Judith Bruder, like so many women, lived a variety of lives, often to her own astonishment.
On college campuses she was a writer, a lecturer, and a scholar; a graduate of Wellesley College who had been a campus minister at Fordham University in Manhattan. At home she was a wife, mother, grandmother, and an unwilling widow. Brooklyn-born and Long Island bred, Judy loved foreign languages, knew a smattering of many, and felt at home around the world. Her interests ranged from English Literature and addictions counseling to cooking techniques, French conversation, mystery novels and the movies.
Judy knew two religious traditions from the inside out. She was raised as a devout, believing Jew. Her first novel, Going to Jerusalem (Simon & Schuster, 1979), offered a funny, quirky, modern-day Jewish pilgrimage to the land of Israel. Then the unthinkable happened, as she found herself unexpectedly and irrevocably embarking on a spiritual journey that eventually led her to become a Roman Catholic.
She told that story in her second book, Convergence (Doubleday, 1992), about which Book-of-the-Month Club wrote: “Moving, funny, and poignant, Convergence is an autobiography of rare candor and depth.”
From My Button Box: Collected Essays in a Pandemic Time was her third book.
Most recently, Judy lived in the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts where she gratefully and delightedly received many visitors, old friends and new, a modern-day anchoress, or so it pleased her to think. She passed away on August 26, 2026. (You can read her obituary here.)
