Editorial note: Spoilers ahead for “31 Candles” and “Eleanor the Great.”
In 1966, “The Dick van Dyke Show” aired the first-ever episode of American television featuring a bar mitzvah. It was also the first-ever episode to depict an adult bar mitzvah. Inspired by actor Morey Amsterdam’s own experience being too poor to have a bar mitzvah as a child, the episode features Buddy Sorrell (Amsterdam) as he secretly prepares for the right-of-passage he never got to have.
Nearly 60 years and many, many onscreen b-mitzvahs later, it seems that the adult b-mitzvah plot line is the latest emerging trend in Jewish TV and film.
Since 2021, this Torah trope (sorry, I had to) has started popping up everywhere. It’s in an HBO show and the Real Housewives franchise, indie rom-coms and a movie that opened at Cannes. (Though I’d be remiss not to mention that in 2003 “The Simpsons” depicted Krusty the Clown’s adult bar mitzvah in “Today I Am a Clown.”) The b-mitzvah adults are men and women; most are fictional characters but a handful are real. They range in age from 31 to 94 years old. And their reasons for participating in this Jewish coming-of-age ceremony intended for 12 to 13 year olds are just as variable.
In “And Just Like That…,” Charlotte (Kristin Davis) steps in at the last moment when her areligious, apathetic kid Rock (Alexa Swinton) refuses to participate in their “They Mitzvah.” Meanwhile, in “31 Candles,” 31-year-old Leo Kadner (Jonah Feingold) decides to have the bar mitzvah he never had as a scheme to reconnect with his camp crush turned b-mitzvah tutor Eva Shapiro (Sarah Coffey). It’s only after Eva rebuffs Leo (she’s gay, dude) and his beloved grandmother Lila (Caroline Aaron) passes away that he realizes that his Jewish identity is in fact important to him and he goes ahead with the ceremony. Interestingly, the bar mitzvah captured in the movie is actually a real ceremony for Feingold, who himself never had a bar mitzvah as a teen.
Similarly, “Mazel, Meredith,” a season five episode of “The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City,” provides a rare glimpse at a real-life adult bat mitzvah. Sure, the episode has all the trappings of Real Housewife flair: Meredith arrives at the ceremony in a horse-drawn sleigh and the party afterwards features a fight about someone’s “high body count.” But where reality TV is usually a dubious source of reality, Meredith’s ceremony is sincere and intimate. Her mother bestows her with a tallit — the one Meredith’s husband wore for his own bar mitzvah 40-some years prior. Her children recite the priestly blessing. And surrounded by a small group of friends and family, Meredith leyns from the Torah.
“She was nervous. And I said to her, it’s OK, you can be nervous. I’ll be there. I won’t let you fall,” officiant Rabbi Ruth Abusch-Magder told Kveller after the episode aired. “And I think that that’s also a really important Jewish value: It’s not a performance and it’s not a test of how good you are. It’s really an opportunity to celebrate what you’ve learned, and she had done the work and the learning.”
For her part, Meredith explains in the episode: “This is very special for me, most people do this when they’re very young. And this is something I decided to do as an adult to affirm my faith, to affirm my spirituality and my heritage.”
But perhaps the most poignant examples of late-in-life bat mitzvahs come from recent films “Between the Temples” and “Eleanor the Great.” In the former, Carol Kane plays Carla O’Connor, a music teacher whose chance run-in with a former student-turned-cantor Ben (Jason Schwartzman) provides her with the opportunity to have the bat mitzvah she never had (bat mitzvahs weren’t a thing when she was a kid) and never could have had (her parents were Jewish by heritage, Communist by political persuasion). Whereas others see Carla’s desire to connect with her Judaism as “impulsive” and not worthy of serious consideration, Ben takes her seriously. And where Ben is adrift and literally voiceless after the death of his wife, Carla brings music, purpose and love back to him. The film ends with Kane as Carla, not in a synagogue, but in nature, chanting her Torah portion to only Ben and Hashem.
In “Eleanor the Great,” 94-year-old Eleanor Morgenstein (June Squibb) doesn’t actually get to celebrate her bat mitzvah. Just as she is sitting on the bimah, donning a bright magenta suit and ready to be called to the Torah, an elaborate deceit she’s been weaving all movie is uncovered: She’s been lying about being a Holocaust survivor. But like the reasons for Eleanor’s big lie are complex, so is her Jewish identity. In a scene before Eleanor’s bat mitzvah, Eleanor watches as a little girl she doesn’t know completes her bat mitzvah rites. “Are we crashing a bat mitzvah right now?” Eleanor’s young friend Nina (Erin Kellyman), a journalism student documenting her Holocaust story, questions. “For the longest time, shul was a place only for men,” Eleanor tells her. “Women weren’t welcome. We certainly weren’t bat mitzvahed. Well, when I was young, I…”
“You were just fighting to stay alive,” Nina says, still believing Eleanor’s lie.
Eleanor doesn’t correct her, but offers: “Anyway, I just mean I never got the chance to celebrate my Jewish identity.”
It’s only later, when Eleanor’s daughter crashes her own mother’s bat mitzvah and disrupts her lie, that we learn that that part is true. Eleanor converted to Judaism to marry her late husband. She never had a bat mitzvah, and never got a chance to celebrate her Jewishness. This detail maintains Eleanor’s bat mitzvah storyline as a foil to her Holocaust lie. She might be presenting her late best friend’s Holocaust survival story as her own, but her drive to have a bat mitzvah comes from a genuine place; perhaps it comes from Eleanor questioning what her Judaism is, now that both her husband and her best friends are gone. Like Kane, Feingold and Marks, Squibb also learned a Torah portion for the role. And though Eleanor’s bat mitzvah doesn’t happen, viewers still get to see a 94-year-old Eleanor flawlessly chant Torah during a practice session.
Where teen onscreen b-mitzvahs like “You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah” tend to be vessels for exploring secular elements — social dynamics, angst and a big, fabulous party — adult onscreen b-mitzvahs tend to achieve far more meaningful ends. They challenge the idea that b-mitzvahs are shiny, hollow ornaments to hang on an outmoded way of life. Instead, these adult b-mitzvahs develop a picture of Judaism that is fuller, more grounded in ritual, spirituality and introspection; and provide an opportunity to dig into the richness of Jewish identity for viewers and actors alike.
This isn’t to say that all teen onscreen b-mitzvahs are bad and all adult b-mitzvahs are good. The entire framework of the “They Mitzvah” in “And Just Like That…” is inherently flawed. Alana’s bat mitzvah in Apple TV+’s “Extrapolations” points to the tremendous responsibility to our climate that those in power have placed on the shoulders of children; and satirizing the gratuitous performance and Dippin’ Dots machine at Becca’s bat mitzvah is a point well-taken in the “Pen15” bat mitzvah episode. But when the entertainment industry, and particularly television, are quickly moving to a model where the goal is to create content as do-nothing and empty as possible, the adult b-mitzvah story is not just welcome. It’s a tonic I’d readily drink up with a cheery “L’chaim!”
