Death of the Bar Mitzvah
Slate reports,
The “bash mitzvah,” as New York once dubbed it, is alive and unwell as a peculiarly American form of excess. As a teenager in the 1980s, I attended parties where DJs spun REO Speedwagon and kids skulked around the edges of the dance floor near a life-size cardboard cutout of the bar mitzvah boy. That sort of awkwardness now seems quaint. (Have a look at Bar Mitzvah Disco and you’ll see what I mean.) At today’s faux adult parties, as Mark Oppenheimer reports in Thirteen and a Day, his tour of the American bar mitzvah, kids rub up against older “party motivators” and gamble away monopoly money at blackjack tables. Dropping off your son or daughter at such an affair, you could be forgiven for wondering if it isn’t time for the bar mitzvah to go.
I think that there should be a major clarification that the ‘bar mitzvah party’ has nothing to do with the ‘bar mitzvah’. Once we were naive, but the truth is out. Catching uncles and aunts on video doing the funky chicken is a thing of the past.