TV review: Bar Mitzvah on 'The Wonder Years'

The pleasant, heart-warming re-incarnation of ABC's "The Wonder Years" has offered a bar mitzvah episode, as did the original series in 1989.

The setting is Montgomery, Alabama, during the late1960s, when Blacks were fighting for civil rights and Jews still wanted simply to be accepted.

Written by Yael Gatena, the episode begins with some boys throwing pennies at Brad Hitman (Julian Lerner) in front of his friends, goading the Jewish lad to pick them up in order to be true to stereotype. His Black friend, Dean Williams (Elisha Williams), the show's principal character, narrates in retrospect that he didn't understand the complexity and hate behind the "joke." But he does notice that "even though he [Brad] looked white, people saw him differently, too."

When Dean asks Brad to participate in an after school activity with him, Brad responds that he has to go to Hebrew School every night to prepare for his bar mitzvah, adding that his Torah portion is about a father giving advice to his sons on his death bed. "Imagine singing something in a language you barely know in front of people you barely know," Brad vents regarding the "whole becoming a man thing or whatever."

Good friend that he is, Dean promises that he will help Brad with the speech part so that Brad can concentrate on the party.

When Dean comes home, he tells his mother about the invitation to the bar mitzvah and she responds: "It says a lot about Brad to include everybody." This is, after all, still the era of racial segregation in Montgomery, but Brad is too young to pick up all of the ramifications. Dean asks if his parents are invited. Their facial expressions reveal that adult invitations might be pushing the boundaries. Mom insists, "Brad and his parents may have friends who are not as welcoming as they are."

At any rate, Brad wants Dean's older sister, Kim, to be there, since the presence and thus recognition of an older teenage girl is a dream of every adolescent boy. Brad also invites Dean's longtime friend, an African American girl, and Dean's new girlfriend, also African American, who is trying to get him to sever his ties with the other girl. So attending the bar mitzvah ceremony becomes occasion for girl trouble and stressful drama for Dean, who decides that he should try to get the two girls in his life to be friends. Dean has been distracted from helping Brad with the preparation and on-the-spot moral support that he had promised.

The episode features a simple but stately and functional late-1950s-modernist synagogue structure, especially the lobby and sanctuary. Dean's first question upon entering is, "Where is their Jesus on the cross? What, Jesus was a Jewish man too, you know." The more mature Dean narrator quickly interjects, "Clearly, I was still playing catch-up on the whole Jewish thing."

When Dean greets Brad with a "Mazal tov," the latter cries, "I'm freaking out," adding that he feels that Dean is ignoring him - that is, letting him down - because of his preoccupation with the two girls.

But Dean is a good friend and does come to Brad's aid. He boldly walks right up to the side of the bimah, right to Brad's seat, and relates to Brad his father's adage that the best way to deal with stage fright is to imagine everyone in the audience in underwear. The "joke" is that Brad forgets that he is holding the Torah when he applies this advice. That scene introduces some vulgarity into the episode, but is not as vulgar as a parallel scene in the film, Keeping Up With the Steins (2007), which may have been an influence here.

Dean's advice inspires Brad to speak from the heart. Brad shares that being Jewish in Montgomery "means feeling different all the time. I spent a lot of that time feeling embarrassed about being Jewish. But I don't want to feel that way anymore. So for now on, I'm not just gonna stand by while people are making fun of me or trying to make me feel bad. No, instead, I'm going to stand up for myself, for my people and for what I believe is right. ...[I am] a proud Jew from Alabama."

For his part, Dean concludes that Brad's speech shows that they have "a lot in common" and that having two girls angry at him has helped him to understand the suffering of the Jewish People. I suppose that individual Jewish and Black viewers will have to decide whether or not this humor minimizes the past suffering of both groups.

Also, with regard to segregation in the South, I suspect that by the late 1960s it was not rare for Black friends, acquaintances and employees to be invited to synagogue functions in that era, though I could be wrong. It would be valuable for discussions with younger generations to learn what historians or interviews with b'nai mitzvah of the era would have to say about this.

Certainly, this episode is a notable TV commentary on Southern Jewish life and history, at least in its implications. The take-away here, at least as far as Southern Jewry is concerned, is that self-consciousness was far more a guiding force than Judaism-consciousness. But in the 1989 bar mitzvah episode of the first "The Wonder Years" series - the highest rated episode at the time, by the way - the emphasis was on imparting a sacred tradition and learning its required skills, and on the handing down of a siddur (prayer book) from grandfather to grandson. Did this episode sell Southern Jews short, both in the spiritual realm and in the realm of interracial relations?

"The Wonder Years" streams on Hulu on Wednesday evenings at 8:30.