It being the summer, it’s wedding season. I admit, it’s also less than a fortnight to my own wedding, and I’ve tried to avoid doing productive things like find a florist by diving into the coolest wedding traditions I can find, more obscure gems than just breaking a glass. There are lots of amazing ones that you can’t seem to find on the Internet, which seems mostly focused on explaining for the 613th time what a chuppah is. And so, here a few favorites I have gleaned:

Helping your friends find a match

Throwing a bouquet to give luck in finding a match is way too limited. Why leave that up to chance, when your most deserving, most eligible friend has to miss out because they didn’t play sports in High School? Jewish weddings are peppered with chances to distribute matchmaking mazel, and what’s more, the bride has the power to pick the recipients.

For example, in Ashkenazi tradition, women don’t wear jewelry under the chuppah during the ceremony. The sweet explanation is that a couple is marrying for partnership, not material gain, but this may also be because a formal part of the ceremony is the giving of a ring; it may be “legalistically” confusing for the bride to have other jewelry at the time she receives the ring.

But of course you’re going to wear jewelry at your wedding, so what do you do? Right before the ceremony, the bride may remove all of her other jewelry and give it to friends to hold. Those who have the honor of holding this jewelry are said to have extra luck in finding a spouse of their own.

The same applies to Jewish weddings where a plate is broken before the ceremony. If you can get a shard (careful with that!), more good luck.

Another one is that after dinner, the bride and groom share a drink of wine during birkat hamazon (grace after meals). If you can get a sip of that too, you share in their luck (and germs).

Plus, some brides pray the morning of their weddings, and collect names of people who want matches, healing, et cetera. Apparently, her prayers are super potent that day. Get in on that.

Henna Party

In some Sephardic and Mizrahi traditions, before her wedding, a bride is adorned with henna, in a layered and deeply meaningful event. This can include drumming, ululation, and fertility rituals. Also, henna body art is absolutely stunning.

DEMONS DEMONS DEMONS

It is absolutely amazing how much of Jewish wedding traditions involve fear of demons. Of course, the famous play The Dybbuk involves a bride suffering demonic possession, but her position as newlywed was not only chosen to create high drama. Demons in Judaism famously love ruining happy moments (babies pre-bris are also vulnerable), so you have to be ON GUARD for about a week up to the big day, or something terrible and demonic (e.g. possession) will occur.

A lot of the Jewish rituals you do know have alternate explanations based in demonology. Carrying candles (like in Fiddler on the Roof)? Demons hate light. Marrying under a canopy? Protect the couple from demons. Breaking a glass? Demons hate that sort of thing, apparently. Circling your spouse-to-be at the start of the ceremony? Creating an anti-demonic force-field. The above-mentioned henna party? It also protects against demons!

But maybe my absolute favorite has been the role of bridesmaids in the wedding. I’ve heard a lot of variations on this custom, but the gist is that you can’t leave a bride alone, and therefore vulnerable to dybbuks or other nasties. Some say that for a week before the wedding, the bride needs constant surveillance, perhaps by a friend or family member serving as a bridesmaid. At the very least, the night before her wedding, a bride should not sleep alone (one friend had to share her sister’s bed to protect her for this very reason).

Imagine the movie Bridesmaids crossed with Ghostbusters— Kristen Wiig is in both after all, and has a Jewish boyfriend. She should definitely star in a movie about a friend asked to serve as maid of honor for her Jewish friend’s wedding, only to find out that fighting demons comes with the job description.

Hollywood, call me.

If you have other great Jewish wedding traditions, please comment below, or tweet us @Jewcymag!

Images: Still from film The Dybbuk. Henna image via Pixabay.

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So, Cameron Diaz and Benji Madden got married on January 5, which is very nice. (Yes, I had no idea they even knew each other, either.) But what makes this celebrity wedding different from all other celebrity weddings? It was a Jewish ceremony, despite the fact that neither the bride nor the groom are members of the tribe.

According to Us Weekly, the ceremony was conducted underneath a chuppah, and culminated with the traditional breaking of the glass, plus a little sojourn in a yichud room—a super-authentic, inside-baseball touch if ever there was one. (I’ve gotta say, I’m impressed.) No-one seems to know exactly why Diaz and Madden decided to do the Jewish thing on their big day, but there’s a good chance their Israeli wedding planner had something to do with it.

But, seriously, why start at the chuppah and stop at the yichud room? There’s so much more Jewish ritual and symbolism to be had: Pre-marital mikveh dunks! Bedekens! Customized bentschers! Sheva brachot led by, I don’t know, John Legend! (We know he’s down for a bat mitzvah.) If you’re going to appropriate another culture, you might as well go all the way, no? Quoth Wham!, “If you’re gonna do it, do it right.”

Memo to Hollywood: next time, I’ll see you at the pareve dessert buffet table. (I know a great caterer, if you need.)

(Image: Andrey Bayda / Shutterstock.com)

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Wanna feel old? Consider this: ‘Sex and City’ premiered sixteen years ago today.

Now, I know it’s cool to hate on Carrie et al these days, what with Girls and Broad City bringing the sexting, q-tips and authentic Brooklyn hipster poverty to the small screen. But I still have a soft spot for SATC, and I have a feeling you, dear reader, might feel similarly. Before it descended into the slavish consumer-fest of the later seasons (and the movies, of which we shall not speak), it was really, really good. Edgy! Risque! It’s where I learned about anal sex! And vibrators! (Ah, the sheltered decade of dial-up internet: we were such innocent teens.) Don’t pretend you don’t stop and watch an episode when you’re channel surfing/illegally downloading in the liminal hours between updating your OKCupid profile and falling asleep. You do, and you love it.

Anyway! SATC had a number of good Jewish moments, mostly focused on Charlotte’s conversion to Judaism for husband #2, Harry Goldenblatt, who woos her with his menschy, honest charm—one of more engaging plot-lines in the harried, lackluster final season. Wrote Sala Levin in 2012:

Nebbishy, lawyerly Harry certainly seems to be cut from the same cloth as his anxious, uncool brethren. Harry knows that the “shiksa goddess” Charlotte seems to be beyond the reach of “a putz like me,” as he puts it. But while the stumbling nerds of the popular imagination typically win the affection of their crushes despite not knowing how to interact with members of the opposite sex, Harry gets the girl with his brazenness, a forthrightness that Charlotte finds difficult to resist. It’s his openness about his desire for her—coupled with a talent for coupling—that distinguishes Harry from his geeky cohort. Like the female characters of Apatow’s movies, Charlotte ultimately develops feelings of real depth for Harry, noting that if his warmth and kindness are part of his Jewishness, being Jewish might be something she would want for herself. But—unlike in Apatow’s films—these feelings emerge only after the ignition of a sexual spark.

Charlotte and Harry’s love affair is served up with a generous dollop of borscht belt vernacular—a lot of putzing and schvitizing on Harry’s part, which feels tonally off for a 30-something man in the early 2000s—but underneath the schtick, theirs is a love affair of equals: two people who really understand and accept the other for who they are, hairy back, WASP-y affectations and all.

The depiction of Charlotte’s conversion is fairly accurate by sitcom-land standards: she’s thrice turned away by the rabbi before being accepted as a candidate for the “Jewish faith,” she and Harry bicker over differing levels of religious commitment, and eventually we see her take a dip in the mikvah to complete the process. There are a few anomalies—i.e. the rabbi’s family members seem to have confused Shabbat and funeral attire, and the rituals are overly-formal, almost robotically executed—but for the most part it’s a faithful (if abbreviated, sentimentalized) depiction of a non-Orthodox conversion.

Back in 2003, Samuel G. Freedman wrote that Charlotte’s conversion to Judaism radically redefined interfaith relationships in American popular culture:

Until the HBO series, no television show had ever presented a conversion with such visual and theological detail. Even more important is what the approving portrayal represents: a reversal of the entertainment industry’s tradition of viewing Jewish identity as something to be shed in the quest to become American.

For nearly a century, ever since the Broadway comedy Abie’s Irish Rose, the standard narrative of love between a Jew and a Christian has pointed toward interfaith marriage, and the implicit abandonment of Jewish observance and continuity, as the epitome of the melting pot… Unlike all of those Jewish characters of yore, who were so ready to reinvent themselves with a gentile wife, Harry insisted that Charlotte convert; he wanted their children to be fully Jewish.

And Charlotte wanted to be fully Jewish, too: from the very first heartfelt ‘shalom’ she offers to the custodian of the synagogue, to her decision to stop celebrating Christmas (a ritual she loved), she’s in it 110 percent—she even chastises Harry for watching baseball during Shabbat dinner, leading to a massive fight and temporary break-up. But it’s OK! They reconcile at a depressing singles’ event at shul, and have a big, fat, disastrous (but happy) Jewish wedding.

http://youtu.be/GKKau5XVF7k

So happy birthday, Sex and the City. I still love you, and I’m not ashamed to say so on the internet.

Image: HBO

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Ah, Jemima Kirke and Michael Mosberg! Glam-Jewy-indie couple extraordinaire! You either want to be them, or you— wait, no, you pretty much just want to be them. That’s the only option.

First, we saw the inside of their Brooklyn home and read about their Shabbat dinners. Now, a new slideshow up at Refinery 29 provides an intimate glimpse into their 2009 wedding. Each photo is accompanied by commentary from Kirke, and first few slides—in which she describes falling in love with Mosberg—are pretty swoony:

I loved his gentility, but his kindness was what struck me. He had this patience and stoicism; I had never met anyone like him… He just felt so much more awesome than any guy I’d ever dated. Every guy I dated before had been abusive and made me feel like shit. I was like, “Wow, this just might be the person I deserve.”

The traditional, Orthodox Jewish ceremony took place at the bride’s mother’s beach house, under a “driftwood chuppah covered in flowers.” Kirke was untraditionally—but gloriously—pregnant. She wore a rad vintage Jill Stuart dress which she purchased a few days before the wedding for $200, and immediately after the ceremony, the bride and groom jumped into the water. The guests ate “bagels and lox and cereal,” it was over by noon, and everyone lived happily ever after. Sounds like a dream.

Related: ‘Girls’ Star Jemima Kirke and Husband Michael Mosberg Do Shabbat, Have Many Tattoos, Are Very Beautiful

Image: Not the actual wedding (via HBO.com)

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A few weeks before my sister’s wedding, she was discussing ordering kippot, trying to figure out how many she would need for the big day. How many might be too many? Well, I said to her, if you order too many you could use the extras for when guests come to your home.

Within a second of saying this, I was immediately transported back to my family’s kippah drawer. It’s been a long time since I opened this drawer, which was located in a dark brown wood unit in the dining room. The top portion of the unit had glass doors that held candlesticks and the Seder plate. The bottom part of the unit was made up of three drawers. The kippah drawer was the top drawer and it had a very distinct wood smell; if I concentrate, I can still smell it.

It was outfitted with brass handles that made a sound when you pulled them up from their resting position. And as the drawer opened, it made an ever-so-slight noise. Inside this drawer my family kept all the kippot we acquired. A few were from weddings, but most were from bar and bat mitzvahs. We opened the drawer when a family member or a guest needed a kippah. And when a kippah was chosen—sometimes it was selected based on color to match an outfit—the inscription inside would be read aloud. You know, today’s kippah is brought to you by so and so who became a bar or bat mitzvah on this date in this year. This might have been followed by a factoid about the person, or information on the party’s theme. Such details are important.

What’s interesting about the kippot in this drawer is how they got there. Often we were invited, or someone in the family was invited, to the simcha. Hence the sharing of factoids and themes. Sometimes the kippah was from a bar or bat mitzvah at our synagogue that we attended because we happened to be there that day. In this case, someone in my family took a kippah from the basket outside the sanctuary and brought it home. Occasionally, we simply acquired a kippah and added it to the collection. Who knows how it got there, but it got there. That’s the beauty of the kippah drawer—kippot will mysteriously find their way to it.

Regardless of their exact route to the drawer, the kippot were in our home, and if someone needed one, we could provide it. Our kippah drawer signified that our home was a Jewish home.

There’s another way to look at the drawer. Beyond a kippah’s color and material (I am partial to non-nylon), a kippah from a bar or bat mitzvah is a historical link to an important day in a young person’s life. Forever stamped with the date and year, a bar or bat mitzvah kippah symbolizes my moment, your moment, her moment, the moment of someone we might not even know. A kippah is a Jewish artifact. Whenever it is worn, it connects the wearer back to that day, regardless of whether they knew the honored bar or bat mitzvah. There is something truly powerful about a drawer full of Jewish history.

Currently, my family has many kippot lying around at each of our homes, and some of them are in drawers. They may not be in the drawer, but they are in drawers nevertheless. I’m not sure how many we have. The good news is that wedding season is upon us, and there are many kippot that are about to make their way into my home. I’m thinking of designating a drawer to be the drawer.

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So, Andy Samberg is officially off the market, taken by the wonderfully talented Joanna Newsom. For those of us who had creepily seen ourselves getting married to Samberg in what would surely be a long, laughter-filled fantasy marriage, this is quite the blow. But to lift our spirits (we’re all in this together) we have a great clip of Samberg impersonating one of his wedding guests, the great Adam Sandler, who came dressed up as Donny from That’s My Boy, which was probably way funnier in person than it was on screen.

Mazel tov, you guys!

(Photo by Taylor Hill/Getty)

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Two nutty dog owners threw an absurdly lavish wedding ceremony for their dogs, who I’m sure we can all agree would’ve rather just humped each other out back. The event set a Guinness World Record for the most expensive pet wedding in history, which is good, since the owner (mother?) of one of the dogs said crazy things like “My reputation is on the line.” Reputation intact!

Who was the lucky rabbi officiating this beautiful ceremony? None other than Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, the crass creation of Jewish comedian Robert Smigel (happy belated birthday, btw!). No one in the well-coiffed human/canine audience one was spared.

“Of course this is a Jewish wedding,” he told the crowd, “so when they took Baby Hope to get fixed, she said ‘Start with the nose.”

(image via Shutterstock)

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Drew Barrymore visited The View last week and talked about her marriage to Will Kopelman, who she called “a nice Jewish man from a nice Jewish family,” and their nearly four-moth-old daughter, Olive.

“We had a very traditional wedding ceremony with Rabbi Rubenstein,” Barrymore said to laughs from the crowd. “I did the ketubah and we wore the yarmulkes and we were under the chuppah.” There was some confusion among the hosts about the pronunciation of his last name, which means there might be some openings for a new intern over at ABC.

“I’m a shiksa. I do the seders, and we do Passover,” Barrymore explained, adding that daughter Olive will be raised Jewish. “It’s a beautiful faith and I’m so honored to be around it,” she told the hosts, “It’s so family-oriented and beautiful.”

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Rachel Shukert breaks down what Anne Hathaway’s recent Jewish wedding (omg!) says about the tribe in Tablet Magazine, and the verdict is good. We’re cool! And normal:

And that’s precisely the point. The current vogue for Jewishness, in weddings or otherwise, is less notable for its exoticism—the kind of thing that might seem irresistibly “edgy” to a Crayola-haired pop star who uses that word a lot—than for its normalcy. When Drew Barrymore stands under a chuppah, or Anne Hathaway accompanies her fiancé to Yom Kippur services, or the husbands of Queen Natalie and her lady-in-waiting Rachel Weisz (and believe me, the thoughts I have about Daniel “James Bond” Craig as the ultimate trophy husband could fill a doctoral dissertation) slip on a yarmulke or wrap themselves in a tallis, they’re doing so because it’s normal, and the mainstream nature of the ritual is the key to its desirability. For the first time in the history of America, Jewishness—and not just the bagels-and-lox part—is aspirational.

Intermarried A-Listers and Us [Tablet Magazine]

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In response, non-Jewish readers said they were inspired to include chuppahs in their own wedding ceremonies—prompting Keene to respond, fiercely, that it was “borderline offensive” for non-Jews to adopt some cultural and religious symbols for their own weddings. “We had people saying there are elements of our religion that are not open to appropriation, and there was a reaction of people saying, ‘How can you tell me no?’ ” Keene said. “But this is what happens in the wedding industry—people start to say, ‘Aren’t these all cute things to do at a wedding?’”

Brides’ Aid [Tablet Magazine]

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