Published: 7 May 2021
Last updated: 4 March 2024
Read an excerpt from Seth Rogen’s new memoir, Yearbook, which will be out next week
When Jewish kids turn 13, they have a bar or bat mitzvah, depending on whether they’re a boy or a girl. This entails getting up onstage at Temple in front of everyone you know and reading from the Torah in a crazy singsongy way that I’m a hundred per cent sure has no musical logic to it and is objectively humiliating. To make matters worse, they have to prepare for a fucking year for this.
There are three good things about having a bar or bat mitzvah:
- A party. You get to have one after your service, and, at that age, I’d been led to believe that having a party thrown in your honour is a fun thing—which is something I’ve since greatly reconsidered.
- You get gifts. Often in the form of money, which is a thing that I wanted to have in order to buy things I didn’t have. A good haul could be several thousand dollars. That’s right. All ’bout the Binyamins, baby. (I’m sorry.)
- In order to be bar mitzvahed, you have to go to bar-mitzvah class, which sucks. But you also get invited to the bar and bat mitzvahs of everyone in the class, and there were about 60 kids in mine, so that was essentially an entire year of attending parties every single weekend, a pretty exciting prospect.
FULL STORY Sons of Commandment: Tales from the Nineties Bar-Mitzvah Circuit (The New Yorker)
Photo: Seth Rogen in 2019 (Matt Crossick/PA Wire)
ID: 20190426001396644393
