Listen, it’s your kid’s Bar/Bat Mitzvah, and you want it to be special. You’ve got the theme (“opulence”), you’ve got the music (Nicki Minaj or similar), you’ve got the entrance planned (though it’ll never beat this), but you still need a venue/caterer.

Like something out of Keeping Up With the Steins, enter the New York Harvard Club, featuring their own Bar Mitzvah menu. Because nothing says “coming of age in the Jewish community” like shrimp and squid tapas in a clubroom for an institution the teen of honor can’t even join for another five years.

Sorry; it would be lazy writing to just list every treif item on the menu. Like the petit crabcake with creole sauce. Or the lobster and vanilla cappuccino. Or the crab BLT. Or the baby octopus. Or the entire “New England Clam Bake Station” and the “Seafood and Raw Bar.”

Enough. Listen, not every Jewish gathering has to be kosher, since, you know, most Jews don’t. Dessert does include a “Mitzvah cake” but what that means is anybody’s guess. Perhaps, in accordance with the literal translation of the word, you’re commanded to eat it? There’s also mention of a kosher menu available, but no word as to what that entails.

But this isn’t about traditional dietary restrictions. It’s about the opportunity to be so lavishly assimilated that it doesn’t matter if you’re eating pork or not.

It’s about menu sections like “Asian Station,” “Taste of Italy” and “Mediterranean Specialties,” but nothing explicitly Jewish. It’s about having multiple selections of artisinal breads, but no challah. It’s about shelling out that extra cash (pun not intended) for an oyster shucker. It’s about serving way more food than the population of a small country could eat in one sitting. It’s about the open-est of bars at a party for twelve-year-olds. It’s about throwing a party at a club affiliated with a university that once had a quota on how many Jews could enroll.

In short, it’s about proving how great it is for Jews in America by being as un-Jewish as possible and sticking a Jewish label on it at the last second. It’s a Philip Roth masterpiece in menu form (and simply begs for a reenactment of the Goodbye Columbus wedding buffet scene). It’s revenge against the socio-economic barriers we’ve faced on-and-off as a people for centuries.

So go ahead. Bete’avon. You earned it.

Image via Wikimedia.

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Over at Vulture, there’s a revealing, intimate profile of fun. guitarist and songwriter-to-the-pop-stars Jack Antonoff—AKA Mr. Lena Dunham—that’s well worth your time.

Antonoff—who rose to fame in 2012 on the back of fun.’s sweeping, exuberant pop hit “We Are Young“—talks openly about the death of his 13-year-old sister when he was 18, right before 9/11, and how the two tragedies shaped his psyche, his creative life, his germ-phobia (he wipes down airplane seats with anti-bacterial wipes before traveling), and his songwriting ethos. What emerges is a frank portrait of a sensitive, neurotic, likable thirty-going-on-sixty-year-old with a penchant for crazy socks and sweaters. Writes Jada Yuan:

Sarah lost her lifelong battle with brain cancer when she was 13 and Antonoff was a senior in high school, but his adolescence might have been marked even more profoundly by his family’s struggle than her dying, by those memories of hospitals and growing up in constant fear. “It’s not groundbreaking psychological stuff,” says Antonoff of his “germ issues.” “It’s coming from a very obvious place. You know, the scarring on the lung is not a big fucking deal. It’s just that in the context of my life, it just stresses me out. My real sickness is how I deal with it psychologically.” He’s seeing a psychopharmacologist and really needs to find a new therapist, but he gets stressed out thinking about starting over—not because he has a problem bringing up painful things but because of “the boredom of catching someone up.” He laughs. “Anyway, long answer to your question about why I drink tea. You realize that’s how this started, right?” We’ve been talking for only ten minutes.

We also learn that Antonoff can pull off “vaguely Nazi looks,” like a shaved head, because his face is “so Jewish.” His mom still buys him lunch, even though he’s a platinum-selling artist. And at his parents’ place in New Jersey he has a walk-in closet filled with Star Wars tchotchkes, which spill “out of three full bookcases and guarded by life-size cardboard cutouts of a Storm Trooper and Obi-Wan Kenobi.” His bar mitzvah, not surprisingly, was Star Wars-themed. It’s a credit to Antonoff that this detail is neither tragically nerdy nor annoyingly twee—it’s just endearing, like he is.

Image: Mat Hayward / Shutterstock.com

The post “Fun” Guitarist Jack Antonoff Has a Jewish Punim and a Big, Big Heart appeared first on Jewcy.

The purim ball was a fucking crazy time!

— Lena Dunham (@lenadunham) February 28, 2013

Lena Dunham gave the Purimspiel at last night’s Jewish Museum Purim Ball at the Park Avenue Armory. “Welcome to my bat mitzvah!” she said as she faced the well-heeled 800-person crowd in the massive party space filled with balloons streaming from the ceiling and sparkly decorations (in the name of journalism, I got a glitter tattoo).

The play was inspired by Eloise, the city child who lives in the Plaza, who Dunham called an “international, intergenerational symbol of just general precocity”—and naturally her favorite fictional character—and was written in the voice of a young Lena Dunham.

What started out as a potentially cloying narrative (“I am Lena, I am six. I am an artist’s child, and I live in New York City”) turned into a surprisingly revealing look at Dunham’s own understanding of her Jewishness—though Dunham interrupted herself early on as ‘grown-up Lena’ to insist parts about her parents had been somewhat fictionalized. She also added a very meta while-we-were-tweeting message: “If anything I say offends you, please don’t fucking tweet it because it’s going to really stress me out.”

Dunham was headlining the annual fundraising event as a favor to Museum Director Claudia Gould, a close friend of her mother, artist Laurie Simmons. Gould had asked Simmons if Dunham would participate in last year’s event, way back in a pre-Girls era, and Simmons wisely urged her to “give her a year.” But back to the Spiel:

“I suppose I’m Jewish, depending on which way you look at me. For instance, my mother is Jewish, and you are a Jew if your mother is a Jew—at least that’s what the Jews say,” Young Lena began. Her next line—”The Jews also say, ‘you’re too skinny, eat,'” got a hearty laugh from the crowd, who had just finished dining on short rib.

“The Jews don’t care who your dad is, unless he’s on the board of a major hospital,” Young Lena added, also to big laughs. (Tickets for the event, which this year honored artist James Rosenquist and AIG CEO Robert H. Benmosche, started at $1,250.)

Young Lena’s WASP father (a “White Angry Saxophone Protestant”) would go to synagogue but not wear a yarmulke—it looked like a bird pooped on his head, he said. Still, Young Lena learned early on about the hazards of Jewish hair and developed a very negative opinion of parents who sent their kids to camp (Camp Ramah got its second Dunham mention—the first was during Season 1 of Girls).

Then Young Lena assembled a group onstage to play the different roles in the Purim story—her mother played the principled Vashti, her doctor played King Ahashuerus, and boyfriend Jack Antonoff’s sister Rachel played Esther. The story was told quickly, a less dramatic version of a Rugrats holiday special, and ended with—spoiler alert—Esther convincing her husband Ahasuerus (even though we’re warned that Young Lena’s doctor is way too old to actually marry Rachel) to save all the Jews from Haman.

The whole thing was sweeter than what we’ve come to expect from Dunham, but just as sharp. She also did drop the F-bomb at a fundraiser for a Jewish institution, so there’s that.

Dunham spent the rest of the evening being politely accosted by girls in high heels and sparkly dresses. I was barred by a publicist before I could ask Grown-Up Lena the age-old question: was she an Esther or a Vashti?

There’s always Passover.

(Photo by Neilson Barnard/Getty Images)

Previously: Lena Dunham to Direct and Star in Her Own Purim Spiel
You Can Buy a Ring With Lena Dunham’s Face on it on Etsy

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The post Lena Dunham Wins Purim appeared first on Jewcy.

Max Greenfield, the man behind New Girl’s Schmidt, stopped by Late Night with Jimmy Fallon last night and, naturally, talked about his mother and his bar mitzvah.

He called his mother right away when he found out he got nominated for an Emmy, and her response was “You’re nominated against SAUL?” He imagines her spitting out her Nespresso coffee (“They just got a machine, they’re very excited about it”) when he listed the rest of the nominees.

Fallon also showed pictures from Greenfield’s Saturday Night Live-themed bar mitzvah, which we’ve heard about several times before. SNL people, just let the guy host already—please?

Previously: Network Jews: Schmidt from ‘New Girl’

(Photo by Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images)

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Jason Segel’s new Judd Apatow-produced comedy, Engagement, which Segel co-wrote with Nick Stoller (the dream team behind Forgetting Sarah Marshall), will open the Tribeca Film Festival on April 18.

• In other Apatow family news, daughter Maude interviews Paul Rudd, her on-screen dad in Knocked Up and the upcoming This is Forty, and he tells her about his bar mitzvah.

• Steve Martin, Twitter prankster.

• Whitney Houston was planning another trip to Israel.

The post Daily Jewce: Jason Segel Flick to Open Tribeca Film Festival, Steve Martin Pranking on Twitter, Whitney’s Trip to Israel, and More appeared first on Jewcy.