Mazel Tov: Celebrities' Bar and Bat Mitzvah Memories by Jill Rappaport

MITZVAH LATER IN LIFE? YOU COULD BE A TRENDSETTER, KIRK.
    I have had people tell me, “Oh, my grandfather wants to have a bar mitzvah because of you.” So I have influenced a few people who now plan to have a bar mitzvah. But I don’t think it’s very common.
    WHAT’S THE MAIN DIFFERENCE BETWEEN YOUR TWO BAR MITZVAHS?
    At my first bar mitzvah I was pleased with all the presents. As far as the service itself, at the age of thirteen, it didn’t have the same significance as my second bar mitzvah had at the age of eighty-three. At thirteen I was too young to appreciate it. At thirteen you say “Today I am a Man.” But are you really?

Charles Grodin
    For more than three decades, his on-screen roles have made us want to hug him, slap him, but certainly watch him….
    And what a diverse career Charles Grodin has had. From dumping the sweet nebbishy wife on their honeymoon for the WASP princess in The Heartbreak Kid , to cracking us up as a con conning Robert De Niro in Midnight Run, to speaking his mind (for better or worse) as a commentator on 60 Minutes II and as host of his own CNBC show, which earned him the nickname “the Perpetually Angry Talk Show Host.” Well, one thing’s for sure—he has done it his way.
    Born in Pittsburgh in 1935, he was raised in an Orthodox Jewish household. His maternal grandfather, a Russian Jew, came from a long line of rabbis. Grodin attended the University of Miami but left to study at the Pittsburgh Playhouse and then went on to New York to study with Uta Hagen and eventually Lee Strasberg. He is a member of the Actors Studio. Grodin’s big acting break came in 1968 when he played the obstetrician we all love to hate in the horror film Rosemary’s Baby. Grodin jokes how to this day people are still “furious” with him that he did not help Mia Farrow’s character, and tell him so openly on the street.
    In the nineties, his career “went to the dogs,” literally, with films Beethoven and Beethoven’s 2nd , which were his two biggest-grossing movies. He left the movies at the peak of his career to be a stay-at-home dad when his son entered first grade. He began his talk show on CNBC after that. It was nominated as best talk show on cable every year there were awards.
    He returned to the movies in 2007. Currently, he is a commentator for CBS News, where he is heard all across the country. He is also working on a book that will be published in the fall of 2007. His play, We 3, opens at the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven in 2007. I caught up with him at a very quaint West Side theater where he was rehearsing one of his plays and we talked about the day the boy “became a Man.”

    CHARLES GRODIN ANYTHING BUT A HEARTBREAK KID
    I was raised in an Orthodox Jewish home, but I wouldn’t call myself a dedicated Jew today. What I would call myself is someone who is dedicated to the principles that every religion would espouse. And I really do trace that back to my religious upbringing, although it doesn’t manifest itself in Jewish rituals or anything else. However, if I sense any anti-Semitism, I become more Jewish.
    I was thrown out of Hebrew school when I was eleven because I asked the rabbi what the Hebrew words meant on the blackboard too many times for his comfort level, and he resented it. (This wasn’t the first time I got into trouble at school—a year earlier I was impeached as president of my fifth-grade class. That was just for talking incessantly, which I still do, but now I get paid to do it.)
    YOU CHALLENGED THE RABBI?
    Well, sort of. I just said, “What do the words mean that we’re reading?” It seemed to be a good question to me. And he thought it was rude or something. I said, “Why can’t we know what we’re saying?”
    It seemed like a logical thing. And he actually kicked me out of the Hebrew school, which was good because I then went to a smaller place where the father of my closest friend at that time, a man named Rabbi Morris Kaplan, took me under his