaza. The Yale Daily News, for example, helped to popularize this denialism in higher education in November 2023, when it censored a column which discussed the sexual assault, calling the accounts of victims “unsubstantiated” — an outrage for which it later apologized.
“What is interesting about some Western responses to Oct. 7 is that groups which fall on the liberal side or the political spectrum, who claim to be invested in the well-being of women and disposed peoples,’ contribute to mass dehumanization which enables conditions for horrific gender-based violence to occur on nationalistic grounds,” writes Smith College student Skylar Ball in her contribution to the book. “When we turn our backs on truth, we enable dehumanization, and we subsequently turn our backs on humanity.”
Romirowsky, Robinson-Divine, and the scholars they brought together have a tall task, as anti-Zionist extremism in higher education has proven to be infectious.
Just last month, a New York City college saw a portentous incident in which a student and local imam disrupted an interfaith event by issuing a verbal fatwa which called for imposing sharia law on Americans, defended amputating the limbs of misdemeanor level criminals and the wealthy, and denigrated a Jewish co-panelist, Baruch College professor Ilya Bratman.
“If you’re a Muslim, out of strength and dignity, I ask you to exit this room immediately,” said Abdullah Mady, who is enrolled in the Master’s in Translational Medicine (MTM) program. “Sharia … stands against the oppressor. When sharia is implemented, pornography — gone. Alcohol industry — gone. Gambling system — gone. Interest is gone, which is what they use to enslave you.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.