We were just following orders. There was a general acknowledgement among us ninth-graders that we walked in the shadow of Joe Bower’s genius, and so we did as we were told. As a recent yeshiva refugee, I knew authority when I faced it. But Joe Bower—a tall boy with a thin brown mustache, a digital watch with a calculator, and an unnerving air of quiet competence—was compellingly different from the rabbis who had populated my life until then.

In the early days of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud thought hypnosis was the key to his patients’ unconscious. But he was a mediocre hypnotist, and often his patients would look up at him after his strenuous attempts to subdue them and, wide awake, shrug sheepishly.

Joe Bower had no such problem. When he turned to hypnosis, Joe’s only challenge was finding a volunteer, and really all he had to do was ask. Norman, sweet-natured stoner and irrepressible pontificator, stepped forward.

In Joe Bower’s stuffy attic we lit the candle and switched off the light. We settled into a tight circle, Norman and Joe facing one another, the O’Bannon twins and me rounding out the space between them. Joe’s resonant voice filled the room.

“All right Norman, I want you to relax,” Joe said. By the time Joe counted backward from 10, Norman—quietly sitting, all bushy brown hair, zits, and peach-fuzz—was gone.

The first time Joe did this, the O’Bannons and I sat stunned, looking at each other. Surely Norman was pretending. Surely he and Joe had planned this in advance. But Joe was no joker, and Norman, with first his left, then his right wrist attached to imaginary helium balloons, was too earnest to fake it so thoroughly.

The giddy exhilaration I felt when I realized that Norman, arms floating above his head, strawberry rolling paper still peeking out of his shirt pocket, was not with us anymore—that he was entirely under Joe’s sway and would do his bidding no matter how ridiculous—this exhilaration was deeply flecked with relief.

I was in the midst of a rocky transition from yeshiva to public high school. Desperate to enter the broader world that I encountered nightly on TV, I had spent my last full year at yeshiva tearfully lobbying until my parents’ resolve to cloister me away there finally broke. We made a pact doomed to failure: no swine, no shiksehs, no Friday-night football games.

The day before school began, three black-suited rabbis visited our small living room. Rabbi Mayer, the yeshiva’s headmaster, brought the two newest members of the faculty, young bearded men who sat awkwardly on our piano bench—site, through the years, of monumental battles with my parents over my resistance to practice. The men came to entice and cajole, to convince me that this would be the most exciting year yet at yeshiva, and to certify that the fate of the Jews depended on my decision. I nodded obligingly, but it was clear their power had faded. The more their mouths moved, the more desperate they seemed, making the pitch to an inwardly defiant and mostly uncomprehending adolescent. I emerged from the meeting absolutely in control of my destiny.

This feeling lasted one day. Then I was lost amid my new school’s confusing sway. Yeshiva hadn’t prepared me for the rigorous social demands of public school, the uniquely distorted hierarchies, the ceaseless, awkward flirtations, the ebb and flow of a social world not shadowed by Talmudic debate.

How much nicer it was to self-hypnotize during afternoons at home, to lose myself in the fantasy of miraculous transformation that characterized so many of the TV heroes about whom I obsessed: Steve Austin, a man barely alive, was given bionic strength after a horrible aeronautic accident; in The Incredible Hulk one had only to make David Banner a little angry and he’d quickly turn into a bright green Lou Ferrigno; and most impressively, somehow Henry Winkler, a short, slender Jewish fellow, for a time had us all convinced that he was a seductive Italian street tough.

Continue reading: I was like the Fonz

In addition to a small mountain of jewelry, many of the gifts I received were books. They were the kind of books you give a bat mitzvah girl regardless of whether she loves to read: hefty ones about big subjects, books of history and tradition conveying weighty life lessons. They were about Israel and Strong Jewish Women, mostly. Had it been published in time for my bat mitzvah instead of just this month, Today I Am a Woman: Stories of Bat Mitzvah Around the World would probably have been among them.

Edited by Barbara Vinick and Shulamit Reinharz of the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute, the book would have been given to me to communicate the richness of Jewish tradition, and to make the point that my bat mitzvah was not an isolated experience. I would have already understood those truths; understood, too, that this was an occasion to underline them. Actually reading such a book would have been almost redundant. I might have leafed through it, but otherwise I would have resigned it to the high-up shelf in my bedroom where I put the rest of the well-meaning, impressive-looking books I was given. They were daunting, grown-up volumes, books that signaled a certain kind of responsibility. I knew even then that I might never actually sit down to read them, but that I’d never really be able to get rid of them either.

I vividly pictured all this as I read Today I Am a Woman. Even with no official coming of age bearing down, I figured my reaction to it would hew pretty close to the one I projected on my teenage self. Maybe it had something to do with the absence of the kind of existential pressure that comes along with a bat mitzvah, but reading it curled up on my couch on a cozy fall afternoon earlier this month, I found the book to be a genuinely moving read beneath its academic gloss. Organized by region, each country introduced with a brief description of its Jewish community, the volume includes a story or two from girls who had their bat mitzvahs in those places (or in some cases, the parents of those girls). The editors aimed for variety, gathering anecdotes from Kazakhstan to Colombia, India to New Zealand, Canada to Libya. Some of them are straightforward accounts of a familiar kind of service, while other contributors explain that they didn’t have a formal ceremony or ritual at the usual age but figured out how to lay claim to their Jewish identity in their own way. For Gina Malaka Waldman, born in Tripoli in 1948, leaving her country of origin was the most profound rite of passage. When she arrived in Switzerland to pursue her education, it was “the first time in my life I could say I was Jewish and not be afraid,” she writes. “It was at that moment that I became a bat mitzvah. I had come of age by making a commitment to my people.”

The first bat mitzvah in the United States dates to 1922, when Judith Kaplan (daughter of Mordecai Kaplan, founder of the Reconstructionist movement) read from the chumash during a Shabbat morning service. Pinning down the very earliest bat mitzvah in the world is trickier; in her introduction, Barbara Vinick cites the writings of “nineteenth-century sage” Joseph Hayyim ben Elijah al-Hakam of Baghdad, which contain “the first indisputable mention of girls’ public coming-of-age.” But tracking the earliest roots of the ritual is kind of beside the point, as it took many (many!) years for bat mitzvahs to be seen as having any kind of equivalence to bar mitzvahs—and some communities still resist allowing girls to engage in the same level of preparation and participation as boys. A bar mitzvah, by contrast, has changed relatively little over its long history.

Today I Am a Woman is light on stories from kids who had the kind of over-the-top parties that make rabbis shudder. Instead, the accounts in these pages tend to come from families that care deeply about marking their daughters’ coming of age and who often had to think creatively about what that would involve—whether because they were part of communities without a clear tradition or a rabbi on hand, or ones in which women are forbidden from reading Torah. Some took part in group bat mitzvahs that felt a little minor-league compared to the rituals their brothers participated in and were bothered by the difference. Still others found meaning in their ceremonies anyway.

While there’s certainly plenty of immediate significance for a girl to find in this ritual in which she “becomes a woman,” there’s a reason a bat mitzvah is something one becomes—the verb suggesting a process rather than a singular occasion. In the moment, high-minded ideals about responsibility and adulthood and Jewish identity may be mere buzz words, eclipsed by more urgent matters like nervousness and excitement and lipstick (carefully applied to a girl’s own lips on this grown-up occasion, and also smudged on her cheeks from the kisses of doting aunties). That’s not to say the meaning is lost—no matter the extravagance of the party, months of study and preparation make a bat mitzvah’s gravity hard to deflect. But the meaning can take time to soak in. And inevitably—necessarily—it changes and grows along with the girl-turned-woman herself.

So, it’s not surprising that most of these stories come from women who are some distance from the occasion of their own bat mitzvah. There are many poignant reflections from parents. Monica Pastorok Cohen of Lexington, Mass., writes: “As [my daughter] Jocelyn began preparing for her bat mitzvah, I realized that it was the first time that she was doing something that I had not done, and with which I could not help her.” And there are plenty of stories in which a bat mitzvah takes on historical weight: Giorgina Vitale, who became a bat mitzvah in Turin, Italy, in 1937, describes bringing along her bat mitzvah album when her family went into hiding from the Nazis not long after.

Many of the bat mitzvah girls here explain that their ceremonies were meaningful largely because of what they made of them, rather than because of any predetermined part of the ritual. Because the specifics of a bat mitzvah are not constrained, what began as frustrating limitations (and in some places remain so) have become opportunities for girls and their families to craft rituals that have personal and spiritual resonance regardless of what those rituals are “supposed” to include. These can range from outfitting groups of bat mitzvah girls in identical dresses to involving them in social-action projects. In the process, those girls begin to understand that “coming of age” is not just about accepting tradition as it’s handed to them but about creating their own meaning. That’s an insight that can benefit boys, too, and in some communities already has.

At least, that’s the hopeful take-away from the wide-ranging set of experiences in this collection. A girl is an impossibly young 12 or 13 years old when she becomes a bat mitzvah. She has the rest of her life to reckon with what it means, to mull over her experience in relation to the generations of women before her, and to craft the story she wants to tell about it—whether she shares that story publicly (perhaps in a serious book destined to be a bat mitzvah gift) or just whispers it to herself.

Janice Erlbaum is the author of Girlbomb and Have You Found Her. You can find more of her stories here. [Running time:10:20.]

“There are two of me,” Blume told Haaretz: “Me the grown-up, the grandmother, and me who still sees the world through the eyes of a child. I can be 4 years old or 12 years old. That’s not something I think about, but when I am writing I guess that’s where I go. To that part of myself which is still at that age.” Great news for the inner tweens in all of us, who now never have to stop listening to Party in the U.S.A. What?

Of Margaret, the title character in one of her most well-known books, Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, Blume recalls: “Margaret was the kind of a child I was. It was my relationship with God I wrote about. I had that kind of relationship with God. I actually felt the presence of God when I was alone in the room talking to God. It is not my story though.”

And for those of you looking for your next Judy Blume fix, the film version of Tiger Eyes, which Blume adapted with her son, who also directed it, is reportedly in post-production. Talk about the circle of life. And winning!

Relatedly (maybe) in the world of things written about young adults, Motherlode, the Times’ parenting blog, asks parents: “Are you your child’s ATM?” The answer, according to a survey on personal finance web site The Mint, is overwhelmingly yes: “The poll results show that 63% of today’s kids 17 and younger are “always” given extra money when they asked for it, and 26% of children 17 and younger “sometimes” receive extra money when they ask.”

And just what are our future leaders doing with their newfound funds? “Overall, the most commonly selected reason why kids today ask for extra money is to buy tickets to a movie/concert/sporting event (40%), followed by food/drink (24%) or to buy a toy/game/phone (19%). Only 15% answered that extra dollars are spent on school/educational purposes, and 1% wanted funds to give to or participate in a charitable effort.” Way to go, 1%!

(Also, mom, if you’re reading this, I’m going to need some cash. The LIRR doesn’t pay for itself.)

Eating disorders ranked as the number one concern, followed by bullying (number one among girls aged 9-11), and JWI found that problems with substance abuse and risky sexual behavior rise precipitously when dealing with girls aged 12-15. While it’s unclear exactly whether the available data support the idea that Jews are somehow more at risk for specific behaviors because of cultural factors, as Goldman has asserted, it can’t hurt to have someone taking note that “Girls everywhere are suffering; we owe it to the younger generation to help undo the damage done by impossibly high academic standards, the media’s portrayal of unrealistic bodies and Photoshopped beauty, and the whirlwind of other factors which combine to make young women feel like they don’t measure up.”

Jewish Girls and Self-Destructive Behaviors: By The Numbers [HuffPo]

There was a time when I wanted to get up and chant the Torah as my father had done, and his father, and his before him, and back, and back, and back to the father of us all. Unfortunately, I first had this feeling, quite strongly, when I was seven or eight. It flared again, very briefly, when I lived in Paris after college, plotting ways to relieve my sense of utter loneliness. I imagined that I’d be taken in by a family of Hasidim—I had one in mind; their head was the owner of an old bookshop on the rue des Rosiers. He would lead me through the streets crowded with models and their photographers, past the Picasso museum, and into a quiet old hotel particulier. There, I’d be raised in the ways of peace and paths of righteousness, marry one of their daughters, disappear utterly, change my name to Eliyahu or Gershom. I would speak French, Yiddish, and Hebrew. Put on my tzitzit, not even looking at the body in the mirror, my flesh, white, ghostly, fed on the pastrami they called “le pickel” and Glatt falafel. Gradually, I’d shed the trappings and anxieties of the contradiction-ridden, modern, and enlightened world, transform, once and for all, into a Jew. I would “return,” as they say, and, by returning, become, at last, a stranger to myself. Staring into the bookshop window, holding a copy of Plasseraud’s La Lituanie Juive I’d just bought, along with Lévinas’ Totalité et infini, it seemed no more likely that I’d turn around and invite myself for Shabbos dinner than that I’d become a Catholic, an apostasy of which I was incapable.

I’d first raised the subject of my bar mitzvah with my father when I began 7th grade. Every week seemed to bring a handsomely lettered invitation to services at Central or Park Avenue or Temple Emanuel, the bastions of Upper East Side Jewry, followed by promised parties at The Pierre Hotel, Ivy League college clubs, or Tavern on the Green. All this was an unknown world to me. We’d never gone to synagogue as a family. We didn’t go to lavish parties either; our entertainments were concerts at Carnegie Hall or Lincoln Center, or in our living room. “You can have one, if you want,” my father said, “if you really want one. It’s a lot of work, you know. I’m sure that a lot of those boys up there don’t even know what they’re saying. Do you want that? It would be better if you knew the words. We’ll have to find somewhere you can study. I just ask one thing: Don’t do it for the money.” Then he told the joke about the boy who says, “Today I am a fountain pen.” I thought about it. I didn’t thrill to the idea of adding more hard work to a life that seemed to promise nothing but a future of study: all the usual school subjects plus extra French lessons, violin lessons, orchestra on Wednesdays. Study and practice: I’d never give up my weekend touch-football games or my own reading for the sake of another subject, one that seemed of dubious value and yet could only be taken with the utmost seriousness. September became January and I did nothing. Eventually the date approached, grew ever closer, passed.

Had I made my decision by not making one? Was it mere laziness, or something else? Maybe it was just the feeling of insurmountable and unpronounceable difficulty, as though I had a choice between lifting an enormous rock pinning me down, or tunneling out from under it. Back in September, we’d gone far enough to discuss Hebrew Schools. According to my father, the trope taught at Park Avenue synagogue was ugly, Temple Emanuel was disguised Protestantism and run by snobbish German Jews. Closer to home we had the Orthodox Spanish Portugese Synagogue, housed in a neo-Romanesque splendor on 70th Street and Central Park West, and the Reform Stephen Wise around the corner. We would never be Orthodox, and, as for the Reform one, my father only wanted services in Hebrew; also, he didn’t want to feel pressured to attend services so close to home. He’d lack excuses. Anyway, he’d only recently fallen out with the rabbi there who used to be his friend.

My father was turning into the joke about the Jew, who, alone on a desert island, builds two synagogues—so he can have one that he’d never set foot in. On his island, there were many synagogues and they all had something wrong with them. Perhaps without fully understanding, and not for the last time, he presented me with a peculiar dilemma. Was I strong enough to turn my bar mitzvah into an act of disobedience? Or, if it was only a matter for my own autonomous will, neither opposing nor opposed, how much should I account for my father’s own wishes, his apparent disinterest or absence of pride in what I did or didn’t do? My atheist and yet steadfastly Jewish father had actually imposed a Calvinist and Puritan test of faith: Did I feel a calling? Was I one of the elect? Would my latent and natural religious intuitions rise up in me and pour forth, sweeping away all obstacles, like a lion roaring out of the desert? Could my faith redeem his own lack of it?

Another punch line: “Let’s get this straight, son. There’s only one God and we don’t believe in him.” On its own, this feeling, shared by many of the Jews who turned up to synagogue and bar-mitzvahed their children, might not have prevented anything. But my father didn’t really believe in the Jewish people either. Only very recently, coming across a letter of Hannah Arendt’s to Gershom Scholem, did I find the sentence that best articulated his kind of Judaism: “I do not love the Jews, nor do I believe in them, I merely belong to them as a matter of course, beyond dispute or argument.” Jewishness was our nature, our history, but not, for all this, a necessary sphere of action. Why study Torah when you can study biology or literature? Why act out the belonging that merely is and make a fetish of authenticity? Arendt did temper her seemingly cold-hearted, existential account of her Jewishness with an acknowlegement that “there is such a thing as a basic gratitude for everything that is as it is; for what has been given and not made….” Arendt is right to some extent: We should be grateful for certain basic conditions of our being, but how and to whom? Where was this gratitude, then, in my childhood?

As a minimum, it seems, a family’s decision to bar mitzvah its children could have been one such expression of gratitude, regardless of actual faith. Even my thoroughly unreflective and already secular grandparents were capable of it. My father, however, clearly wished to hold me back, as if a bar mitzvah were, for him, akin to the sacrifice of Isaac. He would not deliver me up to the God he didn’t believe in unless I went willingly, head bowed, to be bound. The impossibility of the choice is self-evident: To whom should I be grateful? My father or his fathers? By siding with one, I could only betray the other. And wouldn’t my father have felt as though he were betraying me, if he surrendered me to all the institutions and practices of New York Jewish life he already felt so removed from? It was a more crucial choice than either of us had imagined.

The signifiers of identity are squirmworthy. The younger characters lack nuance and seem to imply some kind of link between being a loser and being a Jew. The older ones—Aviva’s mother, for example, played by Ellen Barkin—cloak their forcefulness behind supposed good intention and seem hard-pressed to show the barest hint of compassion.

But for all their sullenness, Solondz’s Jews are less offensively farcical than the folks he depicts on the opposite extreme, who have compassion in spades. Mama Sunshine, a jumper-wearing children’s advocate who takes in a variously-disabled bunch of unwanteds, feeds her charges “Jesus’ Tears” cookies and oversees a musical number that tips its hat to School of Rock and The Partridge Family. Those occasional jokes, though, don’t alleviate the film’s unsettling feeling. Somewhere between glib and disdainful, it serves up extraordinary, brutal material as part of one long gag.

While Solondz never really posits that one system is better than another, he shows a stark dichotomy—despair in the prototypical Jewish home and suspended doubt in the Christian one. It’s a vision without complexity, which may mirror literal understandings of religion, but bears no likeness to reality.