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Judy Blume is having a moment. Here’s why Jewish women love her work.
(JTA) — As a young teenager growing up in Manhattan, Nina Kauder found it nearly impossible to ask her mother difficult questions about puberty or her Jewish identity, for two reasons.
Her mother had fled the Holocaust as a child and was, in Kauder’s words, “very tough” to talk to. And by the time Kauder was a teen, her mother was terminally ill. She got her first period just months after her mother’s death.
So Kauder, now 58 and a health coach, turned to Judy Blume.
She remembers reading Blume’s 1970 young adult classic “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret,” about a sixth grader with a Jewish father and Christian mother, in her closet with a flashlight after bedtime.
“I’m reading in there, devouring her book, learning about boys, learning about breasts, learning about brassieres, learning about religion, about identity, about growing up in the United States — learning about all of that,” she said.
Kauder isn’t alone. Blume’s 29 books, which have sold over 90 million copies and been translated into 39 languages, have been touchstones for women — especially Jewish American women — for multiple generations. Her protagonists deal with a range of teen issues, from bullying to sex to loneliness to menstruation, in a realistic way, but they also grapple with issues of Jewish identity as they come of age, adding an extra layer of relevance for young Jewish readers.
Blume is having a moment with the recent release of a documentary about her life and career streaming on Amazon Prime titled “Judy Blume Forever” and a major on-screen adaptation of “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret,” which debuted on Friday to warm reviews. The topics Blume has written about since 1969 have remained relevant: her books still regularly land on banned book lists as states continually debate what young readers should be able to access. (Several of her books were banned in states including Texas, Florida, Utah and Pennsylvania last year.) She regularly speaks out on the dangers of book banning, which she attributes to fear, explaining that “because fear is contagious, some parents are easily swayed.”
The documentary tells the story of Blume’s life and career, beginning with her secular Jewish upbringing in Elizabeth, New Jersey. Born in 1938, Blume was seven when World War II ended, and she describes a nervous childhood in the film. Her mother reassured her that the war happened far away and that they were safe.
“Did I believe that?” Blume asks in the film. “I don’t know. I was a Jewish girl and this happened because you were a Jew. I was an anxious child.”
She also connects her childhood anxiety to her prolific imagination: “I felt adults kept secrets from the kids. I hated those secrets. I think I had to make up what those secrets were. That fueled my imagination.”
“Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret” centers on an 11-year-old who moves to a new town with her parents and has intimate conversations with God. Margaret longs to feel normal, to start growing breasts and get her period along with her friends. She also struggles with her religious identity; her mother is Christian and her father is Jewish, and neither set of grandparents approved of the union. Margaret sets out on a quest to learn about and pick a religion, all the while wondering why she only feels God’s presence when she’s alone.
Rachel McAdams and Abby Ryder Forstson in the film adaptation of “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.” (Lionsgate)
During the war, Kauder’s mother had “survived in France as a hidden child, [hidden] by the nuns in a Roman Catholic environment.” Subsequently, growing up, Kauder “didn’t have a Jewish or a religious or a spiritual influence at all.” She identified with Margaret.
“Here comes Judy Blume’s book, which for different reasons has a Jewish and a Catholic influence, but she’s trying to figure it out,” Kauder said.
To Jessye Ejdelman, a 31-year-old software engineer who attends a Modern Orthodox synagogue in New York City and is raising her children in a Yiddish immersive household, the book is also a strong expression of American Jewishness: of “not being sure where you fit as a Jew and not being sure where God fits as a Jew and as an American.”
To Edjelman, the Margaret character demonstrated something meaningful about the Jewish relationship to God. “The literal wrestling with God in a way is very like Jacob. I think of Judy Blume when I think of that, like that wrestling with God, that uncertainty.”
But the book’s relevance in her teenage years went beyond religion.
“[Like in] ‘Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret,’ I was also a girl who was waiting for my first period to come,” she said. “I remember pretending to have my period and I really related to Margaret as a character because of that… Like I was just waiting to not be awkward or weird or ugly or a child… Many, many women relate to that feeling.”
In the 1970s, after her writing career and the women’s liberation movement took off, Blume decided to leave the suburbs and her first marriage. “I wanted to see the world. I wanted to travel everywhere,” she explains in the film.
After her divorce, her books became more explicitly drawn from her own life. In 1977, Blume wrote what she calls her “most autobiographical novel,” the book “Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself,” about her post-war Jewish childhood. It includes a scene where the young characters grapple with their fear of the Nazis by playing make-believe.
Elisa Zuritsky, 53, a TV writer and producer behind shows like “Sex and the City,” “Odd Mom Out” and “Smash,” remembers watching “The Brady Bunch” on TV in the early 1970s — a time when Jewish themes were far less common on screen — and hoping they might include a Jewish moment or character.
“I started reading Judy Blume books and the thrill that there were any Jewish characters in her books and heroines and narrators of her stories was monumental, I think, for me,” said Zuritsky, who grew up attending Jewish day school in Philadelphia. “I so rarely saw Jews anywhere in the popular culture that I consumed.”
Rereading the books as an adult, Zuritsky said, “what struck me the most, and what I think I was responding to as a kid, was how unadorned and unapologetically honest she let her narrators be.” She aspired to be just as honest in her own writing about women’s life experiences.
“There’s a direct line between reading Judy Blume books and being an adult writing for ‘Sex and the City.’ It’s pulling from the same well,” she said. “The bar was set for me personally by [Judy Blume].”
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Carrie Prejean Boller ousted from White House Religious Liberty Commission following antisemitism row
(JTA) — Catholic right-wing activist Carrie Prejean Boller has been removed from the White House Religious Liberty Commission over what the chair called her “political agenda” during a public hearing on antisemitism this week.
The announcement of Prejean Boller’s removal by Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, an evangelical Christian, on Wednesday came after Prejean Boller spurned calls to resign from her post amid mounting backlash over her remarks on Monday.
“Carrie Prejean Boller has been removed from President Trump’s Religious Liberty Commission,” Patrick wrote in a post on X. “No member of the Commission has the right to hijack a hearing for their own personal and political agenda on any issue. This is clearly, without question, what happened Monday in our hearing on antisemitism in America. This was my decision.”
During Monday’s hearing, Prejean Boller, who was named to the commission in June, argued that anti-Zionism is not antisemitic and said her Catholic faith prohibits her from supporting Israel.
“I’m a Catholic, and Catholics do not embrace Zionism, just so you know, so are all Catholics antisemites?” said Prejean Boller, who wore a pin depicting the American and Palestinian flags.
She also defended conservative influencers Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson against antisemitism allegations, later receiving praise from Owens on social media for her defense.
Following Patrick’s announcement of Prejean Boller’s removal, Owens decried the decision in a post on X, which featured a host of antisemitic conspiracy theories.
“Carrie didn’t hijack anything. You hosted a performative Zionist hearing meant to neuter the Christian faith. Carrie spoke truth, as a Catholic, and Christians, the Truth cannot be defeated. Zionists are naturally hostile to Catholics because we refuse to bend the knee to revisionist history and support the mass slaughter and rape of innocent children for occult Baal worshipers. Your decision will only further the Christian enlightenment which is taking place in this country. And for that, we thank you. ✝️,” wrote Owens in the post, which was reposted by Prejean Boller. “@CarriePrejean1 said no to selling her soul.”
Prejean Boller’s removal drew praise from Shabbos Kestenbaum, an antisemitism activist who was invited to speak on Monday’s panel and had previously called for Prejean Boller’s removal.
“We spoke about Christian Americans and Jewish Americans being under assault. She was interested in discussing the Middle East and non advancing American religious liberties. THANK YOU,” tweeted Kestenbaum.
The post Carrie Prejean Boller ousted from White House Religious Liberty Commission following antisemitism row appeared first on The Forward.
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Art theft, angels and neo-Nazis force a reckoning with the past in ‘The Tavern at the End of History’
Tavern At The End of History
Morris Collins
Dzanc Books, 326pp, $27.95
In Morris Collins’ novel about two directionless adults on the hunt for a famous work of art presumed to have been stolen during the Holocaust, one character theorizes that “the only way towards a moral life” is to let go of the past. But Tavern At the End of History a follow up to Collins’ debut novel — the post-colonial thriller Horse Latitudes — is all about remembering, even that which is painful, and reckoning with it.
When readers are first introduced to Jacob, his inappropriate remarks to a student have cost him his professorship and his marriage, and he’s become an alcoholic. At a park in Brooklyn, he meets Baer, an impoverished Orthodox man living in a ramshackle apartment with only a fat orange cat to keep him company. As it turns out, they are both connected to the disgraced Kabbalah scholar Alex Baruch.
After meeting Baruch at a conference in Berlin, Jacob became a devoted follower. Even after Baruch was exposed for lying about being a German Holocaust survivor, Jacob remained loyal and has agreed to meet with Baruch at his sanitarium in Maine the same weekend Baruch plans to auction off a sketch by the deceased Jewish artist Alexander Lurio.
Baer reveals that the sketch had belonged to his family before the war, but, he says, it was confiscated by the Nazis. Jacob agrees go to Maine and look for the sketch with Baer’s cousin Rachel, an art historian still reeling from her husband’s suicide after she helped him leave the Orthodox community. But art isn’t the only interesting thing on Baruch’s private island. There are neo-Nazis, an erotic statue garden, otherworldly entities, and an eccentric group of Jews, although it’s unclear if they are fellow visitors of the sanitarium or patients.
Jacob, Rachel, and the other Jews at the sanitarium are incessantly haunted by the past — for Baruch, this becomes literal, when a friend he presumed had died in the Holocaust appears at his doorstep. The oddball group spends their five days in Maine, primarily telling stories about their trauma, all linked to the Holocaust either through their own experiences or those of their parents. It may be doubtful that there is any sense to be derived from tragedy, but they try their very best.
For Baruch, this means trying to justify lying about his past and doing unspeakable things to make his life easier. Jacob funnels his confusion into philosophical debates about how — or even if — the Holocaust and Israel should be understood in relation to one another. Rachel seems to believe misfortune can be rectified as she hunts for the stolen Lurio sketch.
The book often veers into unsettling territory, sometimes painting overwhelmingly disturbing scenes from the Holocaust, but Collins’ illustrative writing keeps the story engaging, even in its bleakest moments. His world-building is so convincing it’s almost incomprehensible that the Lurio works are fictionalized. Even the enigmatic Alex Baruch and the fake writings Collins “quotes” from feel real.
Because the book takes place in 2017, some of its musings on Israel and antisemitism feel less jarring than they could be. The characters watch the Charlottesville Unite the Right rally on the television, scenes that could now easily be substituted with more alarming images of government officials cozying up to neo-Nazis. The discussions about the Holocaust and Zionism feel less edgy than they may have almost a decade ago, as so much new scholarship questioning the role of memory and trauma in the creation of Israel has come out.
The book ends with some ambiguity about what exactly transpires on the island and how our characters will be able to move on. Still, Collins crafts a compelling art mystery, buttressed by a tale of a group of lost souls trying to find meaning in a world that sometimes feels hopeless.
The post Art theft, angels and neo-Nazis force a reckoning with the past in ‘The Tavern at the End of History’ appeared first on The Forward.
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Netanyahu returns to Washington — this time to shape a deal with Iran, not fight one
When President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu meet at the White House today – their 6th meeting in the U.S. in the last year – their discussion will focus on a shared commitment to confronting the Iranian nuclear threat, but the stakes are different for each of them.
For Trump, a nuclear agreement could cement his legacy as a peacemaker, perhaps even earn him a long-coveted Nobel Peace Prize. For Netanyahu, a deal could bolster his political standing back home in a difficult election year.
In 2015, when President Obama was on the verge of signing a nuclear deal with Iran, Netanyahu cast himself as the indispensable interpreter of the Iranian threat to Washington, as he has again. But back then, Netanyahu came to publicly oppose what he called “a very bad” Iran deal, pushing back against the U.S. president. Now, he is visiting the White House with the hope of shaping U.S. policy on Iran, not challenging the president.
Trump has described the first round of discussions with Iran as “very good,” even as U.S. aircraft carriers and other military assets build up in the region. He has insisted that Tehran is “wanting to make a deal very badly.” Israel, for its part, has made clear that any agreement must go beyond limits on uranium enrichment and also address Iran’s ballistic missile program and its network of regional proxies – Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis – that have been attacking Israel.
Netanyahu has said he plans to present the president with Israel’s approach to the nuclear talks led by Trump’s close advisers, son-in-law Jared Kushner and Mideast envoy Steve Witkoff.
Netanyahu is betting that intimacy equals influence. That being the leader who shows up in person — again and again — ensures Israel is not outflanked as decisions are made. Last June, that strategy appeared to pay off. Netanyahu launched a charm offensive aimed at drawing Trump into a more active role in dismantling Iran’s nuclear program. If talks fail, Trump could act again. “Either we will make a deal, or we will have to do something very tough like last time,” Trump told Axios.
But the frequency of these meetings also reflects some vulnerability. It showcases a prime minister who cannot afford distance and disagreement with the White House.
The domestic clock is ticking
The longest-serving Israeli leader is facing a real risk that Israel’s legislature, the Knesset, will dissolve in the coming weeks if his coalition fails to resolve the explosive issue of military conscription for Haredi yeshiva students. The Haredi parties have threatened to vote against the budget ahead of the March 31 deadline — a move that would trigger elections as early as June.
If Netanyahu emerges from the White House visit with rhetorical alignment or symbolic support, he could buy himself time and political oxygen.
These gestures matter for Israel, where the education minister, Yoav Kisch, has formally invited Trump to attend the Israel Prize ceremony on Independence Day in Jerusalem to receive the prestigious award for a “Unique Contribution to the Jewish People.” Israeli officials have also invited him to participate in the annual torch-lighting ceremony, one of the most emotionally charged moments on the Israeli civic calendar.
If Trump accepts the invitation and travels to Israel again, it would be a political gift of the highest order. For Netanyahu’s supporters, that imagery could energize turnout and blunt opposition momentum. For undecided voters, it reinforces a familiar argument: Whatever Netanyahu’s flaws at home, replacing him would risk destabilizing Israel’s most important relationship abroad and its closest ally in any confrontation with Iran.
But Trump’s current position on Iran may still cross Netanyahu’s red lines. And Trump has shown before that he is willing to act unilaterally, even without backing from allies.
Still, he is very popular in Israel, and that benefits Netanyahu. A new survey by the Jewish People Policy Institute showed that 73% of Israelis rate Trump as a better-than-average U.S. president for Israel’s interests and 54% of Jews in Israel view Trump as one of the best presidents in U.S. history.
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