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.

But others got that it was a joke. (If the girl’s dachshund were really named “Miuccia,” wouldn’t she be able to pronounce it?) “Fashion Week High Holidays Bat Mitzvah Speech Practice By Hannah” is not a real Bat Mitzvah speech. It’s a comic piece by writer Bob Morris, a style writer, frequent contributor to The New York Times and author of Assisted Loving, a memoir about double-dating with his elderly father. Hannah is played by his tennis partner’s daughter. Miuccia is played by his dog, Zoloft.

“My intent was more about satirizing fashion culture than religion,” he tells me. What was the genesis of the piece? “Last year, the first day of Fashion Week was on the first day of Rosh Hashanah, and I was doing a column at the New York Observer at the time. I had to dress carefully because I was going from a fashion show to services. And when you’re standing around with a bunch of Jews two minutes from the Garment District, you’re gonna check out each other’s outfits!”

Morris comes from a Conservative Jewish background. “My oldest memories of long days of High Holiday services on Long Island always were mixed with memories of women dressing for each other,” he says. “We had style, judgment, and atonement all under one roof.” Writing the script for the video took him several days and multiple rewrites. To prepare, he watched dozens of b’nai mitzvot speeches on YouTube.

“They all follow the same template,” he says. “Welcome the congregation, talk about becoming a man or a woman, discuss their portion, throw in a pitch for their community services, thank everyone.” Even though Morris’s primary intention was to parody fashion culture, the speeches were a target, too. “You have parents throwing their kids into religious training that has no fallout whatsoever when it’s over,” he points out. “It warrants social commentary.”

I think the video is hilarious, but I also think it could be a great opportunity for families and religious leaders to talk about what a bar or bat mitzvah speech is supposed to be. Isn’t Hannah’s speech, fake as it is, a better model than the typical “Myyyyy poooortion … ,” full of stale, shallow insights that came from the rabbi or mom rather than the kid? Shouldn’t the d’var Torah reflect a kid’s actual interests, attempting to relate the kid’s daily life to the coming-of-age ceremony?

Besides, Hannah isn’t way off base about the transformative power of beauty in our culture. (The Jewish one, not the one in the tents.) “Hiddur mitzvah” is the principle of enhancing a mitzvah through aesthetics, so Hannah is right about the beauty of the jewel-toned synagogue windows and the “white Victorian lace dollies” (to which her “father” barks “DOILIES!”) on lady’s heads. Her love of fashion could be an awfully good jumping-off point for a discussion of why we often judge people by the cut of their Carolina Herrera rather than the content of their character. One could even encourage a discussion of heavenly judgment.

There’s a notion … and not the kind you buy at M&J Trimming on Sixth Avenue.

“Fashion Week High Holidays Bat Mitzvah Speech Practice By Hannah”

• Several Republicans are calling on President Obama to recall his ambassador to Syria, Robert Ford, who when appointed became the first U.S. envoy to Damascus in several years. [WP]

• Prime Minister Netanyahu’s newly harsh treatment of certain Hamas prisoners prompted others to go on a hunger strike. [Haaretz]

• A daughter congratulates her mother on her bat mitzvah at 60, and meditates on the expanded meaning of the concept of l’dor v’dor. [WP]

• Rachel Weisz, a real Jew recently divorced from real Jew Darren Aronofsky, eloped with professional fake Jew Daniel Craig. [LAT Ministry of Gossip]

• The Milwaukee Brewers’ Ryan Braun, profiled. He is one of only two players whose contract runs through 2020. [NYT]

Omri Casspi has come to terms with the sad fact that he will never be a pilot, and instead is relegated to a life of playing professional basketball.

Over the past decade, many Jewish schools have added mandatory “mitzvah projects” to the curriculum for their 12-year-old b’nai mitzvah students—designed in part as a counterweight to the increasing extravagance of bar and bat mitzvah celebrations, which at their most outrageous have come to include custom-built “synagogue” pavilions on the grounds of five-star resorts and, in the case of Elizabeth Brooks, a $10 million gala at Manhattan’s Rainbow Room headlined by Aerosmith and 50 Cent. Even for teens of more modest means, the remote-controlled airplanes and private telephone lines that once made for memorable gifts have given way to luxuries like strands of Mikimoto pearls—gifts that might turn into heirlooms, sure, but that can still feel disconnected from the idea of passing into adulthood. And with a new Torah cycle getting underway, a new crop of b’nai mitzvah will decide whether to not only include an element of tzedakah in their big day but perhaps to to do the once unthinkable and forgo gifts altogether in favor of increasing their charitable contributions.

“My bar mitzvah should be about me doing something for the community,” said 13-year-old Daniel Kessler, an eighth grader in Potomac, Maryland, who used his low-key luncheon last June to raise $5,000 for a seeing-eye-dog training center in Israel. Kessler was following in the footsteps of his 15-year-old brother, David, who used his own bar mitzvah luncheon two years ago to collect about 1,500 used English books for an Israeli school. “I thought my bar mitzvah isn’t about me getting things, but I really like books, so it would be good to give other people the opportunity to get the love of reading,” he explained—and while he kept the Barnes & Noble gift cards a few guests gave him along with their book donations, the handful of checks pressed on him by particularly insistent relatives and family friends went to defray the costs of shipping the library to its new home in Kfar Saba. “I really think I did something meaningful, and I’m glad.”

Lital Firestone, a 15-year-old from Rockville, Maryland, decided to go a step further and ask her guests to give not just money but time—specifically, to help serve food at a brunch for patients at Walter Reed Army Medical Center while she and her theater group put on a musical performance. “My bat mitzvah was seven months after my birthday, so I said, ‘Please do this in lieu of gifts,’ ” said Firestone. “I just felt like it should be a celebration of what I should be working toward as a person, and not just like another birthday party with presents.” She raised more than $3,000, more than covering the cost of sponsoring the brunch, and sent the extra funds to a program at the Tel HaShomer army base hospital that provides support to wounded Israeli soldiers.

The idea of using Jewish life-cycle events—brit milot, bar mitzvahs, weddings—to raise money or awareness for charitable causes can be traced to the founding of Mazon, the Jewish hunger-relief organization, which started in 1985 with a request that celebrants give 3 percent of the money they were spending on parties to help feed those in need. The organization now has an annual budget of about $6.5 million. “It was a way to balance out what we were spending on mitzvah celebrations,” said Rabbi Jeffrey Salkin, the author of Putting God on the Guest List, a guide to integrating spiritual traditions into the modern bar or bat mitzvah ceremony. A new wave of philanthropic organizations specifically targets b’nai mitzvah students; one Boston-based group, jchoice.org, recently launched an online registry that allows teenagers to specify the causes they’d like their guests to support in their honor. But, Salkin noted, charity can be as prone to inflation as parties. “I keep waiting for a kid to say that for his bar mitzvah project he worked out a compromise on the territories,” Salkin said, referring to contested settlements in the West Bank. “It’s like a law of physics—we’ve got to compete with each other, so instead of competing with glitz, we compete with meaning.”

For some parents, though, the logical corollary to eliminating gifts is scaling down the size of the accompanying party. “We didn’t want to contribute to this culture of excess,” said Lisa Eisen, a mother of three in a Washington suburb and national director of the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation, which focuses on Jewish youth programs. “We wanted to contribute to a culture that focuses on values and making a difference for others.” When her eldest daughter, Ariella, now 17, was preparing for her bat mitzvah, Eisen suggested she choose a charity rather than make a wish list. In the end, Ariella and her younger sister Tamar collected more than $15,000 between them for a nonprofit founded by their uncle that provides medical services in developing countries, along with money for the American Jewish World Service and a Down Syndrome group, and celebrated with low-key dessert receptions instead of full-scale dinners—and balanced even those events with donations to Mazon. Both girls carried on their volunteer work after their bat mitzvahs, and the whole family has since replaced the tradition of exchanging Hanukkah gifts with picking two charity projects, one in Israel and one at home, each December, Eisen said. Now, with her 11-year-old son beginning to prepare for his bar mitzvah, Eisen said she’s hoping to replace the American-style party with a family celebration in Israel. “I want to commemorate him reaching this milestone without it being about the party and the presents,” said Eisen. “But we’ll see.”

Rothfeld’s havdalah bat mitzvah is hardly unique. Although there are no statistics on how many congregations have adopted similar practices, the popularity of havdalah b’nai mitzvah seems to be growing throughout the country, for a host of reasons having to do with observance, convenience, and exclusivity. While some view the trend as evidence of the adaptability of Jewish ritual, others worry that it is simply one more dilution of a rite already hobbled by materialism and general disinterest.

“At first I wasn’t happy with the havdalah bat mitzvah, because it was new to me,” said Rothfeld, now 14. “I felt like I had to learn everything all over again. But then I began to like it. It was a unique and fun experience for me.”

There are several other reasons why families opt for havdalah b’nai mitzvah—to accommodate Orthodox relatives who will not attend non-Orthodox services on Shabbat, for instance, or those who stay too far away to walk to synagogue but could drive to a havdalah ceremony that begins after sundown. Additionally, Haber said, sometimes families opt for a havdalah service because there is less material for a child to master and therefore less pressure. (At Congregation Mishkan Tefila, a Conservative synagogue in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, which has offered havdalah ceremonies for 20 years, they were originally reserved for children with special needs “who could not handle the material or the crowds of a Shabbat morning bar or bar mitzvah,” said Rabbi Geoff Haber.) The havdalah ceremony is a shorter and more exclusive service, since fewer members of the general congregation attend. And, sometimes families choose this option because it means they are excused from sponsoring a mid-day kiddush lunch for the synagogue, which adds extra costs.

Then, of course, there is the fact that some families want to get to the post-service Saturday night festivities without the intervening hiatus of Shabbat afternoon. “Whereas the Shabbat morning service tends to be a little more haimish, the havdalah bar or bat mitzvah feels more like the prelude to a party, more like the opening act, as opposed to the act itself,” said Rabbi Dan Ain of The New Shul, a nondenominational progressive congregation in New York City. “It was a bit striking to see everyone in their Saturday evening dinner attire,” Ain said, recalling his first havdalah bat mitzvah experience. But, he added, “there is almost no way to avoid the ‘party’ aspect of the b’nai mitzvah experience, and to a certain extent, the tail will continue to wag the dog.”

Ain pointed out the merits to the havdalah service as a bar or bat mitzvah. “Havdalah is a beautiful ritual that literally means separation of the holy from the mundane, of Shabbat from the rest of the week, of who we are before to who we are now, from technology to our lived life. These are exactly the concepts that bar and bat mitzvah students are grappling with as they approach adulthood,” he said. “Exploring them—at the time in which they enter our community, as adult members whose voices should be heard and appreciated—seems particularly appropriate.”

Not everybody, however, is a fan of havdalah b’nai mitzvah. Havdalah, after all, does not typically include any Torah reading, a fundamental part of a traditional bar or bat mitzvah. But rabbis who are open to having havdalah bar or bat mitzvah ceremonies are likewise open to incorporating parts of the morning Shabbat service into havdalah.

“It’s an untraditional choice, as Torah is not usually read on Saturday evenings,” said Rabbi Joe Rooks Rapport of the Reform Congregation Adath Israel Brith Sholom in Louisville, Kentucky. “But assuming the family is fine with that, I don’t think there is ever a time when we should not be reading Torah.”

Rapport is more concerned with havdalah b’nai mitzvah forfeiting the communal aspect of the ceremony. “We feel that it is very important that our b’nai mitzvah students step forward to become the leader of our congregation in prayer,” he said. “This seldom happens on Saturday evenings, since the congregation as a whole worships together on Friday nights and Saturday mornings.” Many congregations do not regularly hold communal havdalah services. Rabbi Joseph Meszler of Temple Sinai of Sharon, Massachusetts, said his congregation generally does not offer havdalah bar and bat mitzvahs because they only have one rabbi and one cantor—there is simply not enough staff to run morning services and evening bar mitzvahs. While their main reason for not offering the service is based on logistics, Meszler said, he has other misgivings. “The havdalah service removes any semblance of [the bar or bat mitzvah] being a community event and makes it into almost an exclusively private party,” Meszler noted. “People can also dress in evening clothes that are not usually appropriate for synagogue.”

Still, there’s always freelance clergy. Cantor Debbi Ballard, an independent cantor based in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, has offered havdalah bar and bat mitzvahs for the past five years. They account for half of the 20 to 30 b’nai mitzvah at which she officiates each year. “A Shabbat morning service can tend to be somewhat predictable and mechanical,” she said. “I like to turn my havdalah services into something more meaningful, more thought provoking, and more inspiring, as we begin a new week. I try to encourage my congregants to envision peace, and to appreciate the peaceful feelings they experience, to attempt to bring more of that into the world.” Jordana Horn is a writer and lawyer at work on her first novel.

John Goodman and Julie Hagerty in Todd Solondz’s Storytelling

Struggle with pronunciation.
“Probably the most difficult sound to master, because we do not have it in the English language, is the ‘ch’ sound,” Brostoff says. “So I always tell kids, ‘Pretend you’re at the dentist’s office, and he’s asking you to spit into a spittoon, and you kind of are clearing your throat and you kind of have that ‘ch’ sound.’ And somehow a lot of kids can do it. Some cannot do it. It’s very, very difficult for them to make that sound. It’s the same sound you have in German in the composer Bach’s name.”

Go too fast.
“One of my mantras to them is ‘Loud, slow, and clear,’ because they do tend to want to rush. Most students, if they know their portions well, want to go way too fast. I often tell them just to say their names in their heads whenever they get to a period.”

Pretend you’re on American Idol.
“A big thing that I would want to emphasize—something I emphasize with my actual bar mitzvah students—is that it’s not a show. It’s a time to be embraced by the community. It’s not that they’re standing up there waiting for their cue. At different points in the service, when there are congregational readings in English, or even in Hebrew if they know it, they need to partake in that. It’s not just standing and waiting for a little line and going up to recite. You’re a part of the congregation when you’re doing your specific solos. I also tell them, because it’s not a show, not to be waving to their friends—you almost have to ‘stay in character’ as a bar mitzvah person. You can smile, you can be natural, but you’re there to do something of a serious nature, and since you are leading the congregation, you’re expected to be acting in a way that is very adult-like.”

Imagine the world is not like a Todd Solondz movie.
“I would want the actor, and the actual bar mitzvah student, to look at this as almost a day of hope, more so in terms of their interpretation—when they’re writing their speech—their interpretation of their torah or haftorah portion. Often this can be a way to motivate kids to say something to this audience out there that hopefully encourages them to do something better with their lives—a pretty awesome responsibility for a 13-year-old.”

With too few Jews around to merit a synagogue, the Concord Area Jewish Group, which we joined when my mother took a job in town, found a temporary home in the historic First Parish Church, set back from the oak-lined road that led off Route 2 from Cambridge.

The odd locale of my bat mitzvah would be merely idiosyncratic if it weren’t indicative of a much bigger karmic joke. My Jewish lineage—which on my Sephardic side can be traced back to Hebron, where my ancestors touched down in 1492 after leaving Spain, and on my Ashkenazi side includes the celebrated Yiddish writer who coined the term yenta—is rivaled only by my father’s Episcopalian Anglo-Saxon pedigree. “Don’t you ever forget it, young man, that’s blue blood that flows in those veins, the finest, purest blood that God ever gave to man,” my great-great-grandfather, John Robertson Dunlap, once told my paternal grandfather, Lewis Spence.

Had Dunlap lived to see his great-great-granddaughter recite her haftorah (even in a church), he surely would have blanched. He was not just an anti-Semite but a racial purist so consumed with the superiority of his Scotch-Irish bloodline that he wrote a thousand-page book on Dunlap genealogy, which wound back through antebellum Kentucky and still further back to the early Highland Scots.

He even made a point of avoiding Jews in public places. Family legend has it that Dunlap—a self-styled publishing tycoon who founded the first trade magazines, among them the scintillatingly titled India Rubber World—struck a deal with the head waiter at his favorite Manhattan restaurant that no one with “Jewish features” would be seated near his regular table by the window. But one afternoon, the joke was on the old man: When he sat down for lunch wearing a skullcap (his doctor had insisted that he cover his bald scalp), a waiter mistook him for an observant Jew and asked him to move. Later that same day, Dunlap snipped off his wife’s hair and promptly placed an order for a toupee.

In keeping with the requisite lifestyle of a baron of the Gilded Age, Dunlap—known for touting his credentials as a “Kentucky colonel” despite his lack of military service—spent his summers in the Adirondacks and his winters on Florida’s Gulf Coast—though it was in his beloved Manhattan where he died in the spring of 1935. One year later, another of my great-great-grandfathers, Jacob Adler, who wrote in Yiddish under the penname B. Kovner, published Laugh Jew Laugh, a collection of short stories about immigrant life in the Lower East Side that he had published over the preceding three decades in the Jewish Daily Forward. At that time, the Forward‘s readership hovered around 250,000 and Adler’s humor column was a favorite among the hordes of Yiddish-speaking newcomers who looked to the legendary paper for guidance on adjusting to life in this Promised Land. In Adler’s outlandish characters, they could see aspects of their irksome upstairs neighbor or—God forbid!—their own husbands and wives. So popular was one of Adler’s protagonists, Yente Telebende, who harangued her unfaithful husband and made everyone’s business her own, that a woman known to gossip has ever since been referred to as a yenta.

The only commonality between Jacob Adler and John Dunlap, I’d always assumed, was their progeny. I was wrong. Last fall, while scanning a copy of Laugh Jew Laugh in my Park Slope studio, I was struck by a small but significant detail: Adler’s introduction is signed off from St. Petersburg, Florida, the very same resort town where Dunlap spent his final months. As I discovered, St. Petersburg was not only the winter home of my Anglo-Saxon antecedent but also the year-round residence of my Yiddish forebear. I don’t imagine that they sipped martinis at the same social club or traded tales on the putting green, but they certainly could have strolled past one another on a white sand beach, two proud men wholly unaware of how human destiny would one day render their legacies intertwined.

Born in 1873 in Galicia, in what was then part of Austria-Hungary, Adler was not unlike the multitudes of Jewish immigrants who fled the pogroms of Eastern Europe and lived out the American dream. Upon arriving in New York in 1895, he began working arduous hours for a tailor in a sweatshop, all the while nursing his dream of becoming a writer. Only two years later, in 1897, he published his first poems in the nascent Forward. He soon joined the ranks of Di Yunge, or “The Young Ones”—the circle of Lower East Side literati who rejected the hard-edged political slant of their predecessors and introduced florid romanticism to Yiddish poetry—before making his mark as a humorist. By 1907, he had already published his first book, Zikhroynes, a memoir of shtetl life composed in verse, which was hailed by critics in New York and Europe. Zalmen Reisen, editor of one of Eastern Europe’s largest Yiddish newspapers, The Vilna Day, described it as “full of quiet, sad longing and heartfelt love for his childhood and the idyllic life of the Jewish shtetl.”

Adler wrote prodigiously, and somewhat obsessively, until the age of 99; he died in 1975, the year before I was born, at the age of 102. In just under a century, he churned out some 18,000 poems, more than 30,000 columns, and published work under almost 20 different pen names. He even went on publishing after his death, having written hundreds of Forward columns in advance.

Needless to say, he set the bar high for writers in the family. While I don’t foresee ever approaching his prolific—or, perhaps more accurately, lunatic—output, I do have one important thing in common with Adler: I too am a writer at the Forward (albeit the English paper, not the Yiddish, which is still printed weekly in New York). Add to the mix my Israeli family history dating back more than ten generations, and being Jewish feels like an ineluctable fate. I did, however, have a choice. In an alternate universe, I could have taken my cues from Dunlap and turned out a Protestant preppy. So what made me a Jew? Considering that I practice neither religion, it’s got nothing to do with theology.

It may be as simple as this: WASP culture, as embodied by my perennially depressed grandparents, felt painfully austere and witheringly cold. Grandma and Grandpa Spence, living in an isolated farmhouse in Cranbury, New Jersey, were the proverbial descendants of characters in a Henry James novel; two cash-poor aristocrats forced to live out the tragic indignities of a ruling class in decline. My grandfather, Lewis, who grew up in Long Island with a coterie of servants and was shipped off to boarding school in the first grade, drank bourbon every night at 6 o’clock, cursed the creeping onslaught of low culture, and wrote books that were never published. His wife, an intellectually adroit woman who languished as a housewife and elementary school librarian, joined him in his misery.

Jewish life, as embodied in my great-grandmother—Adler’s daughter Bertha Klausner, a crackerjack literary agent and the family matriarch—stood in sharp contrast. A fiercely independent and forward-thinking woman, Bertha entertained the leading writers, producers and performers of her day from her capacious apartment on 38th Street and Park Avenue. She served up lunches of whitefish and brisket and inked book deals for her bevy of celebrated clients, among them Marcel Marceau and, once upon a time, Upton Sinclair.

As a child, I instinctively gravitated toward this beatific woman with her huge bosoms and crown of silver hair. She fed me Entenmann’s chocolate cake, smothered me in mama-bear hugs and was known for her constant refrain at family gatherings: “All my great-grandchildren are geniuses.” Lewis, on the other hand, made no secret of the fact that he didn’t much care for children. I can hazily remember fishing for rainbow perch with him off the dock on Upper Saranac Lake—on the very patch of Adirondack land inherited from Dunlap—but I can more vividly recall how, when I was a distressed seven-year-old, standing on his weathered gray deck in a puddle of tears, he exploded in anger and refused me entry into the house.

“My home is no place for children to cry,” he bellowed down at me.

I was scared; the memory stuck. More importantly, I don’t think I stopped crying. Several years later, when he took me for Sunday services at Saranac’s rustic lakeside church, where patrician men in pastel blazers worshipped beside their trim, smiling wives, I winced with every ministerial reference to Christ, wanting to scream “But I’m Jewish!”

When my mother and father met in Boston in the early 1970s, the bigotry and cultural divisions that would have kept their ancestors from crossing paths in St. Petersburg only a few decades earlier had dissolved into the collective memory of America’s ugly past. In Cambridge, the ethnically mixed corner of the Northeast my parents inhabited, activists and academics freely commingled in the progressive political circles at the crest of the anti-war years. Vietnam protests in Harvard Square were just petering out and echoes of Joan Baez playing at Club 47 could still be heard in the vibrant folk scene that continued at its successor, Club Passim.

My parents—two tenacious and idealistic bureaucrats—first met while working for Massachusetts governor Frank Sargent (one of many liberal Republicans to lead the bluest state in the Union). My father agreed to raise his children Jewish, though we celebrated Christmas and Easter, and nobody flinched. The mountains of conflict that eventually overtook my parents’ marriage had little to do with religion or ethnicity, although family life might have been far more peaceful if that was all that divided them.

This isn’t to say that their interfaith union produced no fallout. We have been subject to the rips and fissures that intermarriage inevitably seems to create. My mother’s father, a sociology of religion professor who has become increasingly observant in the years since my parents were wed in the Berkshires in 1973, has done his part to carry on the tradition of shunning the young who choose partners outside of the fold. To date, he has boycotted three family weddings, all of them his own children’s and grandchildren’s. Still, he relents and resumes relations if the kids are raised Jewish.

Standing in an Episcopal church on the Upper West Side last June, watching my brother’s two sons being baptized, I couldn’t help but wonder how things might have been different if my grandfather had taken a less punitive approach. It certainly wasn’t his committed observance or disdain for mixed marriages that molded my identity. And while I take issue with his tactics—in part because of the hurt they inflict, and in part because they only serve to further distance people from Jewish life—I do understand the sentiment. It was not easy to attend that baptism. I flinched at every reference to “our lord Jesus” just like I did at age nine, sitting in the pine pews at Upper Saranac’s Church of the Ascension. Only this time it was my own sibling’s ritual, not that of some ruddy-faced stranger in Nantucket red pants, that foisted the sense of otherness upon me.

Yet in spite of our obvious cultural differences—my brother and I seem to have split our parents’ ancestral traditions straight down the middle—we nevertheless share what our parents had in common: a commitment to social responsibility and an engagement with the politics and culture of our time. During the fifteen years that my parents were married, their respective relatives grew to love coming together at family gatherings, where they could discuss what most bourgeois intellectuals from the Northeast tend to discuss: wine, presidential races, and their undying aspirations for the Democratic party. Lewis, in particular, enjoyed parsing politics and theology with my mother’s father, an exceedingly scholarly Jew, and talking theatre and books with Bertha. In some sense, they all may have had more in common than not.

Lewis’s fortunes also turned: He finally published a book, though he didn’t live to hear about it. Two weeks after his death (I was twenty-one and just about to graduate from Barnard) we got the news that a small upstate publisher specializing in Adirondack literature had accepted his manuscript. It was a memoir of the four childhood summers he spent on Upper Saranac Lake with his grandfather, John Robertson Dunlap. In reading A Mountain View, I saw where the stern, imperious grandfather that I knew in my childhood had come from: By Lewis’s own account, Dunlap, with his eye patch and cane, was the scariest grandfather of them all.

I also grasped the depth of my great-great-grandfather’s anti-Semitism—and just how far my own grandfather had strayed from that past. The fact that not one, but two of his children married Jews gives some indication. On a recent visit to my aunt’s home in the Carroll Gardens section of Brooklyn, where she lives with her Jewish husband of twenty-five years, I noticed another, slightly more subtle indication: Hanging on the wall was a lithograph inscribed “For the Spences,” signed by an artist friend of my grandparents who had lived not far away from them in Roosevelt, New Jersey. The artist? The Jewish Social Realist painter and photographer, Ben Shahn. Perhaps the occasion of my bat mitzvah wasn’t the first time that Dunlap had rolled over in his grave.

Earlier this month, my pseudonym, Fiona Rosenbloom, came out with her first young-adult novel. (Mazel Tov, Fiona!) The novel centers on Jewish themes and is called You Are SO Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah! Here’s how that happened: A month before the release of my own decidedly R-rated first novel, I was approached by a book packager who pitched me the bat mitzvah project. To be honest, I wasn’t interested in young-adult fiction, but to be fair, I needed a job. I had questions: Could I manage to work on my second novel while writing Fiona’s first? Was it wise to make this departure when I hadn’t yet established myself as a literary novelist? Did these packager people know what a bad seed I was? An advance was offered, and I accepted in greedy haste, signing on under one condition: that I be fitted with the Jewish pseudonym of my choice.

At the first plot meeting, my then-editor, Judy, started using Hebrew words to describe character traits, and I started using some words of my own: Secular Jew in over her head. I never went to Hebrew school. The closest I’ve come to God was on Essex Street leaning over an open barrel eating sour pickles. I don’t know from aleph and, though I love the bitter herbs at Passover, I don’t know why we eat them. Our Haggadah is a Diaspora of articles stapled together from Elle and Vogue, mixed with quotes from Bartlett’s, Primo Levi, and Martin Luther King. Sure, there are always people there who know the prayers; that’s why my mother invites them. But I took the job unable to tell the difference between the Torah and the Haftorah, a rabbi from a rebbe, a bar from a bas. Folks, I don’t even know my Hebrew name. In short: I SO did not have a bat mitzvah.

Yet somehow, between online research and heavy dependence on Judy, I managed to write a fairly believable book about a girl who does have one. Then I wrote a fairly believable bio for my pseudonym. Not only did I give Fiona a religious upbringing, but I referenced her bat mitzvah. I wasn’t thinking about book tours, or about middle-school kids who would want to know how much of the novel was autobiographical. Only after the book was bound with the bio on the back page did I realize what I’d done.

It’s one thing to apply Jergens Natural Glow moisturizer and claim you’ve been in the sun, and another to pretend that, as a teenager, you were called to the bema. When girls want to know how protagonist Stacy Friedman’s bat mitzvah compares with my own—that is, Fiona’s—I need to be armed with answers. I need to dredge up details, because Fiona rocked the dais.

Sketching in Fiona’s life is like creating a character for another novel. I pulled details from my own past, and some from my peers’. Like Aiden Black in the ninth grade, Fiona got the asymmetrical hair cut. Like me, she wore army pants and white T-shirts to school most days—until Alexis Biederman asked if we owned anything else. Unlike me, Fiona got into the college of her choice, Hampshire, where she studied sculpture and philosophy. We both taught ourselves to play guitar, but late one night after a bitter breakup, alone with her tacos and tears, Fiona discovered that she could sing.

How can a person like me—someone who attended an urban girls’ school where Christian prayers were mandatory; someone whose family celebrated Christmas not because we believe in the resurrection but because we are addicts and believe in instant gratification—be expected to pass herself off as a bat mitzvah? I created Fiona; I can play her. (Fiona and I dress alike, but I should mention that I will be wearing a wig.) My conundrum lies in the lying: Being Fiona means being a bat mitzvah, regaling girls with stories that never happened at a ritual I never experienced. I’ve already had mothers wanting to connect and bond, wanting me to provide some solace or advice concerning their Shira’s upcoming ceremony. This feels very awkward. Can I go to hell for this?

I’ll admit to wishing I didn’t have to fake it, that I was raised with a practice in place, one that I could choose to defy, like I do with yoga every single day. Could I possibly be yearning for what I lacked: a more traditional upbringing? And here is the spot where I could insert the cliché: that writing this book was my own bat mitzvah. Which is not entirely true.

But it’s not exactly untrue, either. In my daily life, I learn lessons through experience, but as a fiction writer I’m not interested in moral education. My first novel was about a couple doomed to repeat their mistakes. But in the world of young-adult fiction, morality prevails. Stacy had to learn something. While many Reform Jewish girls get through their bat mitzvahs unscathed by actual learning or heightened understanding or deep meaning, Stacy actually understood her Torah portion, she actually grew from the experience. In other words, Stacy gets it while I’m just faking it.

But on tour, I won’t be able to fake it any longer. I will be on the proverbial bema in front of a congregation of pubescent girls who will eat me alive if they intuit a crumb of inauthenticity. I’ve heard you can practice Judaism without believing in it and through the routine, the hope goes, comes belief. This was a lesson I learned with writing, with guitar, with cooking, and perhaps I’m about to learn it about my religion. So maybe by putting on the wig, sitting with preteen girls, answering the same questions and reading to them from the same book, I can develop my own routine, and through routine comes belief. Perhaps it’s fitting, then, that my rite of passage will take place back in middle schools, in front of developing and confused 13-year olds.

Then came his daughter’s bat mitzvah. On the big day, Ari managed to threaten to kill two people and made reference to the cost of the event—”tonight we eat like kings, $500 a head.” During the candlelighting ceremony, Ari spied a rival agent chatting up Vince, and over his wife’s protest, called Vince up to bless the challah, usurping Grandpa Maury. We even got to watch (and cringe at) guests gettin’ down to the sounds of the onetime rap star DJ Quik.

It’s not entirely surprising that Ari’s ruthlessness didn’t stop for religion. But Entourage also gave us old men with whitefish salad stuck in their teeth, and Sarah, Ari’s unassuming daughter, wearing a tiara—like a princess, not a scholar. Some television shows have offered the bar mitzvah as an opportunity for poignancy, others have provided inspiring satire, but this show simply gave us a snide send-up. Regrettably, Sarah’s bat mitzvah affirmed misconceptions that the American Jew can neither dance with soul nor observe with it.

Theodore Bikel, Cloris Leachman, and Ernest Borgnine in The Bar Mitzvah of Major Orlovsky (CBS/Photofest)

Here, then, are 10 memorable TV b’nai mitzvah, moving over the years from well-meaning, almost saccharine reverence for ritual to critical, even scathing send-ups.

1. “The Bar Mitzvah of Major Orlovsky,” 1962. In this installment of General Electric Theater, Orlovsky, a Russian defector, falls in love with Miriam Raskin, the widowed daughter of a rabbi. Although Orlovsky fell away from religion as a child—fleeing home, serving in the Russian army—he re-connects to his tradition through Miriam, who is preparing to celebrate her son’s bar mitzvah. Orlovsky returns to Judaism and decides to become a bar mitzvah.

2. Car 54, Where Are You?, 1963. Joey Pokrass, about to become a bar mitzvah boy, is afraid no one will attend his big day; his father is a widely loathed landlord, and the Pokrass name is mud in town. So officers Toody and Muldoon bring over prisoners from night court to watch Joey at the bima; others show up, too, persuaded by the cops’ genuine pleadings. Old Man Pokrass is so touched at this outpouring for his son that he mends his ways and begins to fix up his tenants’ apartments. “Yesterday my son was bar mitzvahed,” he says, “but it was me who became a man.”

3. The Dick Van Dyke Show, 1966. Buddy Sorrell, played by Morey Amsterdam, has been acting funny, ducking out of the office for unclear reasons and with odd excuses. Rob and Sally speculate whether he’s having an affair, but it turns out that he’s been meeting with a rabbi: As a young child, he had to work and was unable to become a bar mitzvah, and now he is planning to rectify the omission from his youth.

4. Archie Bunker’s Place, 1981. Stephanie, the young Jewish girl whom Archie and Edith adopted after her mother’s death, wants to celebrate a bat mitzvah on this successor to All in the Family. Stephanie’s biological grandmother gets involved in the planning and insists on a big, lavish affair, but Stephanie will have none of it. After a synagogue service in which she chants in Hebrew alongside a rabbi and a female cantor, Stephanie has her party back at Archie’s house. It’s the one time Archie Bunker wears a yarmulke, and Rob “Meathead” Reiner isn’t even around to see it.

5. Diff’rent Strokes, 1984. Arnold, the young, black adopted son of “Mr. D,” attends a friend’s bar mitzvah and is attracted to a religion that gives a 13-year-old boy cash and premature adult privileges, which, he thinks, include getting into X-rated movies. Arnold consults a rabbi about converting, but when he hears about some of the challenges of Judaism—learning Hebrew, fasting on Yom Kippur—his interest cools. At the end of the episode, he goes to church with his father.

6. The Wonder Years, 1989. Kevin, played by Fred Savage, is jealous of his friend Paul, who is about to become a bar mitzvah. Kevin is moved when, having dinner at Paul’s house, he sees Paul’s grandfather give him, in anticipation of the big day, not a TV or watch but a prayer book that his father had given him. Kevin goes home and asks his parents, “What are we?” His parents fumble about, come up with a few bland European ancestries. Since it happens to fall on his birthday, Kevin, overcome by a jealousy he can’t quite name, refuses to attend Paul’s bar mitzvah. Paul is understandably wounded. In the end, Kevin relents, showing up at the synagogue in time to see Paul read from Torah. The episode ends with the two boys dancing a rousing hora.

7. Seinfeld, 1997. “The Serenity Now” episode features this fine exchange among Elaine, a bar mitzvah boy, and his father:

Elaine: Congratulations, Mr. Lippman.

Lippman: Oh, Elaine. My boy’s a man today. Can you believe it? He’s a man.

Elaine: Oh, congratulations, Adam.

[Adam zealously French-kisses Elaine.]

Adam: I’m a man!

Later, both Mr. Lippman and the rabbi hit on Elaine.

8. Sex and the City, 2000. Publicist Samantha Jones, played by Kim Cattrall, is hired to help plan the party of Jenny Brier, a precocious, young New Yorker. “My father has invited over 300 of his most powerful friends to this event,” Jenny tells a skeptical Samantha. “They’re not all coming. The Clintons can’t make it, of course. But like I told Daddy, we’ll be lucky if we can swing this for under a mil. But what do I know? I’m just a kid.”

9. Frasier, 2002. Eager to put in a fine performance at the bar mitzvah of his son (who is being raised by his ex-wife, Lilith), Frasier wants to deliver a brief blessing in Hebrew. When he accidentally infuriates his Hebrew tutor, a Star Trek fan, Frasier is deceived into memorizing the blessing in Klingon. At the big event, Frasier chants, “Pookh lod wih le koo…” then concludes, “Shabbat shalom.”

“Today, I Am a Clown,” The Simpsons

10. The Simpsons, 2003. Krusty the Klown, the prodigal son of Rabbi Hyman Krustofski, is moved to celebrate an adult bar mitzvah when he discovers that he cannot get a star on the Jewish Walk of Fame without having passed that milestone. In a nod to reality TV, Krusty’s bar mitzvah becomes a television special, a big spectacle that infuriates his rabbi father, voiced by Jackie Mason. But at the end, to reconcile with his father, Krusty celebrates a low-key affair at the synagogue.