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?”
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?
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.
And each Yom Kippur, as worshippers attend the last prayers of the day, they might well ask: “Why is this closing service different from all other services?”
The Book of Life
Throughout the High Holidays, the 10-day period that begins with Rosh Hashanah and ends with Yom Kippur, Jews pray to be “inscribed” in the Book of Life – that God grant them life, livelihood, health and moral growth in the coming year.
The holidays culminate in Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement: a day dedicated to reflection, fasting and repairing each person’s relationship with others – and through that, their relationship with God.
According to Jewish tradition, the Book of Life is sealed as Yom Kippur draws to a close, as is each person’s fate for the coming year. During the fifth and final service, one prays to be “sealed,” which on this Day of Judgment entails being forgiven. This last service is thus titled “Ne’ilah,” or “the closing,” reflecting the idea that the gates of heaven are closing. It also alludes to the gates of the ancient Temple in Jerusalem, where the holiday was once celebrated.
Ne’ilah prayers are accordingly recited at the closing of the day – just at sunset, adding nature’s drama to the closing of the day. The ambience is enhanced by keeping open the ark of the Torah, the usually closed chamber at the front of the synagogue that protects the scrolls of scripture. Many congregants remain standing, using this final chance to plead their case as the day slips by.
Yom Kippur is a day reserved for repentance, expressed through confession – and, in many ways, it is a day of repetition. The confessional prayer is recited up to 10 times over the course of five services.
It begins with the congregation asking God for forgiveness “for the sin that I have committed before You.” Yet what follows is an extended list of ethical sins, with a focus on the sins of abusive speech, such as slandering, slurring, slighting and smearing the reputations of others. A foundational concept of Judaism is that humanity is made in the image of God, meaning that in wronging others, we offend God as well.
After reciting the confessional, the Ne’ilah service adds one more prayer, not used in other services. This addendum focuses not on the specifics of confession but the dynamics of repentance: underscoring that belief that each person’s relationship with God is correlated with their relationship with other people.
Ne’ilah thus focuses on the sin of fraud, echoing a passage from the biblical Book of Jonah read in the preceding afternoon service: “Let everyone repent of their evil way by giving back the stolen goods in their hands.” To return to God, then, it is important to return what is owed to other people: emotionally, spiritually and materially.
Whereas the oft-repeated confessional focuses on offenses of the lips, such as slander, here the focus is on offenses of the hands: taking what does not belong to us, such as by exploiting the vulnerable or committing fraud.
“You give space” – literally, you give a hand – “to the sinner, but You extend Your right hand to penitents,” it begins. “You have taught us … to confess to You every one of our sins so that we cease handling unlawful goods.”
Judaism holds that God won’t forgive you for a sin if you haven’t made amends with the person you wronged. During the Days of Awe leading up to Yom Kippur, Jews are taught to ask each other for forgiveness, apologizing for the ways we wronged one another in the past year.
Repent and repair
Rather than browbeating people into repentance, the Ne’ilah service’s strategy is to boost them up into it, playing upon the biblical idea of the grandeur of humanity. “You have distinguished humanity from the beginning, privileging it to stand before You,” the liturgy says.
Judaism sees sin as a rupture that can be healed, not an inherent condition. The liturgy’s message is this: Live up to your greatness, your divinely endowed potential, as a being made in God’s image.
For Ne’ilah, the eminence of humanity consists in the ability to repent and set things right before man and God. This is what Yom Kippur is all about.
At Dartmouth, Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies refuse to stay apart
Immediately after the Oct. 7 attacks and the start of the Israel-Gaza War, Dartmouth College student Jackson Weinstein was “extremely outspoken” on campus about his support for Israel.
But by his sophomore year, he had largely withdrawn from discussing the conflict with other students.
“It felt like I was losing friends and just making things harder for myself,” said Weinstein, now a senior at the Ivy League university in New Hampshire.
This past school year, he enrolled in a new course, Difficult Conversations on the Middle East, developed by the college in response to debates over Israel and Gaza that have divided campuses across the country.
For the first several weeks, the class, jointly offered by Dartmouth’s Middle East and Jewish Studies departments, avoided delving into the conflict. Instead, students started by studying topics like groupthink, mindfulness, emotional regulation and academic freedom.
Only by the fifth week did they plunge into subjects like Palestinian armed resistance, women’s rights in the Middle East, the accusation of genocide in Gaza and the role of colonialism in the region.
“In the first class, students come in with this idea of, ‘How do I win the debate? How do I show that I’m right?’’” said Jonathan Smolin, a professor of Middle Eastern Studies. “That’s categorically not what we’re doing in the class.”
Smolin teaches the course alongside Ezzedine Fishere, a former Egyptian diplomat who spent five years posted in Israel.
The hope is that students learn to take an argument seriously enough to understand it before deciding whether they reject it.
The unusual course, offered again this school year, is the product of an experiment Dartmouth began long before Oct. 7. For roughly a decade, its Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies programs have deliberately intertwined themselves: professors co-teach and cross-list courses, serve on each other’s steering committees, co-sponsor visiting professors and even occupy neighboring offices in the same building. It’s just as much for the faculty as it is for the students.
“I want to understand why some people hold positions that I may find horrific,” said Susannah Heschel, chair of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth. “I’m not here to just condemn something; I want to understand the complexity of it.”
An unusual partnership
For Darcy Rochkind, a Middle Eastern Studies major modifying her degree to include Jewish Studies, the partnership is what drew her to Dartmouth.
Rochkind was applying to college in the fall of 2023, as campuses across the country were convulsed by protests and arguments over universities’ responses to Oct. 7. Her dream school was Columbia, but after watching congressional hearings on antisemitism in person and videos her mom sent her of Dartmouth’s Jewish Studies and Middle Eastern Studies professors discussing the conflict side by side, she changed her plans and enrolled at Dartmouth.
“You’d have a very hard time being a Middle Eastern Studies or Jewish Studies major without taking a class from the opposite department,” she said.
The experiment also extends beyond the classroom. In the immediate aftermath of the Oct. 7 attacks, Heschel and her colleagues in Middle Eastern Studies organized two public forums to discuss what had happened and opened it to students. The room was so packed that Dartmouth needed an overflow space, and Heschel said another 1,600 people watched via livestream.
After those initial forums, Dartmouth launched Middle East Dialogues, a series of events organized by faculty in Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies to explore challenging topics related to the region. Rather than foster safe spaces, Dartmouth leaders aspired to create what they call “brave spaces,” where students are encouraged to actively engage with disagreement.
To make it work, Smolin, who has organized many of the program’s events, deliberately avoids inviting speakers who are political activists on either side.
“We’re not interested in people declaring who’s right and who’s wrong,” he said. “That’s not what we do in higher education.”
Instead, they have hosted Israeli and Palestinian political commentators, think tank experts, and public-opinion researchers.
Professors have also facilitated meetings between students to expose them to different viewpoints. Weinstein and several other Jewish students went to dinner with a group of Muslim students, including two Palestinians and a student who had grown up in Gaza. His professor, Fishere, facilitated the gathering.
The students sat together at Pine, a Dartmouth restaurant, and talked for hours about the war, the accusation of genocide in Gaza and the experiences of Gazan civilians.
Weinstein had never before met someone who had spent his entire life in Gaza. He described the dinner as “one of the most human experiences I’ve had at Dartmouth.”
A national flashpoint
Dartmouth’s approach has become increasingly distinctive as Middle East studies programs have become flashpoints in campus battles over Israel, antisemitism and academic freedom.
Since Oct. 7, critics — including Jewish students, alumni, and watchdogs — have accused some Middle East studies programs across the country of teaching about Israel through a hostile ideological lens and creating an inhospitable environment for Jewish and pro-Israel students.
Some professors in the field, meanwhile, have argued that accusations of antisemitism in higher education are being used to police scholarship that could be critical of Israel.
Under similar pressure, Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies removed the center’s director and associate director from their leadership posts, though they kept their jobs. The Trump administration later demanded that the school’s Middle East Studies Department, among others, be audited by a third party to ensure a diversity of viewpoints.
The interventions prompted outrage from professors, students, and academic-freedom advocates arguing that the government was seeking to exert control over how universities teach about Israel and the Middle East.
According to Heschel, the climate has contributed to driving a wedge between Jewish Studies and Middle East Studies departments on some college campuses.
“I know that at some universities, faculty in Middle East and Jewish Studies don’t even talk to each other; they don’t respond to each other’s emails, for example,” she said. “That I find appalling. That’s unacceptable.”
Not everything is about conflict
For Heschel, the intellectual case for faculty in Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies to collaborate goes beyond teaching students how to talk about the current conflict.
“We want our students to know not just about the conflict that they read about in the newspapers today,” Heschel said. “We want them to know about a period where there was religious tolerance and respect for one another, to see that it’s possible we don’t have to live in a condition of anger and enmity.”
She co-teaches a course with a Middle East Studies professor examining how Jews in Europe and Arabs in the Middle East responded to modernity during the 19th century.
In one lesson, students learn about the Lebanese intellectual Butrus al-Bustani, who founded a school in Beirut in 1863 for Christian, Muslim and Jewish boys — and hired a cook to prepare kosher food for his Jewish students.
Engineering major Oguz Kurt, a rising junior who was born and raised in Turkey, took the course last semester.
“Building trust week over week” with classmates and professors, he said, brings people like him into the room who might otherwise be “intimidated” by the prospect of tense encounters in a class focused explicitly on the Israeli and Palestinian conflict.
Kurt wants to be there, which points to one obvious limitation to Dartmouth’s experiment: Students have to want to participate.
A 2025 survey of graduating seniors by the university’s campus newspaper, The Dartmouth, found that nearly 70% described themselves as liberal or very liberal, compared with roughly 12% who identified as conservative or very conservative. More than 70% said most of their closest friends shared their political beliefs.
Additionally, a 2025 Gallup poll conducted on the Dartmouth student body in 2025, found only 38% reported feeling comfortable sharing unorthodox ideas in class.
Weinstein wonders whether this degree of homogeneity is why courses like Difficult Conversations succeed – the people least willing to engage with opposing points of view don’t take the class.
“Everyone was there to learn. Everyone could be persuaded,” he said. “In some ways that’s a problem,” adding that the class might benefit from “a wider range of ideologues.”
“Not all of Dartmouth is like this,” Smolin acknowledged. “No doubt there are professors in other units that think it’s up to faculty to lead liberation and that this approach is stifling.”
On the other end of the spectrum, Heschel said some right-wing Jewish faculty members outside the Jewish Studies program have criticized the approach she and her colleagues take.
“I understand the anxiety that Jews feel today about university campuses, but I think they’re underestimating their own students,” she said. “Kids will encounter viewpoints that they will find disturbing and offensive, not just about Israel… they need to learn how to handle such a situation, how to respond.”
Heschel said faculty and administrators at other universities have approached Dartmouth to ask how to replicate what they did.
“I was surprised that we received so many requests from deans and presidents of colleges and universities to come and talk about what we had done,” she said.
From Dartmouth to Damascus
One of the people thinking about what could be replicated outside Hanover comes from much farther away.
Before flying to New Hampshire this May, Ibrahim Imre El-Khalid Bethlen asked ChatGPT a question he had never needed answered before: What is proper Shabbat etiquette?
Heschel and Bethlen at Dartmouth Courtesy of Ibrahim Imre El-Khalid Bethlen
Bethlen, a Syrian political scientist who teaches at Damascus University, met Heschel when she traveled to Damascus with a delegation of Jewish Americans in December 2025. She invited him to come to Dartmouth for 10 days and packed his schedule with jointly taught courses like Difficult Conversations, and a seminar about Jews in Algeria. Bethlen also lectured about the current political situation in Syria and attended his first ever Shabbat at the campus’ Chabad.
Just as new to him was seeing Jewish Studies and Middle Eastern Studies professors teaching together.
“With every professor we had some brainstorming about how we could bring the people closer,” he said. “How could we demystify” Jews to Syrians. Most of them have never met a Jewish person since the millennia-old Syrian Jewish community left en masse in the mid-20th Century.
Now, Bethlen hopes to connect faculty at Damascus University to their counterparts at Dartmouth. He is realistic about political sensitivities. Bringing an Israeli or Jewish Studies professor into a Syrian classroom to discuss the contemporary conflict, he says, could be a nonstarter. But having an Arab professor in the classroom as well could help.
“We don’t want to jump too high,” he said.
He imagines beginning somewhere Dartmouth itself often begins: with classes focused on shared history and culture rather than contemporary politics. Perhaps a jointly taught course that introduces students to the literature and poetry of Jews and Arabs once shared across the Middle East. Classes like Difficult Conversations can come later.
As a part of that Dartmouth class’s final assignment, students are asked to have a conversation with someone on campus they disagree with about the region, applying what they have learned.
Weinstein chose a friend and fraternity brother whose views on Israel differed sharply from his own. They talked for several hours.
“I ended by congratulating Eli on being ‘the only close friend I’ve ever had that wasn’t pro-Israel,’” Weinstein wrote in his reflection afterward. “I sure hope he isn’t the last.”
In a sea of kippot and black skirts, more than 200 Orthodox middle school and high school students gathered outside Gracie Mansion on Friday, conducting morning prayers and giving speeches.
“I like protesting against Mamdani,” Rami Fishman, a 16-year-old student, told the Forward. “He’s not a great guy. I’ll take an opportunity to speak out against him.”
Prominent Modern Orthodox preparatory schools Ramaz and SAR organized the gathering with Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun, the synagogue that sponsors the institutions. Organizers said that comments Mayor Zohran Mamdani made over the summer attacking AIPAC and Israel drove their efforts. Rabbi Bini Kraus, principal of SAR, said the experience was also intended to teach students about “their civic responsibilities.”
“It’s fun,” Fishman said. “We’re praying and we’re saying ‘no’ to Mamdani.”
Fishman, a junior at SAR, said he liked waking up late and he was enjoying meeting students from another school. Kraus told the Forward students were missing three periods by participating, but noted prayer is part of the school’s curriculum and the gathering wasn’t taking away from their studies.
Students and parents could opt out, with Kraus noting some declined to participate. Nearly 400 alumni and members of Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun signed a petition against the gathering.
Photo by Molly Myers
In their speeches, students touched on fears of antisemitism, being proud Jews and supporting Israel openly. One 8th grader called on Mamdani to prioritize the safety of the Jewish community.
Neturei Karta, a Haredi group that opposes Zionism, protested against the student group by waving Palestinian flags, chanting and holding signs in support of Mamdani. The NK group chanted “Antizionism is not antisemitism,” and called for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to be arrested during his visit to New York next week. Mamdani, who campaigned on arresting Netanyahu, recently acknowledged he does not have the authority to do so.
Michael Rapaport, an actor and staunch supporter of Israel, came to support the students saying it was “moving,” and “not a political statement.”
“These are kids,” Rapaport told the Forward, “they can’t even vote. This is a beautiful, beautiful, beautiful prideful thing.”
Organizers did not describe the gathering as a form of protest, instead referring to it as a vigil or communal prayer. However, the event involved classic hallmarks of a protest. A handful of participants waved or wore Israeli flags, and organizers acquired a permit for noise amplification.
“Our students have been going out for decades, really, when things matter,” Kraus said.
He noted he demonstrated for Soviet Jewry when he was a student at the school.
A reporter asked Mamdani about the demonstration at a press conference Wednesday.
“I welcome them,” he said. “They can have a vigil, or I’ve heard some describe it even as a ‘protest.’ Whatever it is intended to be, they have the room and space to do so outside of Gracie Mansion. I think that at the time that they are there, I will probably be somewhere else across the city.”
Rabbi Chaim Steinmetz, senior rabbi at Kehilath Jeshurun, said Thursday, “That’s the right response.”
Kraus, however, said he hoped the mayor would change his mind and attend. If he did, he would hear singing, praying and concerns “expressed respectfully.”
“Maybe that will move him,” Kraus said.
Some alumni and parents opposed the demonstration
The petition against the demonstration stated, “This gathering needlessly inflames tensions between the mayor and the Modern Orthodox Jewish community, as opposed to inviting him into conversation as a potential ally working for the shared safety of all New Yorkers.”
Much of the signatures are anonymous, with only school and class year listed.
The petition also said the schools risked portraying the Modern Orthodox community “as a political monolith opposed to the mayor.”
“They don’t want it to look like the Modern Orthodox community is a monolith, but the Modern Orthodox community really is a monolith on this,” Steinmetz said. “The Modern Orthodox community is, by and large, quite Zionist and really takes the security and safety of the state of Israel very seriously.”
A 2024 poll conducted by Nishma Research found 94% of the Modern Orthodox community identifies as Zionist, compared to 51% of Haredi Jews.
Halachic Left, an observant organization that says its members have “deep connections” to institutions in the Modern Orthodox community, helped circulate the petition. In a statement to the Forward, the organization insisted there is a “full range of views in the Modern Orthodox community on Israel, Zionism, and Mayor Mamdani.”
“The mayor has shown a willingness to respect and speak with our community,” read the statement. “We should be partnering with and engaging the mayor rather than castigating or insulting him.”
