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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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Memoir of child of Holocaust survivors takes riveting twists
Book Review by Julie Kirsh (former Sun Media News Research Director)
Exclusive to The Jewish Post
“We used to Dream of Freedom, A Memoir of Family, the Holocaust, and the Stories We Don’t Tell”
By Sam Chaiton (Dundurn Press) 2024
Sam Chaiton’s memoir of growing up with Holocaust survivor parents in downtown Toronto in the 1950s is a compelling read.
Jeanne Beker, a well known Toronto fashion writer, mentions in her praise for “We used to Dream of Freedom” that her survivor parents talked incessantly about their war experiences.
My own parents, both survivors, would drop tidbits of their stories now and again. I learned to be watchful and vigilant for these rare moments of revelation. However, questioning my parents about the Holocaust, would cause them pain. I knew when to stand down.
In his memoir, Sam Chaiton tells the reader that his parents chose to remain completely silent about their wartime experiences. Poignantly their son was left with a silence that he interpreted as huge empty sound. Although the son could understand some Yiddish, his parents turned to Polish in order to keep the “kinder safe”. Outright denial of illness and death was part of his parents’ way of coping.
Born in the 1950s on Palmerston Boulevard in downtown Toronto, Chaiton paints a vivid picture of his youth as the middle son of five boys. He describes the mayhem of a household of barked orders and punishment by his father’s belt. His mother, as with many other survivors, was obsessed with eating and food. Chaiton learned early that rejecting his controlling mother’s food was one of his few weapons. “It’s hard not to do what a Holocaust survivor wants you to”, he says. Chaiton had to stare down two parents both with tattoos.
Dance proved to be a saving grace for Chaiton. On the dance floor, with a partner, the gates of happiness and permission to be oneself, opened. The Toronto Dance Theatre in Yorkville was a salvation and home for Chaiton. Also important to Chaiton was a family – not his troubled blood family but a chosen one – a commune.
In 1973, after a sojourn in New York, Chaiton decided that he was not a performance dancer. Back in Toronto as he pointedly danced with his mother at his brother’s wedding, she told him that he was her favourite child, imposing “the psychological damage that parental favouritism caused”.
Living in a commune with a chosen family afforded Chaiton the freedom to dig deep into his psyche, face his traumatic upbringing and tear down the rigid rules of society and the biological family. At a certain point, for reasons he explains in the book, Chaiton made the decision to vanish from the lives of his parents and brothers.
In 1980 the commune took up the cause of the injustice and illegal jailing of Rubin “Hurricane” Carter. Carter had been exonerated, released from prison and then reconvicted and sent back to prison.
In hindsight Chaiton wonders if his disengagement from his family caused them the same wounds and feelings of emptiness that Carter had to face when he was reincarcerated.
In 1985 while sitting in a New Jersey prison yard with friends and Carter, Chaiton had the riveting vision that he was in a concentration camp, “on a mission to liberate (his) parents – the dream of every Holocaust survivor’s child.”
In the summer of 1985, Chaiton received the news from Toronto that his parents were involved in a fatal car accident. Only after his mother’s death, was Chaiton able to acknowledge that in spite of her smothering, she gave him a sense of self worth and strength.
In 1988 Chaiton co-wrote the story of freeing Carter. One of his brothers saw him on a news broadcast, contacted him and the 20-year silence between Chaiton and his blood family was over.
Riding on the coattails of the successful release of Carter, Chaiton and some friends established an organization that continues to exist today. Innocence Canada has helped wrongfully convicted people like Guy Paul Morin, David Milgaard and Steven Truscott.
In chapter 16, entitled Wierzbnik, Chaiton finally learns about his father’s testimony published in a book, “Remembering Survival”, by a university professor. Reading about his father’s history helped Chaiton to understand the damage done to survivors, his parents’ trauma and why the home that they created for their sons after the war was so fraught.
Chaiton remarks on the interconnectedness of learning about the sufferings of his parents, his own personal struggles and the gift his father left him of being able to tell his own story.
Sam Chaiton’s profound memoir took courage and brutal honesty to write.
His book teaches that the legacy left by Holocaust survivors, along with a deep sadness, is the innate need of the children to persevere and find their own path of survival and growth.
Obituaries
CAROL SLATER (née GENSER)
With great courage on Wednesday, November 6, 2024, surrounded by her family.
Treasured daughter of the late Esther and the late Percy. Beloved wife of Ron for 69 years. Loving mother and mother-in-law of Charles and Dina Slater, Erin and Joe Battat, Adam and Kit, Claudia and the late David. Cherished grandmother of Zach, Robert and Hydi, Ben and Martha, Liam and Addison, Thom and Emeline, Max, Ilai, Emanuelle and Eli. Proud great-grandmother of Rafael, Lily, Maya, and Jojo. Special sister and sister-in-law of David and Joan Genser, Roberta and Mayer Lawee; and sister-in-law of Joel and Sheila Slater. Greatly missed by her nieces, nephews, family, friends and by all who knew her.
The family would like to thank Drs. Shamy, Lipes, Chang, the doctors, nurses and staff at the Jewish General Hospital Palliative Care Unit as well as DeyDey, Linette and everyone who took such wonderful care of our Mom.
Funeral service from Paperman & Sons, 3888 Jean Talon St. W., on Sunday, November 10 at 9:30 a.m. Livestream available. Burial in Israel.
Donations in her memory may be made to the “Carol and Ron Scholarship” c/o Mothers Matter Canada 1-604-676-8250
Publish Date: Nov 9, 2024
CAROL SLATER
(née GENSER)
With great courage on Wednesday, November 6, 2024, surrounded by her family.
Treasured daughter of the late Esther and the late Percy. Beloved wife of Ron for 69 years. Loving mother and mother-in-law of Charles and Dina Slater, Erin and Joe Battat, Adam and Kitt, Claudia and the late David. Cherished grandmother of Zach, Robert and Hydi, Ben and Martha, Liam and Addison. Proud great-grandmother of Rafael, Lily, Maya, and Jojo. Special sister and sister-in-law of David and Joan Genser, Roberta and Mayer Lawee; and sister-in-law of Joel and Sheila Slater. Greatly missed by her nieces, nephews, family, friends and by all who knew her.
The family would like to thank Drs. Shamy, Lipes, Chang, the doctors, nurses and staff at the Jewish General Hospital Palliative Care Unit as well as DeyDey, Linette and everyone who took such wonderful care of our Mom.
Funeral service from Paperman & Sons, 3888 Jean Talon St. W., on Sunday, November 10 at 9:30 a.m. Live stream available. Burial in Israel.
Donations in her memory may be made to the “Carol and Ron Scholarship” c/o Mothers Matter Canada 1-604-676-8250
Features
How to Implement a Successful Casino Marketing Strategy
Your casino stands out in your market and attracts interest. But does your audience know that? With effective marketing, you can transform your casino from an average competitor into a top industry player. We will show you proven strategies to boost your business now and in the future. And when you have proven strategies like insights from a High Roller online casinos review in Canada, the possibilities are endless.
1. Improve Visibility
With stiff competition among casinos, being easily found online is crucial. Discoverability measures how simple it is for people to find your casino.
Put yourself in the shoes of one of your guests looking for a casino. How easy is it to find yours? Try searching on different engines, checking reviews on travel sites, and looking for your casino on social media. See how often your casino appears and how well it ranks. Use tools like Moz and SEMrush to get a clear picture of your current visibility.
To increase your casino’s online visibility, there are a number of strategies you can try. First, try to create distinct landing pages for each key amenity at your casino. Incorporate relevant keywords, high-quality images, and engaging headlines.
You can also use search engine ads carefully. Follow Google’s guidelines by targeting approved countries. These include responsible gambling information on your landing pages and avoiding targeting minors. Check local regulations and test ads with relevant keywords.
Don’t forget to set up social media profiles on platforms your audience frequents. Engage in discussions about gaming, your casino, local news, and community events.
Optimize your content with keywords about your amenities, location, unique features, and events. Highlight what sets you apart so visitors can easily find you.
Use beacons or proximity marketing to attract nearby guests, especially when competing with other casinos. This helps target customers in the real world, not just online.
Form partnerships with local businesses, entertainers, event suppliers, and food vendors to boost your visibility and word of mouth.
2. Focus on Events and Group Business
Your casino offers more than gaming. You might have a luxury hotel, advanced technology, event spaces, a spa, and great restaurants. So, think about the whole picture in your marketing.
Casinos are great for big events like weddings, conferences, and reunions. Make sure your marketing targets these opportunities to attract them.
3. Identify the Jobs to Be Done
Marketers used to rely mainly on demographics, like age, income, and education, to predict behavior. Understanding audience behavior based on demographics is useful. For example, Anderson Digital notes that Boomers and Gen Xers spend 80% of their casino money on gaming and 20% on food and entertainment. In contrast, Millennials spend 30% on gaming and 70% on food, entertainment, and other services. To attract Millennial and Gen Z customers, focus on better entertainment, food options, online game components, and mobile marketing.
However, demographics alone don’t tell the whole story. For instance, knowing a group of women outside your casino are in their late 20s, college-educated, and have high-paying jobs is helpful. But, it doesn’t reveal their reasons for being there.
These women might be on a business trip with some free time, in town for a family reunion, or celebrating a bachelorette party. With just their demographic info, it’s hard to know their motivations, challenges, or needs.
This framework helps marketers understand why customers choose their products or services. Women at a casino for a bachelorette party are looking for a fun atmosphere with entertainment, food, and drinks. But if they’re there for work, they need a stress-free environment with good Wi-Fi, charging stations, and quiet spaces for meetings.
Understand what your audience wants and how they see your role. This helps you tailor your messaging, marketing, and offerings.
4. Create Positive Feedback Loops
Casinos attract customers with fun experiences like gaming, dining, and entertainment. By enhancing these positive feelings, you can boost your casino’s marketing success and encourage repeat visits.
Feedback loops happen when the result of an action is used to influence the action itself. For example, if a child makes a parent laugh, they’re likely to repeat the funny behavior to get more laughter.
Positive feedback loops make it more likely that the action will be repeated. Negative feedback loops make it less likely. You likely use positive feedback loops in your casino already. Guests who win are happy and want to play again. Those who have a bad experience are less likely to return.
You can enhance marketing by using feedback loops. After a positive experience, like winning or a great meal, encourage guests to refer others or leave reviews. If a guest uses a discount, offer another deal immediately. If your casino has a hotel, send emails encouraging future bookings right after positive experiences, like upgrades or enjoyable events.
Reply to positive feedback and reviews with invitations for future experiences. Make sure to also reward loyal customers with special offers and exclusive perks. Don’t forget to address negative feedback by turning it into a positive experience.
5. Use Social Proof
People usually trust each other more than they trust your brand. They’re more likely to listen to recommendations from friends or online reviews than your own claims.
To build trust, you need endorsements from others. Social proof means people tend to follow the actions of those they admire.
Show positive reviews on your website and social media. Record video testimonials from satisfied guests and winners. Encourage guests to share their experiences online and tag your casino. Keep an eye on reviews and respond to feedback. Set up a photo booth in the casino for guests to take winning photos. Display pictures and videos of recent winners on screens around the casino. Think about your audience’s motivations and where they get their information to find creative ways to use social proof.
6. Keep Up With Gaming Trends
Casinos are changing quickly. Online gaming, e-sports, and new tech like virtual and augmented reality are key. To stay competitive, casinos need to understand and use these trends.
As you create your casino marketing strategy, consider these key trends. E-sports are growing fast, so partnering with teams can help you reach new audiences. Virtual and AR are changing how guests experience gaming, making it more engaging from anywhere. Online casinos are becoming more popular with relaxed regulations. So, keep up with industry changes to stay competitive. Finally, as gaming tastes shift, staying updated on new trends will keep you ahead.
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