The standard bar mitzvah speech invariably included the words, “today I am a man,” but I have always felt that a bar mitzvah ceremony at age 13 is a relic of a time when marriage took place in ...

I was not supposed to like Netflix’s “You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah.” Here is why. Some 30 years ago, I created my own rabbinical cottage industry — observing and critiquing bar ...

Via Getty Images, via Kveller/JTA.org Holly Lebowitz Rossi My favorite photo of my dad at his 1957 bar mitzvah shows him, tuxedoed but clearly pre-pubescent, proudly holding a sign that reads, “Today, ...

In the Jewish faith, this is called a bar and bat mitzvah, and it is a joyous event in which 12 or 13-year-olds celebrate the end of their youth, according to Judaism, and their entrance into the ...

Doug Emhoff, left, and Scott Bermack, right, with Rabbi Henry Weiner at their Nov. 1977 bar mitzvah. Today, Bermack (top) and Emhoff are both attorneys. Courtesy of Scott Bermack and Getty Images ...

Nobody.” Over the years he performed at bar mitzvahs for his son, his nephews, his friends’ sons, but said he never felt he needed one of his own. “What I missed was the presents,” he said.

In the world of supplemental Jewish learning (synagogue schools), bar/bat mitzvah has cannibalized Jewish education. To quote one of my colleagues: we “teach to the test” — the ceremony.