The Lazy Scholar

BOOKENDS: Bar Mitzvahs, Newsday, November 6, 2005

Thirteen and a Day: The Bar and Bat Mitzvah Across America, Mark Oppenheimer, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005.

Bar Mitzvah Disco: The Music May Have Stopped, but the Party’s Never Over. Roger Bennett, Jules Shell, and Nick Kroll, Crown, 2005.

The bar mitzvah—the moment when a Jewish 13-year-old publicly reads from the Torah and officially undertakes the religious responsibilities of an adult, if only to drop out of Hebrew school a week later—has its roots in medieval Europe but hit its groove in post-Eisenhower America. How and why this once humble ceremony turned into the notoriously lavish celebration it is today and, at the same time, one of the few rituals honored by American Jews however observant they are or aren’t otherwise, are the central questions of two surprisingly complementary new books, one by a historian, the other with a foreword by the Village People.

Mark Oppenheimer crashed two years’ worth of bar and bat mitzvahs from the Upper East Side to Alaska for his insightful and lucid history-travelogue Thirteen and a Day. Only one chapter dwells on the sort of bashes with which the rite of passage has lately become synonymous, complete with blackjack tables and “party motivators.” “Mine is a minority report,” writes Oppenheimer, eager to uncover places where the ritual hasn’t been entirely sapped of meaning, like Fayetteville, Arkansas, where a mother exposes her community, Jews and gentiles, to the arm-swaying, tambourine-shaking of the Renewal movement.

Oppenheimer is a richly observant reporter, noting a tutor’s “throaty Bea Arthur laugh,”  and a swift-footed anthropologist, effortlessly moving from the art of chanting Hebrew to a broader survey of American Jews. His curiosity, however, sometimes spins out of focus—a chapter on a Hasidic family in Anchorage reads more like a brief history of Chabad—and he ultimately falls short of answering the ambitious queries he’s posed.

To see what’s missing, turn to Bar Mitzvah Disco, by Roger Bennett, Jules Shell, and Nick Kroll, a wry collection of photos from the late 60s to early 90s, drawn from the website the trio began in 2003 for friends, family, and strangers to share memories of “The Electric Slide” and their first slow-dance. What looks on the surface like a passable Hanukkah present turns out to be a frequently funny, well-observed dissection of the bar mitzvah party—the memory glass, the chair lift, the sign-in-board destined to rot “away in your basement over the decades to come”—as well as the eerily homogeneous photo albums it spawned, with the requisite family portrait and “gentle wave goodbye.”

The running commentary reads a lot like “I Love the 80s: Bar Mitzvah Edition,” evoking the same offhanded tone of the VH1 series, an appealing balance of earnest nostalgia and embarrassed sarcasm. And while essays by Sarah Silverman, Jonathan Safran Foer, and A.J. Jacobs, specially commissioned for the book, fall disappointingly flat, several others, by L.A. critic Josh Kun and MTV correspondent Gideon Yago, fully evoke what comedian Eric Drysdale, who came of age at summer camp, calls “the cognitive dissonance” of American and Jewish cultures.

Oppenheimer ties the ascent of the bar mitzvah to “the ethnic pride movements of the counterculture and the resurgence of Zionism” in the 60s and early 70s. But Bar Mitzvah Disco suggests the age-old rite owes its popularity as much to those wild parties to come and the wider transformations they symbolized, most notably the shift “to a celebration of the individual in the 70s and 80s.” It’s a glowing insight, one you’d expect from Oppenheimer, but it turns up among photos of newly-minted teenagers awkwardly modeling their best suits and dresses instead.