When I speak to Marcie Maxfield (née Blumberg), author of the 2025 memoir JewGirl, she’s just wrapped some promotional book events in Michigan.
“Detroit really showed up for me,” says Maxfield, a Detroit native who’s also lived in places as far-flung as Los Angeles, Europe, and Asia. (She now calls Palm Springs home.)
Indeed, her first event packed a room at the Jewish Historical Society of Michigan in Bloomfield Hills, and her second was standing room only at Schuler Books in West Bloomfield. Attendees included her mother’s caregiver, former neighbors from the Sherwood Forest neighborhood where she grew up, and even an old boyfriend. “It was really this This Is Your Life moment,” Maxfield says.
Maxfield writes about her Detroit childhood in JewGirl. “Growing up, I thought everyone was Black or Jewish,” she notes, thanks to her happy public elementary school experience. But her perception changed after the 1967 rebellion, when her parents sent her to a private school in Grosse Pointe for sixth grade.
There, Maxfield became “the JewGirl” and thus hyperaware of her “otherness.” Her family identified as humanistic Jews, a movement founded by Detroit’s own Rabbi Sherwin Wine of the Birmingham Temple (now called the Congregation for Humanistic Judaism of Metro Detroit in Farmington Hills).
“My mother felt very aligned with [Wine], and we all really loved and respected him,” Maxfield says. “Most people don’t even know that humanistic Judaism exists … but it was there when we needed it.”
Maxfield’s travels abroad as a “tagalong spouse” largely inspired her award-winning first book, the 2021 comic novel Em’s Awful Good Fortune (Simon & Schuster). More recently, while participating in an anti-racism book club, she read several books that focused on the experience of Black American women, and they gave her an idea.
“I wanted to write a book about the intersection of being Jewish and female in a time of rising anti-Semitism and renewed attacks on women’s rights,” Maxfield says. “As things landed on the page, I realized that I was really writing about belonging.”
JewGirl tells Maxfield’s personal stories through a series of essays. One recounts her choice to have an abortion. Another reveals how pleased she’d been, at the time of her wedding, to let go of a surname that announced her Jewishness before she entered the room. “My fearlessness to write and talk about being Jewish is me today, not me as a young woman,” Maxfield says. She also explains why she now refuses to check the “white/Caucasian” box on forms and details the political pushback she received from her own writing group about the essays.
Publishers echoed the uneasy response to JewGirl. Maxfield says her first rejection came a week before the Oct. 7 attacks in Israel, and one Jewish woman in publishing said she “couldn’t touch [JewGirl] with a 10-foot pole.” After receiving overwhelmingly positive feedback from four editors in spite of the rejections, she ultimately decided to self-publish.
“I realized that this is happening to Jewish writers across the board,” she says. “It’s not about my personal experience. It’s not even about my book. It’s about how [female Jewish] voices are being perceived as toxic at this moment. As politically dangerous. … And that’s really sad.”
This story originally appeared in the September 2026 issue of Hour Detroit magazine. To read more, pick up a copy of Hour Detroit at a local retail outlet. Click here to get our digital edition.
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