An excerpt from Mazel Tov: Celebrities’ Bar and Bat Mitzvah Memories by Jill Rappaport, Photographs by Linda Solomon. Copyright © 2007 by Jill Rappaport and Linda Solomon. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc. N.Y.
I was bar mitzvahed in Evanston, Ill., in a church because we were a very liberal congregation of Reform Jews, called Reconstructionists. My father used to joke that we prayed to To Whom It May Concern.
Besides the studying part, I helped prepare for the event by drawing the picture on the invitation, which was so much fun. I drew pictures of the band KISS and I drew things that I loved from inside the Torah. My parents structured the day. The ceremony was modest but I think there were about 200 people there. Only about 40 were my friends. The rest was family. My parents read poetry, and because they’re real artists, it was a pretty cool bar mitzvah. We didn’t have a band but afterwards there was dancing in my basement. I put on my records. I wanted to honor the occasion in my own way. I didn’t really have any reverence for the big party. It wasn’t a big community of people battling each other for the biggest bar mitzvah, like in my movie Keeping Up With the Steins.
I had no desire for the big fancy party. And we were a theater family living in Evanston. It was just a way of gathering my friends together, and to take part in the tradition that my father had passed down to me. My friends showed up. I didn’t really have a girlfriend at the time, but a girl that I liked showed up. And I think it was a real novelty to them, because it was one of the only bar mitzvahs going. For the most part, my friends had not been to one. So it was a new experience and they loved it.
But being 13 wasn’t only about the bar mitzvah. At the time, I was also playing football. That was a real focal point of my life. My team actually would win quite a bit, and after a game, the team would go to McDonald’s to celebrate. Instead of going to McDonald’s, my father took me, one of the very few white kids on the team, to Hebrew school. So, unfortunately, my Jewishness was introduced in a negative way, but in time I grew to appreciate it all.
Turning 13 and being bar mitzvahed is a rite of passage. We all need rites of passage and markings of times and all these things. And it meant a lot to my father. So at the time it may have been even more about him than me, and what a beautiful thing for him to pass on to me. My father was very religious and incredibly active in his community. He was a singer and probably would have been a cantor or a rabbi had he not been an actor. He was very connected to his Judaism.
