A collection of more than 300 photographs culled from bar and bat mitzvahs from the 70's to the early 90's with essays by friends of the authors like Jonathan Safran Foer and Sarah Silverman, "Bar Mitzvah Disco," which will appear in bookstores on Nov. 2. It is at first glance a nostalgia tour through an era of unprecedented bourgeois tackiness. But, the authors say, it is also a cultural history, albeit one with a Duran Duran backbeat. The MTV-era bar mitzvah marked not only a transitional moment in their own lives, they say, but also one for American Jews as a whole. It was a time when an insular Old World ritual blew up into an all-American affair: inclusive, often suburban and, thanks to new Hollywood production values, unforgettably garish.
I'd say over-the-top bar and bat mitzvahs were already a well-established tradition before the 1980s. But the decade of big hair is always good for a laugh.
"For most of these people these pictures have been sources of shame, embarrassment and therapy," [co-author Roger] Bennett said. For his part he said he could look at his own album now and laugh, but couldn't face it even a decade ago. "Ten years ago, when you still have everything to prove, and there is some flexibility about who you might become, this is something you most certainly want to hide. But after a certain amount of time the statute of limitations on shame just evaporates."
Of course some memories are easier to rationalize than others. Stephanie Huttner of Denver, for example, is shown standing in the middle of a country club wearing a gold ruffled skirt next to an elephant on loan from the Denver Zoo for her safari-theme bat mitzvah in 1987.
View a slide show of pics from the book here.
No comments:
Post a Comment