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A brief

• Car 54, Where Are You? 1963. Joey
Pokrass, about to become a bar mitzvah
boy, is afraid no one will attend his big
day. His father is a widely loathed land-
lord, and the Pokrass name is mud in
town.
So officers Toody and Muldoon bring
over prisoners from night court to watch
Joey at the bimah; others show up, too,
convinced by the cops' genuine pleadings.
Old Man Pokrass is so touched at this
outpouring for his son that he mends his
ways and begins to fix up his tenants'
apartments. "Yesterday my son was bar
mitzvahed," he says, "but it was me who
became a man."

history of the

television

bar mitzvah.

Krusty the Clown reads from the Torah on "The Simpsons" in 2003.

Mark Oppenheimer

Special to the Jewish News

n The Chosen Image: Television's
Portrayal of Jewish Themes and
Characters (1999), Jonathan and
Judith Pearl argue that, although
Hollywood movies tend to depict b'nai
mitzvah as trivial or materialistic (The
Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, The
Wedding Singer, Starsky 6- Hutch), televi-
sion has taken a far more nuanced
approach: "Often great pains are taken to
explain the meaning of the ceremony, its
importance to the family, and its signifi-
cance in Jewish life."
They're right, but that doesn't tell the
whole story. For the first, say, 30 years of
television, it was a far more cautious
medium than the cinema. It either didn't
treat the religious aspect of people's lives
(there were no b'nai mitzvah on, say, The
Goldbergs), or it treated religion with an
earnestness that would make us squirm
today.

I

By the 1980s, it was acceptable to poke
gentle fun at a rite like the bar mitzvah.
And in the 1990s, when television shows
such as The Simpsons and South Park were
fearlessly lampooning and satirizing
everything, nothing was sacred, not even
religious practices.
Here, then, are memorable TV b'nai
mitzvah, moving over the years from well-
meaning, almost saccharine reverence for
ritual to critical, even scathing sendups:
•"The Bar Mitzvah of Major Orlovsky,"
1962. In this installment of General
Electric Theater, Orlovsky, a Russian defec-
tor, falls in love with Miriam Raskin, the
widowed daughter of a rabbi.
Although Orlovsky fell away from reli-
gion as a child — fleeing home, serving in
the Soviet army — he reconnects to his tra-
dition through Miriam, who is preparing
to celebrate her son's bar mitzvah.
Orlovsky returns to Judaism and decides
to become a bar mitzvah.

• The Dick Van Dyke Show, 1966. Buddy
Sorrell, played by Morey Amsterdam, has
been acting funny, ducking out of the
office for unclear reasons and with odd
excuses.
Rob and Sally speculate whether he's
having an affair, but it turns out that he has
been meeting with a rabbi: As a young
child, he had to work and was unable to
become a bar mitzvah, and now he is plan-
ning to rectify the omission from his youth.

•Archie Blinker's Place, 1981. Stephanie,
the young Jewish girl whom Archie and
Edith adopted after her mother's death,
wants to celebrate a bat mitzvah on this
successor to All in the Family.
Stephanie's biological grandmother gets
involved in the planning and insists on a
big, lavish affair, but Stephanie will have
none of it. After a synagogue service in
which she chants in Hebrew alongside a
rabbi and a female cantor, Stephanie has
her party back at Archie's house.
It's the one time Archie Bunker wears a
yarmulke, and Rob "Meathead" Reiner
isn't even around to see it.

(Satire on page 50)

JN

CELEBRATE • 2006

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