Word: mitzvah
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...replied, "you're Jewish too." I realized that he was correct, and that, in fact, we had gone to the same Jewish summer camp in New Jersey. Memories of my past crises of faith came flooding back to me, such as the time Yasser Arafat crashed my Bar Mitzvah, and the time I tried to sue my parents to return my foreskin. So much for my epiphany. I had met the Other, and he was me. At least Ahab got to fight a whale...
...Harvard debutantes profiled are any indication, coming-out parties are just like any other family event where your relatives want to take your picture. In their families, it was just another rite of passage that involved food, drink and relatives with popping flash bulbs, sort of like a bar mitzvah, only without the religious significance...
...misspelled or mispronounced, a dead giveaway. His brother Samuel had rechristened himself Bill Barzell. That was too exotic for Dad, who did little but grumble about our foreign-sounding name until I started to get bylines on my high school paper. That did it. Not long after my bar mitzvah, he went to court and got a writ requiring the world to call us Barrett. In journalism, he assured me, an American name would help...
...course, the ruse counted for nothing; college tuition, which he also provided, was much more effective. Like most Jews who anglicized their names, my family continued to advertise its real identity in many ways. By the time my father drank toasts at his grandsons' bar-mitzvah parties, the imperative for disguise was gone. Pamela Nadell, professor of Jewish studies at American University, traces the shift to the mid-1960s, when Israel's military prowess evoked group pride and the black-is-beautiful movement struck a chord among Jews, though few Jews went as far as some blacks who adopted African...
Maybe the best way to evoke the odd and intriguing flavor of The Loman Family Picnic is to recount the ending -- or rather, endings. After throwing a bar mitzvah way beyond the budget of his blue-collar Brooklyn family, the father (Peter Friedman of TV's Brooklyn Bridge) storms out in rage at being unappreciated, his son's wad of cash gifts stuck precariously in his back pocket. He returns hours later, explaining that he has been watching the "dumb" movie Born Free. In one variation, his bored wife (two-time Tony Award winner Christine Baranski) chucks...