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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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The post How Judy Blume’s ‘Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret’ broke taboos around interfaith marriage appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

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HaKarot HaTov: Artificial Intelligence Can Never Replace Human Love and Wonder

Illustrative: Fourth grade students from Kibbutz Parod with certificates they received from the Israel Antiquities Authority for finding and turning in an ancient oil lamp. Photo: IAA.

One of the things that primary teachers regularly encounter is children calling them “mom” or “dad.” This is usually followed by serious embarrassment on behalf of the child, and possibly nervous laughter from their classmates.

Most teachers will just smooth incidents like this over, but the good ones will perhaps reflect on its underlying meaning — how in a very real sense for the child, they can temporarily become the child’s mother or father. It’s an expression of the incredibly important role teachers play in the lives of children, acting as the adult presence that bridges across from their family existence to their encounters with the larger world. This is what, unconsciously, children are tapping into when they mix up “mom” and “miss.”

Teachers are really important to kids — and the emotional investment that teachers make in children, and that children make in teachers, is enormous. Sometimes teachers can even provide the love and care that a child’s parents cannot. Teachers matter. Or at least they did.

What it seems the future holds, as AI models improve exponentially, is children each having their own AI-powered tutor responding in real time to their learning needs. AI’s ability to gauge the progress, challenges, and requirements of each child are likely far beyond anything a human teacher could ever hope to achieve. I don’t doubt that this is coming soon, and that many parents, and many governments, will be thinking of the undeniable benefits that these AI tutors will bring.

They don’t need a salary, they don’t need time off, and they can be there at any time of day. On top of that, millions of children are already using AI chat bots for emotional support. AI tutors will soon combine academic and emotional and pastoral support in one package. Unlike human teachers, they will never get tired, or angry, or disappointed, or get distracted from their charges’ needs.

We might wonder why any of this might be a problem. In a near future where robots will care for the elderly, do our shopping, and undertake surgery, and other AI bots will be our lawyers and accountants, as they already are our software engineers, why does it matter if children are taught by AI tutors?

Perhaps it doesn’t. Perhaps children and parents won’t be able to tell the difference, or even care if they can. Having human teachers won’t be important. Maybe we will just need a few humans to check if the AI tutors are on track to ensure that the kids of the future (or the kids of next year) learn enough to read and write, and to count well enough so that they don’t spend their universal basic income all at once.

I had a friend who was a great teacher who taught in Jewish schools in London. He died a decade ago, far too young. He was dyslexic and he told me how he used to share this with his pupils and get them to help him with his spelling on the board. A small thing perhaps, but I just think how much this communicated to those young people — about dealing with adversity, compassion, and empathy. I also remember how, when I was walking with him, we might bump into some of his old pupils. Always, they were so pleased to see him.

He was still “sir,” someone important in their lives, who had helped them navigate the path from their families, out to the world as independent adults. There was also, I would venture, something there that no robot teacher or AI tutor could ever truly have. That thing was love. The love that teachers bring to their work, that drives their professionalism and their commitment and care for the next generation.

Children know that teachers are not parents — that they only come into their lives for a short time and then leave. Yet they also know that just like their parents, teachers can love and care about them — really care about what happens to them. Children also learn how adults apart from their parents can, like my friend, not be perfect, and not know everything, but still set an example through their own behavior, and push them to achieve or keep going, even when it is challenging. They can feel how this connection with adults, with other human beings, molds and creates their adult selves.

Another thing that my friend’s pupils had was gratitude. As Dostoevsky wrote, gratitude is a fundamentally human quality, because someone has to give it, and someone has to receive it.  But Judaism recognized this decades before the Russian literary geniuses of the 19th century.

The Jewish concept of HaKarot HaTov or “Recognizing the Good” means gratitude, but it also implies something transcendent — the wonder of just taking the time to stop and reflect on what we have. HaKarot HaTov teaches us that it’s through gratitude to other people that we come closer to G-d. Large language models and algorithms don’t have aims, or desires, or feelings. They can’t love. AI tutors quite literally are incapable of caring whether the children they work with live or die. They can’t receive gratitude from their students, or give it, not really, because there is no “them.” Perhaps we should think more than twice before we sign up to an education system where children have no one to say thank you to.

Joseph Mintz is Professor of Inclusive Education at UCL. Follow him @jmintzuclacuk. His views are his own and do not reflect those of his employers.

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The Palestinian Authority Just Paid ‘Pay-for-Slay’ Salaries to 8,000 Terrorists

The opening of a hall that the Palestinian Authority named for a terrorist who killed 125 people. Photo: Palestinian Media Watch.

The mask is off: The Palestinian Authority (PA) announced that 8,000 terrorist prisoner pensioners would receive their monthly Pay-for-Slay “pension” salary this week — and confirmations of receipt of the deposits are already being observed over social media.

A Palestinian social media post confirming Pay-for-Slay payments have gone out.

The minimum amount for such salaries is 4,000 shekels for terrorists who spent five years in prison. Going by that minimum, the PA just paid these terrorists — which constitute only one third of all Pay-for-Slay recipients — at least 32 million shekels — over US $10 million.

However, in actuality, this most conservative estimate is far lower than the amount that was likely paid out, as some of the more infamous terrorists released in recent hostage deals have spent 30 or more years in prison. Terrorists with such status receive at least 12,000 shekels each month.

A chart detailing Palestinian payments to terrorists.

One year after PA President Mahmoud Abbas promised the US, Canada, UK, Australia, and the EU that he was ending Pay-for-Slay, there is no escaping the fact that this was just another deception and a lie.

The PA remains an unreformed sponsor of terror.

The author is a contributor to Palestinian Media Watch, where a version of this article first appeared. 

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Is Hebrew a European Language? Debunking Five Myths About Modern Hebrew

A researcher of MiDRASH, a project dedicated to analyzing the National Library of Israel’s digital database of all known Hebrew manuscripts using Machine Learning, including manuscripts from the Cairo Geniza, holds up a 12th century fragment of a Yom Kippur liturgy in Jerusalem, Nov. 24, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun

If you spend enough time on social media, you’re likely going to come across claims about Hebrew that will make your head spin:

Hebrew is a European language.

Hebrew is actually stolen Arabic.

There is no connection between Modern Hebrew and Biblical Hebrew.

For any student of Jewish history or a Hebrew speaker, these outrageous assertions are not just patently wrong — they’re utterly absurd.

Yet they are not random. They form part of a broader effort to delegitimize Zionism and deny the Jewish people’s historic ties to the Land of Israel. This piece examines some of those claims, and the facts that dismantle the myths.

Myth: Hebrew Was a Dead Language Until Eliezer Ben Yehuda Revived It

Hebrew was not a dead language before the late 19th century. But it was not yet the dynamic, everyday vernacular spoken today by millions in Israel and around the world.

To understand the roots of modern Hebrew, we first must go back to the second century C.E. Following the Roman suppression of the Bar Kokhba revolt, Hebrew gradually declined as a spoken language among Jews in the Land of Israel, as Aramaic and other languages took precedence.

But Hebrew did not disappear and did not cease to exist as a language. Rather, it transitioned from a daily spoken language into a primarily literary and liturgical one, preserved in prayer, scholarship, poetry, legal discourse, and correspondence.

The Jewish legal corpus, the Mishnah, was written a number of centuries later in Hebrew.

Rabbinic commentaries, correspondence between different Jewish communities, and scholarly texts (including a medical textbook) were all written in Hebrew throughout late Antiquity and the Medieval periods. The first Hebrew printing press in the Land of Israel was established in the 16th century.

The Enlightenment of the 18th and 19th centuries saw the emergence of Hebrew newspapers and a new Hebrew literature.

All of this occurred before Eliezer Ben Yehuda’s time.

What he sought to do was take the Hebrew language and turn it into a spoken tongue that would aid in the communication between Jews from different communities.

It is true that before Ben Yehuda arrived on the scene, there were Jews in the Land of Israel who spoke Hebrew. There were even attempts in the late 19th century to establish purely Hebrew schools in Ottoman Palestine. However, there were no speakers whose primary tongue was Hebrew or who were native Hebrew speakers. People could speak Hebrew on the street but would go home and speak in other languages to their family and friends.

Ben Yehuda’s Hebrew project saw the establishment of the first “Hebrew-language home,” with his son brought up in a strictly Hebrew-speaking environment.

The revival of Hebrew gained decisive momentum during the Second Aliyah (1904–1914), when waves of Jewish immigrants to the Land of Israel embraced it not merely as a literary language, but as a spoken vernacular, with Hebrew officially adopted as the language of the Zionist movement in 1904.

By the time the British Mandate of Palestine was established in 1922, Hebrew was designated as one of the Mandate’s three official languages.

By 1948, 93 percent of Israeli children under the age of 15 used Hebrew as their primary language.

While Ben Yehuda is largely credited with starting this linguistic revolution, it was essentially a collaborative effort with his family members and other Hebraists expanding Hebrew’s vocabulary to turn it into the modern and dynamic language that we know today.

Myth: Modern Hebrew Is a European Language

Truth: One of the ways in which those opposed to the return of the Jews to their indigenous homeland cast doubt upon the connection between modern Israel and ancient Israel is by claiming that the Hebrew spoken today is not the same as that spoken in the land 2,000 years ago — and that modern Hebrew is, in fact, a European language.

This claim points to the revitalization of Hebrew by a European Jew, Eliezer Ben Yehuda, and the adoption of words from European languages (such as English, German, Russian, and French) by the modern Hebrew dictionary.

However, this is a red herring.

All languages adopt terms from other languages. In ancient times, Hebrew manuscripts borrowed terms from neighboring languages such as Aramaic, Persian, Greek, and Latin.

So, too, today modern Hebrew is influenced by foreign languages. The same with Arabic, English, Russian, and Japanese. Nearly all languages make some use of “loanwords.” Hebrew’s use of “loanwords” does not turn the language suddenly into a European tongue.

As we will see in the next section, despite the modern Hebrew dictionary being developed by a European Jew, modern Hebrew is based on Biblical Hebrew and is, indeed, a Semitic language.

Myth: Modern Hebrew Is Not a Semitic Language

Truth: Similar to the myth that modern Hebrew is a European language, people also make the absurd claim that modern Hebrew is not a Semitic language.

One of the main pieces of “evidence” cited for this claim is that the pronunciation of some Hebrew letters is different from the pronunciation in other Semitic tongues, like Arabic. The two most prominent letters that are brought up in this argument are the guttural Ayin and Het.

Of course, there are several points that undermine this claim.

First, pronunciation is not an indication of whether a language is Semitic or not.

As pointed out by Hebrew language researcher Elon Gilad, Semitic tongues are defined by their three-consonant roots, a structure that existed in Biblical Hebrew and continues to exist in modern Hebrew.

Second, even other Semitic languages feature different pronunciations based on geographic region. There are certain pronunciation differences between the Arabic spoken in Egypt and the Arabic spoken in Jordan and the Arabic spoken in Iraq. However, they are still considered Semitic languages.

Third, even some ancient peoples who spoke Semitic languages, such as the Akkadians and Samaritans, lost the glottal stop in their pronunciation. Yet, no one considered de-classifying their pronunciation as “Semitic.”

Lastly, the more guttural pronunciation of Hebrew is still practiced by some Israelis whose families came from Arabic-speaking lands, particularly the Yemenites. This does not make their Hebrew Semitic while the Hebrew of another Israeli, speaking the same exact words just in a different accent, would be considered a non-Semitic tongue.

Myth: Modern Hebrew is Based on Arabic

The opposite of the “Hebrew is European” myth is the equally false myth that modern Hebrew is based on Arabic.

According to this myth, a large percentage of modern Hebrew (some claim up to 80%) is made up of Arabic words.

As mentioned above, modern Hebrew does use “loanwords” from Arabic (as well as other languages) but its vocabulary and grammar are not a large-scale coopting of Arabic.

This myth is meant to deny the ties between Biblical and modern Hebrew, thus also severing the historic ties between the Jewish people and the Land of Israel and depicting Israeli Jews as somehow fraudulent.

Myth: Modern Hebrew Speakers Cannot Understand Biblical Hebrew

It is true that modern Hebrew and Biblical Hebrew are not the same.

However, it is not true that a modern Hebrew speaker would not understand the Bible.

While there are structural differences between the two Hebrews and there isn’t a 100 percent overlap between the two vocabularies, an educated Israeli would be able to open the Bible and understand a good portion of the Hebrew text.

Analysts have noted that the relationship between Biblical Hebrew and modern Hebrew is much closer than the relationship between ancient Greek and modern Greek (which are considered linguistic relatives).

The relationship between Biblical Hebrew and modern Hebrew is likened to the relationship between Shakespearean English and modern English. While the modern English speaker may not be able to read an entire play without assistance, they will recognize the language used by the Bard as being similar to their own tongue.

However, there are some who claim that a student of Biblical Hebrew (with no grounding in modern Hebrew) would not be able to understand a contemporary Hebrew text due to the developments that have taken place in the language.

That observation is hardly surprising. Languages evolve over centuries – English today would be barely intelligible to a reader of Chaucer. Yet evolution does not mean rupture. Modern Hebrew rests on the same grammatical foundations and core vocabulary that have bound Jewish texts and communities together for millennia.

Its revival was not the creation of something new, but the renewal of something enduring.

The author is a contributor to HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.

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