Addie Swartz has been selected by Jewish Women International as one of the 2008 Women to Watch for her work creating the “Beacon Street Girls” book series and website.
Photo courtesy Addie Swartz
Meet Addie Swartz
Addie Swartz will discuss her “Beacon Street Girls” series at Congregation B’nai Israel in Rumson on Sunday, Nov. 16, at 1:30 p.m. The event is free and open to the public; a light lunch will be served. To make reservations, which are requested by Nov. 1, contact RSVP@cbirumson.org.
Information on the BSG series is available at www.beaconstreetgirls.com.
October 7, 2008
Addie Swartz, a former Rumson resident and member of Congregation B’nai Israel in Rumson, has been selected by Jewish Women International as one of its 2008 Women to Watch.
The organization honored Swartz for her work creating the “Beacon Street Girls” book series and website for preteen girls. Her series, created in 2002, aims to provide positive role models and healthy messages for girls in the nine-to-13 age bracket.
Swartz is one of 10 Jewish women from across the country who will receive the JWI award at a ceremony on Dec. 8 at the Hilton Washington in Washington, DC.
She will appear at B’nai Israel on Sunday, Nov. 16, to discuss the Beacon Street series, which charts the course of five seventh-grade friends.
“Women to Watch honors extraordinary leaders,” said Loribeth Weinstein, executive director of the Washington-based JWI. “Jewish women make crucial contributions in their professions, their communities, and in society at large, and this award truly accentuates their impact.”
Swartz, who now lives in Concord, Mass., with her husband and two teenage daughters, still spends many summer weekends with her parents, Dr. Harry and Renee Swartz of Rumson.
The teachings she learned from her parents and her religious education at B’nai Israel, where she also became a bat mitzva, led to the founding of B*tween Productions in 2002, she told NJ Jewish News. The company has produced 18 “Beacon Street Girls” books (there are approximately 700,000 copies in print) and an interactive BSG website to provide healthy media and role models for ‘tween’ girls.
The company is based in Lexington, Mass., where Swartz and a team of writers and child-development experts develop the BSG books and website.
“This is how I’m practicing tikun olam, and that’s the philosophy of the company,” Swartz said. “My role model is my mother, who taught me to find something I was passionate about and to try and make it happen. She always said you can make a difference — you just have to make the effort.”
Her discomfort with many of the media images that are presented to tween girls was one of the reasons Swartz created B*tween Productions and the BSG books.
“Every young girl is not thin, beautiful, and rich,” she said. “And there are many other challenges, such as school cliques, parental divorce, obesity, being the new kid at school, and bullying. Kids deal with lots of issues, and the BSG books are designed to help them cope with these things.”
‘Positive images’
Swartz’s two daughters also inspired the book series. A few years ago, she and one of them were looking at a fashion display in a prominent department store. The display featured a photo of a woman who was unclothed above the waist.
“One of my daughter’s friends asked, ‘Why do they have to do that?’ It was a good question, and it was a real turning point for me. I started to think about ways to increase girls’ self-esteem by offering realistic, positive images and healthy media alternatives.”
Swartz, who graduated from Stanford University and received an MBA from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, has worked for the Disney, Reebok, and Lotus companies. She said that the not-for-profit B*tween Productions is a challenging concept.
“It would be a whole lot easier to just worry about building a profitable business or just creating pure entertainment that sells,” Swartz said during an interview with JWI. “But it’s all worth it when mothers come up and thank me for getting their daughters to read. Or to see on our website that every day, girls are finding themselves, all within the world of BSG.”
She remains committed to making the world a better place, and said there will be more BSG books.
“By making entertaining, meaningful stories and a safe, enriching on-line space, girls can strive to achieve their best,” Swartz said. “I want to make the world a better place for girls — a safer place, a more positive place, a place that encourages girls to reach beyond themselves to achieve their dreams. This is my contribution to tikun olam.”
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