Grow­ing up, I was the only Jew I knew with a Christ­mas tree.

My moth­er — who is Ital­ian Amer­i­can and con­vert­ed to Judaism for my Dad — dec­o­rat­ed the tree in blue and sil­ver, topped it with a six-point­ed star, and called it a Hanukkah bush. But any­one with eyes could see its true nature — conifer, con­i­cal, and com­i­cal­ly erect­ed through the last week of Decem­ber every year.

And yes, it presided over piles of presents on the morn­ing of Decem­ber 25th.

Liv­ing in sub­ur­ban New Jer­sey in the mid-1980’s, I didn’t know any reli­gious­ly blend­ed fam­i­lies like mine. So imag­ine my sur­prise when, around the age of nine or ten, I opened up a scuffed-up pur­ple paper­back with a wist­ful-look­ing blonde girl on the cov­er. It was called Are You There God? It’s Me, Mar­garet. I wasn’t con­vinced it looked inter­est­ing but at that age, I read any­thing I could get my hands on. 

I was about to embark on a jour­ney, one that has brought me to my forth­com­ing book The Genius of Judy: How Judy Blume Rewrote Child­hood for All of Us.

“Are you there God? It’s me, Mar­garet,” the first line read. ​“We’re mov­ing today. I’m so scared God.”

Was this some sort of reli­gious book? I won­dered. Not my thing, but I kept going.

Today, Judy Blume​’s 1970s clas­sic is best known for its hon­est dis­cus­sions of puber­ty and men­stru­a­tion. Gen­er­a­tions of girls grew up won­der­ing if we could rush along our devel­op­ment by swing­ing our arms and chant­i­ng we must, we must, we must increase our bust! 

Yet those threads weren’t what grabbed me as a first-time, pre-ado­les­cent read­er of the book. Back then, I was fas­ci­nat­ed by a scene that took place in chap­ter five.

Eleven-year-old Mar­garet has made new friends in the fic­tion­al town of Far­brook, New Jer­sey. They’ve formed a secret club, called the PTS’s (short for Pre-Teen Sen­sa­tions). As they’re work­ing out the rules of the club — going by snazzy alias­es, main­tain­ing lists of their crush­es in a ​“boy book” — one of the girls asks Mar­garet if she goes to Hebrew school.

Mar­garet responds no, and that she doesn’t go to Sun­day school either. ​“I’m not any reli­gion,” Mar­garet admits after the girls press her.

This makes her an anom­aly and the PTS’s want to know every­thing. ​“See uh…my father was Jew­ish and uh…my moth­er was Chris­t­ian,” Mar­garet stum­bles to explain. ​“My mother’s par­ents, who live in Ohio, told her that they didn’t want a Jew­ish son-in-law. If she want­ed to ruin her life that was her business.” 

Her par­ents eloped, she tells her new friends. And giv­en all the trou­ble reli­gion caused in their rela­tion­ship, they decid­ed to leave both their faiths behind.

This wasn’t my sit­u­a­tion. Tech­ni­cal­ly we were Jew­ish, Hanukkah bush notwith­stand­ing. Unlike Mar­garet, I did attend Hebrew school. I cel­e­brat­ed the Jew­ish hol­i­days with my Dad’s fam­i­ly and Christ­mas and East­er with my mom’s side, who were all still vary­ing lev­els of prac­tic­ing and non-prac­tic­ing Catholics. Nobody seemed to have much of an issue with the whole thing.

And yet, I still felt a lit­tle bit dif­fer­ent from my peers. Cel­e­brat­ing Christ­mas with a last name like Berg­stein was per­fect­ly fine with­in my extend­ed fam­i­ly, but I some­times found it hard to explain to my play­mates and their par­ents. Ques­tions were asked. Eye­brows were raised. The com­mu­ni­ty I grew up in wasn’t the most diverse or frankly, open-mind­ed, back then.

I relat­ed to Margaret’s feel­ings of oth­er­ness as she stum­bled through telling her friends that she had no plans to join the local JCC or YMCA.

These scenes of Mar­garet nav­i­gat­ing her family’s reli­gious back­ground made me feel seen.

Judy Blume​’s books are so spe­cial because they tack­led top­ics that very few oth­er authors were bring­ing up with kids at the time. That includes the bold sub­jects she’s become best-known for — puber­ty, mas­tur­ba­tion, and vir­gin­i­ty — and also oth­er less-dis­cussed issues that arose as fam­i­lies got more com­pli­cat­ed in the 1970s and 1980s, like divorce, dis­abil­i­ty, racial dis­crim­i­na­tion and yes, dual-faith homes like my own. In The Genius of Judy, I explore how Blume’s hon­est sto­ry­telling shaped her pow­er­ful legacy.

Blume took on these sub­jects because she saw the world chang­ing around her. Even though she was raised Jew­ish, she rec­og­nized the way that reli­gion might be an obsta­cle for a kid like Mar­garet, whose par­ents had been hurt by it and vowed to leave it behind. To tell Margaret’s sto­ry, Blume drew from the pri­vate rela­tion­ship with God she her­self had as a child. She wor­ried her beloved father (a den­tist named Rudolph Suss­man, who she affec­tion­ate­ly called Doey-Bird) would die young of a heart attack like two of his old­er broth­ers. And so she prayed for him, in a secre­tive, rit­u­al­is­tic way, out­side of the con­fines of any orga­nized religion.

As a writer, Blume under­stood that chil­dren were more com­pli­cat­ed than many peo­ple gave them cred­it for. They could get into fights on the school bus one morn­ing and think crit­i­cal­ly about God that same night before bed. She made so many young read­ers feel that their expe­ri­ences were normal.

After all these years, I’m still grate­ful for Mar­garet — and for Judy.