The bar mitzvah boy in this postcard photo celebrated the coming-of-age Jewish ritual in Vancouver, Canada, some time in the late 1880s. New Havener Terry Berger purchased this postcard and brought it to New Haven Free Public Library’s community room Thursday for a “Books Sandwiched In” discussion on the ritual in American life through the ages.
The discussion was led by New Haven author Mark Oppenheimer. He described writing his book Thirteen and a Day: The Bar and Bat Mitzvah Across America.
I would like to tell you what a great book Oppenheimer wrote, because he did. He traveled the country to witness boys and girls (and some elders) reading from the Torah and accepting the religious responsibilities of adult Jews. I would like to tell you how Oppenheimer combined a great eye for detail with an ability to avoid cliches about the state of religious observance. I’d urge you to buy the book by clicking here.
But I won’t do any of that, because I can’t be objective about Mark Oppenheimer and this book. That’s because I have a slew of conflicts of interest here. Some examples: I introduced him at the Thursday event at the library. Oppenheimer’s book has a chapter on New Haven which features my daughter’s bat mitzvah ceremony. I’m married to a journalist who works for Oppenheimer at his day job running the New Haven Advocate. As editor of the Advocate, Oppenheimer ran a cover story promoting this very web site.
So you get the picture.
Instead I’ll tell you what happened at the library “Books Sandwiched In” event. A room full of mostly older folks came to hear Oppenheimer talk about his research into the modern American bar and bat mitzvah ceremony and then offer their own questions and observations about the development of this ritual in America.
Oppenheimer said he started out by renting movies at Best Video with bar and bat mitzvah scenes. There weren’t many (although the scene in The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz is worth ten flicks). The scenes that did exist poked fun at the ritual. “Bar and bat mitzvahs in popular culture are presented as jokes,” Oppenheimer said. “They are something to be mocked. Why? Because of anti-Semitism? No. Because so many filmmakers are Jewish” and feel comfortable making light of their own past experiences.
A lot of authors are Jewish, too. Yet even the novels of Philip Roth, Saul Bellow and Bernand Malamud contained no extended bar mitzvah scenes, Oppenheimer discovered. He did find plenty of books about how to plan bar mitzvah parties, but precious little on the religious and spiritual aspects of the event.
So he set out to write that book. In the process, he also set out “to overthrow the Seinfield Problem, the perception New York is America.” That’s how he ended up in New Haven; in Arkansas, where by dint of demographics the majority of guests turn out to be Evangelical Christians; and the bar mitzvah party in Anchorage where the kosher food had to be flown in from L.A.
Oppenheimer said he discovered that the bar and bat mitzvah ceremony, in its manifold variations across the country, remains strong and meaningful. “It persists,” he said, “because it’s a public ritual in which people perform acts of learning and love.” It’s hard for a 13 year-old to tell a parent, “I love you,” and to hear a parent say in return, “I love you” and “I’m proud of you.” That does happen. It makes you cry every time just to watch it.