Though Michelle Elisburg's bat mitzvah was in 1983, she's kept the relics intact in an overstuffed ivory album: pictures of a 13-year-old with a bowl haircut and a prim dress, a green-and-yellow napkin declaring, "Michelle, October 8, 1983" and even her correspondences with her Russian Jewish pen pal, Yelena Pevzner.
Like most adults looking back at their coming of age, she is mortified by the dated display. Now a 35-year-old pediatrician living in Floyds Knobs, Ind., Elisburg refers to her 13-year-old self as "dorky, geeky, gawky" and characterizes her frock as a "goober dress."
According to Jules Shell, co-editor of the new book "Bar Mitzvah Disco," a compilation of hundreds of bar and bat mitzvah pictures from the early '70s to '90s, now is the ideal time to look back.
"If you flip through the book, you'll really see that it's a look at fashion, music and style through the lense of bar and bat mitzvah photographs, and everybody is ready to vibe with that," she said. "It's a coming-of-age story, it's a cultural history, and sort of an unabashed celebration of style, or lack thereof."
Shell and her co-editors, Nick Kroll and Roger Bennett, have transformed the coming-of-age ceremonies into a nostalgic art form. All the old-school bar mitzvah bases are covered: puffy sleeves, puffy hair, cheesy themes (including a safari ceremony complete with an elephant) and tacky photo effects, from double exposures to the classic bat mitzvah girl pictured inside a silhouette of her head.
"Disco" fits squarely into a movement characterized by publications, performers and parodies with a proud, particularly Jewish sensibility.
Among the slew of sly offerings are hip magazines like "Heeb" and "Guilt and Pleasure," in which "Disco's" Bennett is also involved; Web sites like Jewlicious.com; the sexy, crass comedy of Sarah Silverman; and the novels of young Jewish literary lights like Gary Shteyngart and Jonathan Safran Foer. Both are part of "Disco." Foer contributed an essay about a bar mitzvah kiss and Silverman penned a piece on her late-blooming sexuality.
"We happen to be going through a minor renaissance of young Jewish writing," said Mark Oppenheimer, author of "Thirteen and a Day: The Bar and Bat Mitzvah Across America."
The bar mitzvah has also been in the media spotlight of late. At a recent $5 million reception held in New York's ritzy Rainbow Room and dubbed "Mitzvahpalooza" by the media, Elizabeth Brooks, daughter of a defense contractor, was serenaded by an A-list lineup of performers ranging from Aerosmith to 50 Cent (who showed up sporting an enormous, incongruous cross necklace).
"It's a very crazy and bizarre thing to think that kids would like listening to Don Henley," said "Disco's" Nick Kroll, a New York bar mitzvah entertainer.
Oppenheimer notes that ridiculously opulent receptions and pop culture are the sources of most Americans' bar mitzvah knowledge.
There have been quite a few in recent entertainment. Last Thursday, "The OC's" gentile hottie Ryan Atwood celebrated his "Chrismukkah Barmitzvahkah." There's the scene in "The Wedding Singer" where the bar mitzvah boy gets fresh with Drew Barrymore; an episode of "Sex and the City" in which Samantha does PR for a New York Brat Mitzvah girl; and the ceremony in the "Starsky and Hutch" movie.
But "Disco" is the real thing. Shell and friends never expected their project to get so much attention. Originally, they just wanted to get together and reminisce over their old albums. Soon after, they started seeking photos and memories from more friends and relatives.
"The first thing was strong-arming our sisters and brothers into letting us use their photographs and putting them up on a Web site, which we did in 2003, just as a joke, totally a joke," Shell said. "… Before we know it, photographs were flowing in, agents started calling us and we were like, 'Oh my god, this is absurd.' We didn't realize that this was such a phenom and that people were really ready to look back at this. … We had to get a warehouse for all the ephemera that came in: the T-shirts, sign-in boards. Who knew all this stuff was languishing in the basements and attics of mothers across America?"
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