Forty weeks later, Tzvia—named after my ex’s deceased radiologist father—was born. She was round and brown with a feathery layer of lanugo; she looked frighteningly like my father. We assumed that our daughter would be ugly and smart. But within several weeks, it became clear that she was not ugly—she was, in fact, cherubic, with a rosebud mouth and brown doe-like eyes. By the time she hit age five, we discovered that while Tzvia was animated and clever and funny and popular amongst her kindergarten classmates, academics weren’t exactly her thing. And so, whenever anybody asked why we were throwing our daughter a bat mitzvah at our local Chabad, where, per ultra-Orthodox Judaism, she was forbidden from leyning Torah —which, to be honest, is a pretty annoying question: “I don’t know, why are you having your daughter’s bat mitzvah at the Brentwood Country Club with a lobster buffet?”—I’d make a joke about the fact that we still weren’t certain if she could read. (For the record, she can, and very well; she’d just rather spend her time watching TikTok videos of teens shoplifting at Urban Outfitters.) 

Truth is, Chabad can be a wonderful place in which to have a child’s bar or bat mitzvah. Especially if you’re divorced and single and mired in student debt from your gazillion post-graduate degrees and can’t afford a five-star hotel with an infinity pool and flood lights and day players from the Pantages Theatre production of Hamilton. Even if I could swing all those things, I generally loathe b’nai mitzvahs resembling A-list Hollywood premieres. They’re tacky and gauche, and I say this as a jaded entertainment journalist that has attended way too many premieres to count. Chabad is haimish and warm. They’re also great with special needs children, which is why we chose to have our autistic son’s bar mitzvah there two years earlier.  

But now things were different. My ex and I were officially divorced, as opposed to being legally separated when our son Sam became a man, and this time around my ex-husband was bringing his on-and-off-and-on-again blonde, Princeton-grad, gentile girlfriend—let’s call her Polly—to our daughter’s Saturday night bat mitzvah soiree. 

I pitched a tsunami-sized fit about Polly coming for weeks. It wasn’t appropriate, it was way too soon, it would distract from a rite of passage meant to be special and meaningful and focused on family, even if ours had imploded into radioactive dust. I’d never even met this Polly person—and nor did I want to. I complained about it endlessly—to my friends, to my therapist, to the yeshiva bachor working the evening shift at the Western Kosher deli counter. I didn’t have a boyfriend. I didn’t even have a dress. Nothing fit, everything was wrong, my bangs still hadn’t grown out from the night I cut them during COVID lockdown. This bat mitzvah would be a disaster. 

When it came to bat mitzvah planning—and pretty much everything else in life—my ex and I were rarely on the same page. He pretended to be on board with keeping a kosher home, but later revealed he resented it. He argued with every kosher caterer in town, fighting fruitlessly over everything from their available start-time (“Shabbat ends at 7, so by the time we drive there we’ll be serving food around ten”) to the cost of the customized candy table. A week before the event, the Israeli hot truck we booked vanished on us, another catering company with whom we thought we had confirmed said they never got my ex’s credit card information, and my ex sent me the following text: “I am revoking my Jew card.” 

Miraculously, Tzvia’s kabbalat shabbat bat mitzvah service went off without a hitch. She recited the Rebbe’s 12 Pesukim, the kosher chicken didn’t exactly taste like cardboard, and Tzvia’s entire Camp Ramah bunk arrived wearing sparkly dresses and a congratulatory speech they’d collectively penned on pink notebook paper. By the time dessert was served, I’d knocked back three shots of Belvedere. And while I wasn’t excited about the prospect of my ex bringing Princeton Polly to the following night’s fête, I was self-medicated to the point of reason: If Bridget Moynahan could survive Gisele, I could easily weather a twice-divorced 50-year-old without children of her own. 

This is where Josh comes in. Josh was a guy I friended one night on Facebook when I was home and alone and bored. Josh was from Minneapolis and we had seven mutual friends in common, including a girl from St. Louis Park with whom I’d studied at Hebrew U. during my junior year abroad. According to his Facebook profile, Josh studied computer science at Dartmouth and held a Juris Doctor from Columbia Law School and worked in the technology sector in executive positions I failed to comprehend because I’d studied Shakespeare at Cornell and was left-brained to the point of being a dysfunctional everyday idiot. Josh readily confirmed my virtual friendship request: “Have we met before?” he messaged. We had not, but Josh had read a piece I’d written on Boston accents for Variety and that was more of a real-life connection than most people in the online world. By week’s end we were lunching at Dan Tana and Josh was asking me to come work for him. I repeatedly told him no, mostly because I understood 3% of whatever it was he was talking about—something about content, creative, SEO— but also because Josh looked like the love child born of Owen Wilson and Robert Redford circa The Way We Were. Josh’s eyes were the color of a swimming pool. At a certain angle, he had Gene Wilder’s nose. Going to work for a six-foot-tall Minnesotan Jew with two Ivy League degrees and who resembled a 1970’s movie star would have been a fool’s errand. Josh was also wading through the emotional morass of his own post-divorce hell. The second time we hung out—Doordash pizza and bong hits in his single-story bungalow wedged into the hills of Laurel Canyon—Josh slumped on the sofa and sobbed. “I need a friend,” Josh wept. He didn’t ask me to work for him, and I cradled him the way a child might a parent. People make a big deal about how many men you’ve slept with but you would not believe the number of Jewish men’s chests upon which I’ve laid my head. Looking for a pillow, looking for a home. 

“You wanna come to my kid’s bat mitzvah party Saturday night?” 

Josh showed up an hour early wearing a navy plaid sports jacket and a pink-striped button-down with his initials monogrammed on the cuffs. A silk yarmulke functioned as a de facto pocket square. Designer shoes from France, hair a tumbling crest of dishwater blond. A man—a Josh—plucked straight from central casting. (My look was courtesy of Anthropologie, from the label’s unofficial secret Tznius line.)  Josh tied my son’s tie, I zipped up Tzvia’s pale pink pouf dress, and we drove—top-down, wind whipping through our hair—in Josh’s Range Rover Evoque convertible through the Saturday night streets of Highland Park. Josh drove like he was on the Autobahn. With a perfunctory flourish, he fished the yarmulke from his pocket and brandished it in the air with the manic fervor of a rodeo star. Sam squealed with freakish delight. Tzvia, her Drybar braids unraveling around her wind-smacked face, screamed wildly from the backseat: “Hurry! I’m going to be late for my own bat mitzvah!” 

We arrived at Chabad just as everyone we’d hired to put this thing together the moment Shabbat ended (for a party that started 30 minutes later) raced around the parking lot stringing up tea lights and Japanese lanterns and blowing up gold and hot pink Mylar balloons. My ex was sweating, sleeves rolled up, barking orders at the waitstaff like Martin Short in Father of the Bride. It was hard to ignore Josh, who was dressed better than anybody else in attendance and had way better hair. My ex immediately put Josh to work, kicking over a box of as-yet-unassembled LED centerpiece lights with Tzvia’s initials carved out of acrylic and a lightning bolt running down the middle and a battery-operated base connected to a tiny remote control one could use to switch the colors from neon pink to fluorescent green. 

Meanwhile, Tazvia was tantruming over the mechitza on the rented black-and-white-checkered dance floor. “None of my friends had to have one at their bat mitzvahs!” she whined, her girlfriends gathered around her in protest solidarity like the tween version of Sex and the City. I called in our Rabbi for reinforcement, we explained that it needed to stay and while the rabbi made his way to the buffet of kosher Mexican fare, thus began an impromptu game of musical mechitza, with Tzvia pushing the mechitza off the dance floor, Sam pushing it back on, Tzvia pushing it off. And so on. At a certain point I’m assuming the rabbi just pretended not to notice, sitting in the tented dining area eating tacos and refried beans while tapping his feet to the beat of the instrumental trio playing an acoustic version of Van Morrison’s “Into the Mystic.” 

I was three margaritas into this thing when my ex started chasing me around begging me to say hello to his girlfriend, whom by this point I’d honestly forgotten about. Every time I turned around Josh was there, as if on cue. There was not a single moment in which I mistook Josh’s impeccable party etiquette for anything but reflexive, a product of polite Midwestern youth ferried into adulthood. Josh had two younger sisters, and he’d taken mental notes. Even so, Josh was a sight to behold. He knew nobody at this party, he barely knew me, and yet he circled the crowd with the charismatic ease of a young Bobby Kennedy. And I ran around like Zelda Fitzgerald, a dunk social butterfly in an ebullient haze of tequila shots on ice. At one point, the rabbi and I did l’chaims, and I promised I’d connect him to Robert Kraft—whom I’d met once at a fundraising gala several years prior— in the hopes he’d fund the new mikveh. 

Finally, after four hours of havdalah, hora and kids racing around in customized airbrush apparel courtesy of a t-shirt booth we’d hired, my ex yanked me aside: “Can you please just say hello to my girlfriend? She really wants to meet you.” Instinctively, I dragged Josh along. “This is Josh,” I told Princeton Polly. “He’s hot, he’s got a law degree from Columbia and he’s a Jew from Minnesota.” 

I have zero recollection of Polly’s response. I do remember yawning. 

The night drew to a close and Josh drove us home. 

“Did you have fun?” I asked Tzvia. 

 She nodded, smiled and ripped through a stack of presents: “It was the best night of my life.” 

That next morning, the phone rang. It was our rabbi. 

“Hi, Malina. Thank you for such a great party. I’m reminding you to connect me with Robert Kraft.”

Portions of this article were edited out at the request of the author.

Peak Jewish Divorcee is a bi-weekly column charting the (mis)adventures of a Jewish, newly single working mom in Los Angeles. 

The post My Rent-A-Bat-Mitzvah-Party Boyfriend appeared first on Jewcy.

Yesterday, John Legend released a tear-jerker of a music video (so, business as usual) for “You & I,” the fourth single off his 2013 album Love In the Future. The video celebrates the beauty of women of all ages, sizes, colors, and sexual orientations, as Legend croons in the background about shining stars and love and monogamy. He advises his female listeners—as only a male singer-songwriter can—that they don’t need to wear makeup because “you were fine in my eyes, a half hour ago.” Thanks, John! Also, the opening and closing images focus on his wife Chrissy Teigen, who is a Very Conventionally Beautiful Model, but then models deserve admiration and unconditional love as much as the rest of us, right, so WHO AM I TO JUDGE THIS CREATIVE DECISION? Just a sad, lonely, 5’1″ blogger.

Anyway! Skeptical caveats aside, it’s a really lovely video. We see short clips of a diverse group of women and girls—including Laverne Cox (lover of Jewish men) and Tig Notaro—scrutinizing themselves in the mirror as they remove make-up, put on jewelry, and prepare for important life events. One woman lifts her shirt to reveal the scars from her mastectomy, another shows off her pregnant belly. Girls brush their teeth, get braces, cry at school, make minute adjustments to their hair. A lesbian couple kiss. A bat mitzvah girl wearing a kippah and a tallit takes a selfie with her father and grandfather, proving once and for all that John Legend is indeed AN EGALITARIAN JEWISH FEMINIST.

Yeah, it’s a schmaltz-fest, but the message is affirming and sincere. He’s not trying to sell me moisturizer or soap. I may have watched it three times in a row. I may even have shed a tear. Four and a half feminist pitchforks!

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13-year-old Sophie Schondorf isn’t getting as lavish as a bat mitzvah as her two older siblings, but will still have a famous surprise performance, because come on–you can’t throw a bat mitzvah at ritzy New York City club Marquee without having a headliner.

The daughter of oil and commodities trader Jeffrey Schondorf will throw an intimate affair at the club, going for a more modest approach in lieu of the current state of the economy.

According to the New York Post,“We downsized it from someplace else because I couldn’t afford it,” Jeffrey said. “Times have changed and I don’t want my girl to feel bad.”

The celebration follows up her brother Zack’s glitzy bar mitzvah at Cipriani Downtown in 2004 and the unforgettable “Renee Takes New York” party he threw in 2006 at the Rainbow Room, which was transformed into a 1940s supper club with a marching band that reportedly cost $1 million.

Brings you back to yester-year, no? Sadly, “Jillian’s Beach Bash” circa 2003 can’t contend in this category, but it’s nice to know that lavish over the top bat mitzvah are on the decline.

Cause, c’mon. Save it for the wedding!

(Photo by Vanity Fair)

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Paul Rudd in a canary-yellow jacket, high white socks, and baggy black shorts, d.j.-ing a 90s limbo to “Buffalo Soldier”. Yes, this happened.

In Tad Friend’s Talk of the Town piece on Paul Rudd, the author learns of Rudd’s d.j.-ing phase– which was thankfully short lived. Rudd likened the experience of watching himself as a bat mitzvah d.j. to watching himself in a porn video.

The 44-year-old actor air guitar’s, helps the pink-puffed bat mitzvah girl blow out the candles, and cracks a few jokes, per usual.

Even in the yellow tuxedo shirt, Paul Rudd can do no wrong. In the words of Cher Horowitz, “I am totally butt-crazy in love with Josh!”

(Photo by Getty)

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In middle school, Saturday nights were guaranteed preteen debauchery. There was at least one bar or bat mitzvah a week and we’d tie dance all night, hydrating ourselves with copious Shirley Temples on another parents’ dime. Retrospectively, it seems like nothing could make those nights more fun, but that’s just not true because there could have been an awesome video message from Katy Perry or Justin Timberlake wishing us a lovely evening and maybe even singing a signature note.

For the starting price of $5,000—and that’s only if your celebrity is, like, a nobody—you can have a star impress your friends via video greeting.

“Video greetings in general are considerably less expensive than a live appearance, but anytime you’re involving a celebrity’s name and image the price tag will be in direct proportion to the popularity of the star, ranging from the low of $5,000 per celebrity up to $100,000, often made as a donation to the charity of the celebrity’s choice.”

It was apparently too expensive to actually have a celebrity perform in person (unless you’re Kylie Jenner) so video appearances are now all the rage. At least it’s usually for charity.

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This month, I celebrated my gluten-free bat mitzvah. That sentence needs a bit of clarification: no, I’m not becoming a bat mitzvah nor am I becoming a bat mitzvah and then celebrating with a party that is catered to be gluten-free. I became a bat mitzvah when I was 13, in 1999. And yes, if you’re wondering, I recognize my bat mitzvah anniversary each year—I’m still really proud of that day.

What I’m actually referring to is that this month marks thirteen years since I was diagnosed with celiac disease and began a gluten-free diet. Just as I once turned 13 and became a bat mitzvah, now I’m turning 13 in gluten-free years.

I figured I would buy a gluten-free cupcake on the actual day, text a few people that it was my “gluten-free bat mitzvah,” and that would be that. But upon further reflection, I realized I was actually doing more than just marking a numerical rite of passage. The truth is, there’s a deep connection between my actual bat mitzvah and my diagnosis of Celiac. I was diagnosed about nine months after my bat mitzvah, and the fact that I’m now marking that important moment in my adolescence in a similar manner is meaningful. It’s beyond the number thirteen.

Nine months after I came of age in my community and was asked to take responsibility for myself, I suddenly had to take responsibility for my health. No one was going to do it for me, I was old enough that I had to do it for myself. I was not diagnosed as a toddler or child, an age at which adults would have had to monitor me. Instead, I was a teenager and in my religious community, I was already considered an adult. It was up to me. I would have to learn how to be on a gluten-free diet.

So, at almost 14, right before high school started, I began a strict gluten-free diet. I learned which foods were and were not gluten-free. I learned about cross-contamination, a big issue for those on gluten-free diets. A french fry may start out gluten-free, but once it falls in a fryer with onion rings it’s no longer gluten-free. I tried every gluten-free product out there and stuck with the ones I liked. Most importantly, I learned—and still continue to learn—how to be an advocate for myself.

I cannot expect a waiter at a restaurant to read my mind or the host of a dinner party to remember my restrictions. I have to ask questions about the menu and how foods are prepared to see, first, if a gluten-free meal is possible and, if so, which items are best for me. If I’m traveling, I have to make a plan. I’m not perfect. Sometimes I’m not the best advocate, but I always try and do better the next time.

My first major responsibility after my bat mitzvah has now been a responsibility for thirteen years. As an adult, the diet is now just one of many responsibilities, but it remains an important one, and one that I’ve learned a great deal from. Maybe that’s why I began to feel so strongly about my “gluten-free bat mitzvah.”

Responsibility and all that it entails was first bestowed upon me as a bat mitzvah. I then put those notions into practice with the gluten-free diet, and I’m still learning how to apply them when a question or a problem arises and I have to handle it. I have to make the decision to protect what is important to me and speak up when it’s right—a lesson I also learned upon becoming a bat mitzvah.

My “gluten-free bat mitzvah” may have started out as a lighthearted way to mark a milestone, but it ended up being much more emotionally significant than I could have realized. In a way, I came full circle.

Previous: The Best Gluten-Free Passover Products

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Ari Gold, the Hollywood super-agent with a manic determination to get the very best for his clients—and himself—never quits. He also doesn’t care who he has to crush in the process. The HBO show that revitalized Jermey Piven’s career might have been named after the eponymous entourage for Vincent Chase (Adrien Grenier)—the up and coming actor inspired by the experiences of the show’s creator, Mark Wahlberg—but the real star of the show was always Piven’s cutthroat Jewish agent. And he has three Emmys to prove it.

Piven’s Wahlburg is real life super-agent Ari Emanuel—currently at the helm of the William Morris Endeavor agency, one of the film and television industry’s leading talent agencies—and like him, the fictional Ari’s subversive effectiveness in the business is legendary. But so is his nonapologetic approach and incessant sarcastic mockery—something that became one of the show’s staples when taken out on his long-suffering assistant, Lloyd (Rex Lee), who is ridiculed relentlessly for his sexual orientation and Asian heritage.

It’s easy—and right!—to be offended by Ari’s insults and abuse, but it’s your dislike for him that makes watching his outbursts so enjoyable. There’s a reason Ari outshines the show’s ‘movie star,’ but this hardly makes him a banner of Jewish values. Then again, like any number-crunching Jewish businessman, Ari has a humanizing Achilles’ heel—his wife (Perrey Reeves).

Known simply as “Mrs. Ari” until the show’s final season, his wife is the only person who can bring him to his knees, begging for forgiveness. Such penance made for one of the most memorable episodes, “Return of the King,” which took place on Yom Kippur. Entourage never shied away from Ari’s Jewishness—his daughter’s bat mitzvah became a business opportunity for Ari to showcase his star client as the cake cutter—but Ari never seemed to take it seriously and often used it as shtick in his tirades.

The episode saw Ari belligerently pestering a producer during a Yom Kippur service to try to secure a movie deal, only to see his aggressiveness lead to its destruction. Admonished by Mrs. Ari for popping a breath mint and robbed by her of his phone (and the backup he hides in his sock), Ari even tells his daughter that the beauty of Yom Kippur is being able to sin during that day and apologize by sundown.

Hollywood is, perhaps, a better place to be a Jew than many other industries, but Ari still treats it like a crutch more than anything else. His need to barter and think only about business on Yom Kippur not only ruins his deal, it also shows his lack of appreciation for his religion. When he needs to find a way to get to the producer’s synagogue and realizes that he has no cash on him, he concludes “Like our desert-dwelling ancestors, we walk.” Ari’s Judaism is, like everything else in his life, a bargaining chip, something to help him achieve greater success.

But Ari is not without redemption, and the series finale finds him abandoning his life of work and quitting his job to show his wife how much he cares for her. But then, after the credits, Ari received a phone call offering him the job he always wanted: heading a studio. Now that the Entourage movie that no one asked for (in the words of Vulture’s Josh Wolk, “The only logical explanation for an Entourage movie is that Mark Wahlberg … is taunting everyone who vocally disparaged his show in its later years”) has been confirmed, Ari is coming back. Well, as long as too much sushi doesn’t stop him.

Previously on Network Jews:

Police Detective John Munch on Law & Order: SVU

Dr. John Zoidberg, the Klutzy Jewish Crustacean on Futurama

Jean-Ralphio, the status-obsessed sidekick on Parks and Recreation.

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