relatively less attention until now. Judy Blume is full of details about who belonged to synagogues when. Who went to Hebrew school and who didn’t bother. When intermarriage caused tensions and when was it a non- issue. As someone who clocks things like this when reading about a Jewish subject, I appreciated it. Blume herself is not observant. Friends, husbands, fictional protagonists—some have been Jewish, some have not. It would have been possible to write a biogra- phy of Blume where this fact about her was offered as an ancestral aside. Possible, but with a key piece missing: Oppenheimer connects her background to her free and open attitude toward sexual and bodily matters: “The liberal Judaism of B’nai Israel, the temple to which her family paid dues but which they seldom attended, had no particular concern with pubescent girls’ sexuality; she would have heard no sermons on the sins of the flesh.” A different author might have assumed that Blume’s lack of religiosity would make her Jewishness immaterial. (Indeed, one might say that many of the other writers who
movie Barbie , as in the doll. Girlhood — or the idea of it, at any rate —was in, as was a kind of palatable, upmarket, superficially progressive, youth-centric feminism. Blume’s fiction, much of it about the everyday travails of young, white, financially comfortable American women, may have been a half-century old, but it fit within this later moment’s cultural preoccupations. Blume-mania peaked in early 2023 with the release of both a much-hyped film version of Margaret and the documentary Judy Blume Forever. A Molly Ringwald– authored Time magazine article announced Blume as one of the year’s 100 most influential people. Then vibes shift- ed, due to changing trends and bigger-picture events. October 7 and its aftermath changed the discourse sur- rounding Jewish authors. ( Judy Blume makes no mention of Blume’s attitudes toward Israel, nor is there any reason it ought to. The slight bit of digging I did into the matter suggests this is just not her area.) And Donald Trump’s 2024 election was a blow to, among other movements, the feminism of women’s marches and pussy hats.
JUDY BLUME IS A BOOK ABOUT JUDY BLUME, BUT IT’S ALSO A SOCIAL HISTORY OF TWENTIETH CENTURY AMERICAN JEWISH LIFE — AN ASPECT OF BLUME’S LIFE THAT HAS GOTTEN RELATIVELY LESS ATTENTION UNTIL NOW. THIS IS AN IMPORTANT OVERSIGHT.
The last while has seen the emergence of a crowded field of Blume-content creators. There were all manner of articles, interviews, and posts in 2023, and in July 2024 another American Jewish journalist, Rachelle Bergstein, published the bestselling The Genius of Judy: How Judy Blume Rewrote Childhood for All of Us. Oppenheimer’s new effort stands out both in depth (again, the power of “authorized”) and in its dual function as a biography of Blume and real time meta-commentary about the Blume revival itself: “While complimentary, this drumbeat of ex- altation could draw attention away from the complexity of Judy’s work; it made her both bigger and smaller, as if she belonged on a postage stamp rather than on a bookshelf.”
have covered Blume until now have made exactly this assumption.) But this is an important oversight, and Oppenheimer has the complex understanding of Jewish identity needed to convey how it relates to her life and work. Blume’s childhood knowledge of the Holocaust — partial and long-distance as it was — may also have shaped her thinking regarding how much chil- dren could or should be shielded from when it came to upsetting real-world events. Writes Oppenheimer, “Having grown up in the shadow of the Holocaust, she was clear-eyed about evil and human frailty.”
JUDY BLUME: A WOMAN
JUDY BLUME: A JEW
BLUME’S CIRCUMSCRIBED childhood aspirations (wife, mother, movie star, librarian) were very much a function of the times in which she was raised: the era of Blume’s youth in terms of how stifling it was to women generally and Blume in particular. She married
JUDY BLUME IS A BOOK about Judy Blume, but it’s also a social history of 20th-century American Jewish life — an aspect of Blume’s life that has gotten
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