A Moving Feast
The Bar and Bat Mitzvah across Jewish Cultures
- 325 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
About this book
Winner of the Goldberg Family Foundation Award 2021
What is the meaning of the Jewish rites of initiation known as "bar and bat mitzvah" in the modern age, when the concept of "mitzvah" (religious precept or obligation) means so little to most Jewish adolescents?
Hizky Shoham offers a comprehensive anthropological history of the bar and bat mitzvah ceremonies that seeks to understand why not only have these ceremonies been preserved, but are in fact celebrated by more Jewish families and demand greater financial, psychological, and family resources than ever before. The book maps and analyzes the transformation of the rituals in the modern age and endeavors to understand their meanings for the celebrants and other participants in the diverse historical contexts in which the ceremony appeared. Is it indeed a rite of initiation?
The book breaks new ground by placing the rise of the bar and bat mitzvah in the context of the general rise during the modern industrial age of a new system of life-cycle rituals: rituals that mark the passing of time by latching on to its artificial, conventional milestones. The child's 12 th or 13 th birthday functions as a temporal landmark in a personal biography that would otherwise move through homogeneous time.
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Information
Table of contents
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Contents
- Key to Abbreviations
- Introduction: Today I Am a Wo/Man? Rites of Initiation and Jewish Cultures
- Chapter 1 Rites of Consumption and Rites of Temporality
- Chapter 2 Birthday Parties
- Chapter 3 The Bar Mitzvah, from the Rabbinic Culture to the Emancipation Culture: A Rite of Initiation Turns into a Social Event
- Chapter 4 Rites of Initiation for Girls in the Emancipation Culture: From Group Ceremonies to the Individual Bat Mitzvah
- Chapter 5 The Bar Mitzvah in Mandatory Palestine and Independent Israel
- Chapter 6 The Israeli Bat Mitzvah: Just a Party
- Chapter 7 Female Rites of Temporality and Male Rites of Initiation in Israeli Culture
- Chapter 8 A Narrow Bridge over the Atlantic
- Chapter 9 Conventional Time and the Battle for Meaning
- Index