opinion
Edmund Case
A fter watching “Are You There, God?
It’s Me, Margaret” with one of my
grandchildren, I’m very concerned
that the thousands of tweens and teens
who watch the movie will accept, as true,
its very negative message about religion in
general and interfaith marriage in particular.

The movie is based on a book Judy
Blume wrote in 1970, a long time ago. That
date does flash on the screen when the
movie begins, but it’s easy to forget that
you’re watching a story based on things as
they were over 50 years ago. The movie’s
treatment of puberty, pre-teens kissing and
mean girls ages well, although I’m no expert
on those issues.

But the ways people experience inter-
faith marriage and religion today are very
different. The most dramatic part of the story is
how Margaret’s Christian mother’s parents
cut off contact with her when she married
Margaret’s Jewish father — and had no contact with
their granddaughter for 12 years.

It’s true that even today some non-Orthodox
Jews react very harshly if their children fall in love
with someone who is not Jewish. That definitely
happened more in the 1970s, when there was not
yet much interfaith marriage and the taboo against
it was still high. My mother’s father literally sat shiva
when a first cousin of mine intermarried in the 1960s.

When I married in 1974, my parents were unhappy
that my wife was Christian and, while my wife’s
parents never said anything, we learned much later
that her father was unhappy that I was Jewish.

But they all put love of their family over those
preferences, and they all had very loving relation-
ships with our Jewish children.

Both of our children married partners from differ-
ent faith backgrounds; I am pretty sure that our
Christian machatunim (their spouses’ parents) were
as delighted with these marriage choices as we
were. Our grandchildren are adored by their two
Jewish grandparents and two from different faith
backgrounds. I am afraid that the tweens and teens who watch
the movie will not understand that its depiction of
parents cutting off contact with their children for
14 MAY 11, 2023 | JEWISH EXPONENT
marrying someone from a different religion has
fading relevance in our world today. As far back as
2000, an American Jewish Committee study found
that 56% of American Jews did not oppose inter-
faith marriage, and 80% said it was inevitable in an
open society. The most recent Pew study of Jewish
Americans found that only 22% of Jews said it was
very important that their grandchildren marry Jews.

Meanwhile, Pew found that the number of Americans
who have a spouse from a different religious group
than their own rose from 19% who wed before 1960 to
39% who wed after 2010 — suggesting taboos have
fallen among non-Jews as well.

Viewers of the movie won’t understand that people
realize now that giving up a connection with children
and grandchildren deprives one of so much love, it’s
just not worth doing.

The second largely out-of-date part of the story is
how Margaret’s parents do not practice any religion
— they don’t celebrate Christmas or Chanukah —
and tell Margaret she can pick a religion when she’s
an adult. Margaret is clearly curious about religious
matters — after all, as the title says, she’s always
trying to talk to God.

I’m afraid that kids who watch the movie will not
understand that today it is rare for Jewish-Christian
couples to decide not to have any religion in
their lives. The recent Pew study found that
57% of interfaith couples raise their children
as Jewish only; that may include celebrating
Christian holidays in a not-religious way,
or it may not. The study found that 12% of
parents raise their children partly Jewish
and partly another religion. Some 30% do
not raise their children Jewish at all; they
may be raised Christian only, maybe with or
without Jewish holidays, or with no religion
at all.

There’s no suggestion in the movie that
for Jewish-Christian interfaith families like
Margaret’s, engaging in a religious commu-
nity — whether Jewish, Christian, or both
— can be a profound source of meaning
and connection. Instead, the message is
that religion is boring and confusing. In
the movie’s synagogue scene, everything is
unfamiliar to Margaret because she had no
prior experience, and it’s incomprehensible
because it’s all in Hebrew. I’m afraid that kids
who watch the movie will have no idea that
Jewish worship services can be lively and
meaningful — even with lots of Hebrew.

The dramatic climax of the movie is a scene
in which the Christian grandparents show up to
say that Margaret should be baptized. They’ve
had no contact with her for 12 years. The Jewish
grandmother’s declaration that Margaret is Jewish
because she went to services once is equally ridic-
ulous. In more than 25 years of working with and
studying interfaith families, I almost never encoun-
tered this kind of conflict. I’m afraid viewers won’t
understand that this kind of fighting over a grand-
daughter’s religious identity — instead of respecting
her parents’ decisions about religion — thankfully is
very rare.

Fiction seems to need conflict. There is a paucity
of positive messaging about interfaith families being
happily engaged in fulfilling religious communities
with supportive grandparents. Perhaps those stories
wouldn’t sell — but they are the reality for so many
interfaith families. Unfortunately, this movie will leave
tween and teen viewers — especially those from
interfaith families — questioning that reality. ■
Edmund Case is the retired founder of
InterfaithFamily (now 18Doors), president of the
Center for Radically Inclusive Judaism and an author.

LuckyTD / iStock / Getty Images Plus
‘It’s Me, Margaret’ Is a Dated View
of Intermarriage



opinion
Meir Shalev, Yehonatan Geffen
Were Israeli Cultural Royalty
Gilad Halpern
O ver the last few months, since the far-right
government announced its plans for an
overarching constitutional overhaul,
Israel’s embattled liberal camp has experienced a
renaissance. Unprecedented mobilization on the part of protest-
ing masses, business leaders and the IDF vanguard
has left the government in disarray and, in the wake
of a seemingly endless string of electoral defeats,
invigorated the left to an extent that it had not seen
since the 1990s. The left may be dead, but it is not
quite buried yet.

But amid this process of rejuvenation and weeks
before Israel celebrated its 75th anniversary, the
Israeli left experienced two symbolic blows in ironic
proximity when two cultural titans died within days
of each other.

Meir Shalev, an eminent novelist, and Yehonatan
Geffen, an incredibly prolific journalist, author and
songwriter, were also prominent public intellectuals.

Both spent decades dabbling in current affairs as
columnists for the mass-circulation dailies Yedioth
Aharonoth and Maariv, respectively.

Shalev was 74 when he died on April 11. Geffen,
who died on April 19, was 76.

The symbolism did not stop at their premature
and almost simultaneous passing. It was, rather, the
final chapter of two lives that also began in great
proximity: Shalev and Geffen were born a little over
a year apart in the agricultural community of Nahalal,
the Camelot of the Labor Zionism movement. Both
were descendants of Zionist aristocracy: Shalev’s
father was the Jerusalemite author and educator
Yitzhak Shalev, and Geffen’s maternal uncle was the
legendary general-turned-politician Moshe Dayan.

Like many of their cohort, they were groomed for the
driving seat of the newborn state of Israel.

Their formidable life’s work, thus, was largely an
ongoing attempt to deal with the burden bestowed
upon them by their pedigrees. And this is where
they differ, despite the eerie similarities in their
biographies. Many of Shalev’s novels, especially the earlier ones,
were loving tributes to his lineage. They included “A
Pigeon and A Boy,” which is set during the War of
Independence and won the National Jewish Book
Award in 2006, and “The Blue Mountain,” set on a
moshav (an agricultural cooperative) shortly before
the founding of Israel. Though never overly senti-
mental and always strewn with a heavy dose of irony,
Shalev’s writings were adoring accounts of a bygone
generation, complete with their shtick and quirks and
foibles. His protagonists were shrouded in a certain
mythology, which Shalev did not labor to decon-
struct entirely; he was just attempting to humanize
and bring them down to earth.

But while Shalev looked up to his parents’ gener-
ation, Geffen blew a raspberry in their faces. He
was part of a tight cohort of musicians and artists
who grew up in Israel post-independence — a tribe
that included David Broza, Arik Einstein, Gidi Gov,
Shalom Hanoch and Yehudit Ravitz, all household
names in Israel. Geffen’s song “Could It Be Over?”,
about a timid and frail fallen soldier praised as a hero
against his will, was one of the first and best-remem-
bered anti-war songs in the Hebrew canon.

Geffen’s counterculture instincts were informed
by his great American heroes — notably the Jewish
iconoclasts Bob Dylan and Lenny Bruce — and
this admiration was in itself a jab at his upbringing,
characterized by vain parochialism masquerading
as self-sufficiency. Geffen felt more at home in New
York (where he spent several years) and Tel Aviv than
in the fields of the Jezreel Valley; his tools were not a
sickle and a plow, but rather a pack of cigarettes and
a bottle of whiskey.

Shalev, in his political writing, also advocated for
left-of-center politics that is sometimes derisively
The Israeli left experienced two symbolic blows in
ironic proximity when two cultural titans died within
days of each other.

featured on Arik Einstein’s 1973 album sporting the
deliberately ironic title “Good Old Israel,” exemplifies
the challenging relationship. From the opening line
(“They say it was fun before I was born, and every-
thing was just splendid until I arrived”), the song is
a mischievous and self-deprecating take on Israel’s
founding myths. Enumerating them one by one — the
draining of the swamps, the heroic battles for Jewish
sovereignty, the nascent Hebrew culture in the
pre-state Yishuv — Geffen sarcastically concludes:
“They had a reason to get up in the morning.”
More broadly, Geffen was bent on smashing every
aspect of the Zionist ethos. In defiance of the image
of the Hebrew warrior, of which his uncle Moshe was
the poster boy, Geffen was an adamant pacifist as
well as, famously, a very bad soldier himself. Having
been called for reserve service during the first
Lebanon War, in 1982, he was performing for soldiers
ahead of the IDF offensive on Beirut when he was
dragged off stage by the commanding officer for
calling on the troops to refuse. His song “The Little
Prince of Company B” (sung by Shem-Tov Levy),
described as “Ashkenazi”: moderate, civil, Western in
its orientation, calling to rally around a common good
— a type of political discourse that, as recent events
show, speaks to fewer and fewer Israelis. “The Israeli
public is moving more and more to the right. The
war in 1967 may have destroyed Israel,” he told an
interviewer in 2017. “We took a big bite that is now
suffocating us. All Israel has done since 1967 is deal
with aspects of the occupation. Israel has not been
dealing with the things I feel it should deal with. With
my political views, I am a minority in Israel.”
Shalev was a pastor of sorts; Geffen was sometimes
a Jeremiah and sometimes a court jester, and
often both.

They were representatives of two distinct streams
within the traditionally fragmented Israeli left; the
very same left that, despite the current resur-
gence, seems too often to have more streams than
members. ■
Gilad Halpern is an Israeli journalist, broadcaster and
media historian.

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