The celebration of a Bar or Bat Mitzvah has always played an extra-special role in my family. My father was unable to celebrate his Bar Mitzvah since he spent his 13th year in Auschwitz. That fact and the family history that comes with it was central in my upbringing, my own Bar Mitzvah, and my…
RIO DE JANEIRO (JTA) – At 91, Holocaust survivor Andor Stern no longer fears the Nazis who imprisoned him in Auschwitz. Living in his native Sao Paulo, Brazil’s largest metro area of nearly 25 million, what scares him today are burglars – his modest house has been broken into twice in the city where he…
To life, to health, to great friends, and to butts: l’chaim. Fat-bottomed girls, Miss New Booty, and all the honky tonk badonkadonks of the tri-state area will be joyfully grinding to the nusach of the Thong Song this Saturday in Williamsburg at Butt Mitzvah, a queer Jewish nightclub event. A “cumming of age ceremony” (their…
What’s the difference between Donald Trump and a bar mitzvah boy? A bar mitzvah boy has studied, worked hard, and is finally mature enough to be treated as a man. Ba-dum tssss. On Monday night on “The Late Show,” the ever-affable Stephen Colbert gave the comic treatment to President Trump’s declaration of national emergency. Breaking…
It was when my daughter turned twelve that I realized how utterly financially illiterate she was — I had yet to teach her the meaning of a dollar, the definition of a budget, the art of choosing priorities. The realization came to me when I heard an NPR interview with financial expert Beth Kobliner, author…
Picture the scene: a slew of teenyboppers fist-pumping and thundering the words of “Bodak Yellow” as they toast the bar mitzvah boy with Kedem grape juice shots. Cardi B was hired to attend and perform at a lavish extravaganza for one Jake, a bar mitzvah boy — nay, man — who celebrated his call to…
Sure, this bleeding-heart liberal vegetarian millennial will say it: Between his jokes about raping teen gun-violence victims and his decades of promoting sexual harassment, Howard Stern isn’t fit to lick our Tevas. And we’re not huge fans of Adam Sandler, either. But Hashem-damn-it if the video of the two stars yodeling Torah blessings at each…
Philip Epstein has stood in the same exact spot on two separate occasions, 72 years apart. The first time was in 1946 when Epstein, a child Holocaust survivor, was called to the bimah to become a bar mitzvah at the Reicher Synagogue in Lodz, Poland. He was only eleven at the time, and according to…
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