(RNS) — I had weird reading habits when I was a kid.
For one thing, no one ever told me that there were certain books that boys should read, and certain books that girls should read, and that there was a mechitza (a barrier in a traditional synagogue that separates the sexes) between the two of them.
What did I know? That was how I came to devour the entire “Harriet the Spy” series.
Because, well, I liked spies.
And then, there was Judy Blume, born Judith Sussman, in 1938.
Judy Blume is one of the most important Jewish writers of the 20th century.
Judy Blume? The lady who wrote about training bras and embarrassing gym classes?
Yes, that Judy Blume. OK, she’s not Philip Roth or Saul Bellow or Cynthia Ozick. And, yes, the “serious” literary establishment never really invited her into their club.
They might have been wrong.
Mark Oppenheimer has just published the definitive biography of Blume: “Judy Blume: A Life.” As I read the biography, and as I reflected on my podcast interview with Mark, I kept thinking: Someone needs to make the Jewish case for Judy Blume.
That would be me.
Consider “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.”
That book first appeared in 1970, and it did something quietly revolutionary. It went into areas that the literature of my teen years would never have entered (and certainly not for boys): Margaret worries about puberty, friendships and popularity. More than 50 years after its publication, it’s one of the most controversial and beloved young adult novels ever written.
On one level, the book is about a young girl going through puberty. But it is also about the complexities of Jewish identity. Margaret Simon is a child of an interfaith marriage — Jewish father, Christian mother — who must navigate the landscape of religious identity.
But go back to the title of the book. I’m a sucker for anyone calling out to God.
Margaret embodies the way that Jews speak to God — direct, demanding, intimate and not a little bit combative — the style of the Psalmist, Job, Hasidic rabbis and Tevye.
That is Jewish spirituality in its most ancient form.
And, in fact, Judy Blume wrote about Margaret at a significant historical moment. This was 1970 — exactly 20 years after Jewish families had started moving to the suburbs, creating and joining synagogues and living in an Eisenhower-induced spiritual hibernation. By 1970, that was starting to change. It was precisely when American Jews were beginning to ask the same questions as Margaret: Who are we? What do we believe?
So, yes: sociology giving way to theology.
But, here is something else that was deeply, profoundly Jewish about Judy Blume.
Judaism believes that one of God’s names is emet — truth. Emet — which consists of aleph, the first letter; mem, the middle letter; and tav, the last letter — an all-compassing truth.
Judy Blume — no less than Philip Roth, but in her own way — told the truth: about bodies, divorce, the desperate longing to be normal and to fit in.
And yes, she told the truth — and in her way, no less profoundly than some of the great theologians of our time — about the God who is simultaneously absent and present.
And because of all that, Judy Blume did what any serious author might long to do: to help the reader not only to love the book, and to love literature, but to find themselves in its words. That is what distinguishes a classic: You don’t read that book; that book reads you.
And, the third big Jewish thing about Judy Blume.
For centuries, Jews lived under the watchful eyes of censors. Sometimes, they were our enemies, who looked at our sacred literature, and sometimes, as with the Talmud in the Middle Ages, consigned our words to the flames. Sometimes, Jews themselves were the censors: angry at that which deviated from the truth, as they knew it, or fearful that Jewish words would provoke persecution, or worse.
Which brings us to American children’s literature, circa mid 1900s. If you were an author, you lived under the gaze of publishers who wanted to sanitize your prose; school boards who wanted to censor your prose; and anxious parents who worried about your prose. Everyone would have preferred to promote a cheerful unreality.
That is how Judy Blume came to be a candidate for the prize to be the most-banned author in America. A secular Jewish woman from New Jersey became a “Joan of Arc” of the First Amendment. She became a great defender of intellectual freedom in a country that keeps trying to decide what its children should and should not be allowed to know. She worked tirelessly with the National Coalition Against Censorship, fighting on behalf of teachers and librarians who hold the line against those who would rather children remain “innocent.” Margaret came with a warning sticker — that parents might “wish to read it before your child does.”
Her book “Forever” appeared in 1975. It was, pointedly, a book for adults. But, it talked openly about teenage sexuality. Libraries banned it, schools removed it and parents protested. Judy understood that the pushback was rooted in fear. She became one of the leading defenders of intellectual freedom and the right of young people to read honestly about their own lives.
This was profoundly Jewish. We are the people who democratized learning and literacy precisely because we believed that ignorance, not knowledge, was dangerous. Judy Blume understood this not because she was a Jewish activist, but because she was a Jewish writer.
Even more than she might have even realized.
Margaret Simon is still out there asking her questions. She’s asking them in schools where books are being pulled from shelves. She’s asking them in families where religion has become a battleground and identity a burden. She’s asking them in the hearts of young people who feel like nobody — not their parents, not their teachers, not their rabbis — will tell them the truth about what it means to be alive in this messy, complicated, beautiful world.
People are still asking, and they will forever ask: “Are you there, God? It’s me (fill in your own name here).”
For as long as people ask that question, Judy Blume will be there.
