Cosell, born Howard Cohen in 1918, was best known for his distinctive staccato voice, accent, syntax, and cadence, and they became the basis of a skit portraying Cosell's Bar Mitzvah, where he played the role of his lawyer father, Morris Cosell. His mother was played by comedian Billy Crystal, in one of his funniest roles.
Let's turn the clock back 39 years and join in the fun at the reception hall where the Bar Mitzvah was celebrated.
Enjoy!
Now it's a movie coming to Netflix on August 12. As Lior Zaltzman wrote on Kveller:
The movie musical stars actor Eli Golden as Evan Goldman, a 12-year-old teen preparing for his bar mitzvah in New York City. “A bar mitzvah is the event that defines you, the Jewish Superbowl,” Goldman says in the trailer. Unfortunately, his plans for the epic bar mitzvah are foiled by the dissolution of his parents’ marriage.
Instead of spending his days planning a tony Manhattan coming-of-age party, Evan has to move with his mom, played by IRL Jewish mom Debra Messing, to the small town of Walkerton, Indiana — a place that inspires the song “The Lamest Place on Earth.”
Evan and his mom shack up with his Jewish grandma Ruth, played by the wonderful Rhea Pearlman. “If it took a divorce to get you to come back, maybe it’s a good thing,” Ruth tells her daughter, in true Jewish mom fashion. “I look at the bright side,” she professes.
The very easy-on-the-eyes Peter Hermann of “Younger” plays Evan’s dad, Joel, who stays behind in New York City with Evan’s very congenial rabbi, Rabbi Shapiro, played by Jewish comedian and dad Josh Peck. Peck makes for the perfect movie rabbi, and he is full of Jewish jokes and zingers for his young student. In the trailer, after Evan attempts to chant his Hebrew Torah portion, Rabbi Shapiro answers a pretend call and tells the teen: “It’s God, he wants his language back.”
Here's the trailer for the movie. Enjoy!
A SPECIAL NOTE FOR NEW EMAIL SUBSCRIBERS: THE VIDEO MAY NOT BE VIEWABLE DIRECTLY FROM THE EMAIL THAT YOU GET EACH DAY ON SOME COMPUTERS AND TABLETS. YOU MUST CLICK ON THE TITLE AT THE TOP OF THE EMAIL TO REACH THE JEWISH HUMOR CENTRAL WEBSITE, FROM WHICH YOU CLICK ON THE PLAY BUTTON IN THE VIDEO IMAGE TO START THE VIDEO.
As reported in The Times of Israel,
Asner was born in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1929, to Orthodox Jewish parents, Lizzie Seliger and Morris David Asner, who had immigrated from the Soviet Union. He was given the Hebrew name Yitzhak.
He almost became a newsman in real life. He studied journalism at the University of Chicago until a professor told him there was little money to be made in the profession.
He quickly switched to drama, debuting as the martyred Thomas Becket in a campus production of T.S. Eliot’s “Murder in the Cathedral.”
As Grant aged, many of his characters were more explicitly Jewish, from Joe Danzig, a worn-out principal at a troubled inner-city high school in “The Bronx Zoo,” in 1988, to Sid Weinberg, the abusive stepfather in the recent “Karate Kid” reboot, “Cobra Kai.”
Asner was interviewed as part of the Yiddish Book Center's Wexler Oral History Project. In an excerpt from the interview, he described his harrowing first performance -- his Bar Mitzvah, where he was criticized by his father and his uncle. Having failed his first performance, he became determined to be an actor.
A SPECIAL NOTE FOR NEW EMAIL SUBSCRIBERS: THE VIDEO MAY NOT BE VIEWABLE DIRECTLY FROM THE EMAIL THAT YOU GET EACH DAY ON SOME COMPUTERS AND TABLETS. YOU MUST CLICK ON THE TITLE AT THE TOP OF THE EMAIL TO REACH THE JEWISH HUMOR CENTRAL WEBSITE, FROM WHICH YOU CLICK ON THE PLAY BUTTON IN THE VIDEO IMAGE TO START THE VIDEO.
The town I grew up in was at least fifty percent Jewish, so every weekend in the 7th grade, we went to Bar and Bat Mitzvahs. It's kind of based on that. A lot of my brother's friends who have seen it think that the gestures I make are based on my brother, which is pretty funny and might be true.
When I started doing standup in college, I just started doing that character. My first year on the show, one of the writers wrote me into a sketch where I played a Bar Mitzvah boy and I got to do it, which was so cool. . . but the whole thing started in my standup. I felt like I had seen that boy so much, and it's so fun to play that little awkward boy who likes to tell dad-style jokes. It's so funny that a little boy that age has to be so formal for an entire weekend.In this segment, broadcast in October, Jacob tries to explain the meaning of Shabbat.
As a 13-year-old growing up in the Soviet Republic of Moldavia, Feldman was denied this opportunity since Jews there could not practice or study Judaism or Jewish culture. He never heard of a bar mitzvah, a synagogue or the Holocaust when he was 13 and living under Communism.
“I say to people: ‘It is unusual. Usually you get bar-mitzvahed and then you become a rabbi. I am going backwards,’ ” said Feldman, who has performed hundreds of bar mitzvahs. “To be honest, there is no law that you have to be bar mitzvahed. Think about it: There are 3 million Russian Jews have never heard about bar mitzvah but they are Jews. A million and a half of them live in Israel and they still don’t know anything about it.For the first 6 minutes and 20 seconds, he speaks as the thirteen-year-old he was in Kishinev and how he hates his name and hates being a Jew. Then he abruptly shifts to the present and delivers a moving Bar Mitzvah speech about how he loves Judaism and believes that Judaism is the most beautiful thing ever created.
“American Jews take it for granted,” said Feldman.
Leaving behind religious suppression in Russia, Feldman went to Israel for three years. He then traveled to Italy for a year, and arrived in America in 1980. He moved to South Florida in 1988, a year after becoming a U.S. citizen. He was the spiritual leader Temple Emanu-El of Palm Beach for 12 years. He then was the rabbi of Temple Emanu-El in Miami Beach until 2004.
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