Judith Bruder, like so many women, has lived a variety of lives, often to her own astonishment.On college campuses she is a writer, a lecturer, and a scholar; a graduate of Wellesley College who has been a campus minister at Fordham University in Manhattan. At home she is a wife, mother, grandmother, and most recently, an unwilling widow. Brooklyn-born and Long Island bred, Judy loves foreign languages, knows a smattering of many, and feels at home around the world. Her interests range from English Literature and addictions counseling to cooking techniques, French conversation, mystery novels and the movies.Judy knows 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."Currently Judy is dwelling in the Country of Old, in a retirement community in the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts. She rarely ventures beyond it, but gratefully and delightedly receives many visitors, old friends and new, a modern-day anchoress, or so it pleases her to think. She has also been freshly revitalized by the addition of a great-granddaughter, Casey, who is a pistol!
