Featured Interview With Judy Gruen
Tell us a little about yourself. Where were you raised? Where do you live now?
I was raised in Van Nuys, California, attended college at both UCLA and UC Berkeley, and have raised my family in Los Angeles as well. I grew up with a terrific little Yorkshire terrier mix with terribly buck teeth named Jennifer; last year we had say a very sad goodbye to our beagle/Lab mix, Ken, who delighted our family for 14 years — though he also ate through a lot of furniture during moments of stress.
At what age did you realize your fascination with books? When did you start writing?
I was fascinated with stories from my earliest years! Before I could read on my own my parents read to me, and I insisted they read my favorite Wizard of Oz story over and over and over again. I have just naturally gravitated to the written word, in the form of books, word games, word scrambles, etc.
My first published work was in a college newspaper at UCLA. When I transferred to UC Berkeley I became the editor of the Jewish student quarterly magazine on campus. I loved working on the paper way more than studying for Poly Sci, that’s for sure. Very fortunately for me, I got full time work as a writer right after college for health care trade magazines, then got my master’s in journalism at the Medill School of Journalism (Northwestern University).
I’ve never done any other kind of work other than wordsmithing. In the last few years I have also become a book editor and writing coach, in addition to the essays and features I have written for outlets including the Wall Street Journal, Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, Aish.com, Jewish Journal, and many other outlets.
The Skeptic and the Rabbi is my fifth book. Three of my previous titles are humor books, and one is an MBA admissions guidebook co-authored with Linda Abraham, founder and president of Accepted.com, where I also worked as a consultant for 20 years.
Who are your favorite authors to read? What is your favorite genre to read. Who Inspires you in your writings?
I have so many favorites! They include many authors of the past, because I am very turned off my the vulgarities and coarse language in so many modern books, when it is simply not necessary, and, to me, it detracts from the storyline and shows a laziness in the author.
I love the writings of Edith Wharton — she has a majestic command of language, and she was also a self-educated woman! Her short story collection “Roman Fever” is incredible. I also love the work of Sinclair Lewis, Elizabeth Gaskill, and Anthony Trollope. Barbara Pym was more contemporary, a British writer whose quiet novels about single women in post-WW II London have much sly humor and astute societal observations. “Excellent Women” is my favorite of her works.
More contemporary authors I adore include Herman Wouk, memoirist Ruth Reichel, Fredrik Backman, Marilynne Robinson, Tracy Chevalier, and Anita Shreve. As a humorist, I also adore Alexander McCall Smith, Christopher Buckley, Erma Bombeck, and E.B. White, who many people do not realize also wrote for adults.
Tell us a little about your latest book?
“The Skeptic and the Rabbi: Falling in Love with Faith,” took me by surprise in many ways. First, I had not thought of doing a memoir at all, but about seven years ago I was asked to contribute to an essay collection about life-changing people or experiences. Immediately I knew I had to write about Rabbi Daniel Lapin, who was the first teacher of Torah I had ever met or was willing to listen to. I also knew the title of that essay would be “The Skeptic and the Rabbi” and that one day I would want to expand it into a memoir.
I was born in 1960, and was very aware of the social upheavals of the late 1960s. My older brother, Allan, also died in a car crash in 1970, and the combination of this family tragedy and the social upheavals and talk of Vietnam made my life feel very insecure. Amazingly, none of us spoke of our feelings about it; it just “wasn’t done,” which I think was more a statement about my parents’ and grandparents’ generation. We all had to live with our emotional trauma alone.
I was still a happy and optimistic person overall, driven to achieve great things in the world of journalism. I really liked being Jewish but knew that Orthodoxy could never be for me. I believe it was sexist and outdated.
Meeting my husband, Jeff, in 1984, I was forced to rethink my positions, because Jeff was categorically superior to every other man I had dated. He was thinking about life’s important things, including God, and what God wanted from us, and what we might owe Him in return. I realized that my beliefs about Orthodoxy were not borne out from any first-hand experiences, and I agreed to go with Jeff to a Torah class taught by Rabbi Lapin.
Jeff and I dated for more than two years and we argued a lot about theology. Frankly, I have no idea why he put up with me for so long. But I found the intellectual rigor and psychological insights of Torah to be so compelling that I also had to admit I had condemned Torah observance not on false pretenses, but on zero knowledge.
My memoir is about this journey, bumpy, scary, sometimes awkward, sometimes funny, and how my decision to marry Jeff and live the life of “rituals, rules and restraints” that Rabbi Lapin taught was the best decision of my life. My story is not sugar-coated. I also write about the things that frustrate and sadden me in the world of Judaism (not only Orthodoxy), and I am honest that this decision doesn’t work out as well for everyone as it has for me.
I was also driven to write this book because there have been many memoirs written by people who formerly were in ultra-Orthodox communities, and whose terrible experiences there, either through family dysfunction or overall narrowness of life choices and outlook, drove them away. While I do not question anyone else’s story, these were the only stories about Orthodox Jewish life that the secular society was seeing! It is so wrong and so unfair.
I wanted to show the beauty, the benefits, and the honest struggle involved in taking a journey toward faith. The Skeptic and the Rabbi: Falling in Love with Faith, is my chronicle of that journey. Overall, it took me about three years to write, since my first drafts were, let’s just say, not so compelling. I was willing to keep rewriting until I got it right, and I worked with some wonderful editors who guided my path.
I am pleased and proud of the result, and of the many terrific book reviews and reader reviews it has received.
Connect with the Author on their Websites and Social media profiles
Judy Gruen’s Website
Judy Gruen Facebook Page