Word: bat
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...that he only became a man in February of 2003, when Hillel sponsored his first bar mitzvah. Although the ceremony traditionally marks a young man or woman’s entry into Jewish adulthood—the bar mitzvah is the service held for 13-year-old boys, the bat mitzvah the equivalent for girls—it may not have held much religious meaning for the then-396-year-old John Harvard. For Hillel celebrants, the highlight of John Harvard’s bar mitzvah—now an annual event—is the party. Attendees...
According to Mark Oppenheimer, author of “Thirteen and a Day: The Bar and Bat Mitzvah Across America,” John Harvard’s bar mitzvah is not the only ceremony that focuses on the ensuing party. In fact, disappointed by the lack of religious meaning he finds in the b’nai mitzvah he attends close to home in the New York area, Oppenheimer traverses the country in search of more traditionally religious ceremonies...
Oppenheimer’s Jewish travels begin in New York, where he attends bar and bat mitzvah services at Westchester Reform Temple in suburban Scarsdale, B’nai Jeshurun on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, and Emanu-El on the East Side—and sneaks into the subsequent parties. He finds that the potential religious significance of the ceremonies is lost as rabbis and cantors focus on educating a mostly non-Jewish audience about the service itself. As Oppenheimer, who is currently editor of the New Haven Advocate, writes of the Westchester synagogue...
...extravagance of the bar and bat mitzvah parties bothers Oppenheimer even more than the rote nature of the synagogue services. He describes the party motivators, or dancers, who are paid by parents to enliven children’s b’nai mitvah. Many of the dancers are black, Hispanic, or Asian. And by participating in b’nai mitzvah celebrations, they “are selling an experience more ethnic than any that the children’s parents would allow them to experience for real.” Parents can also purchase tarot readers, large break-dancing...
...author's descriptive instincts for the deadly sins. There is Old Jack, for example, "who pushed drugs for tens of thousands with the same fervor as he filched a newspaper from a candy store," or Charlie O'Sullivan, an ex-baseball player and contract killer who swings a deadly bat. That these and other characters do not have much to do with the story of Dolores and Owney is not so noticeable as one might imagine. Breslin puts a lot of life on the page. Like a good barroom storyteller, he can make you miss your bus with one more...