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This wooden tevah—a stand or reader’s platform used for supporting Torah scrolls—was made and used in Yemen. It was the practice in Yemen for boys to become active participants in synagogue services…
[…] There I am, a kid in Chicago. Not from a particularly religious family. On top of the world, in the middle of the middle class. Ten years old and an only child. The war over half a decade and the…
Circumcision in an Egyptian relief, Sakkara, Egypt, Sixth Dynasty (ca. 2350–2170 BCE). Priests perform circumcision on boys. The hieroglyphic legend reads “circumcision.” The hands of the boy on the…
In this lamplit scene, the brightest spots are the mother’s dress and the white tablecloth on the table. (The mother and a maid at right, coming out of the kitchen, are the only women in the room.)…
Three weeks before Sammy’s thirteenth birthday Papa came in too upset to eat.“Tonight when I come out of schule the rabbi wants to talk to me. ‘Max, my heart is like lead to tell you this,’ he says,…
Night ThoughtsThat night, I had the weirdest thoughts. I don’t know why, but suddenly I thought to myself how great it is for a boy to have a bed as comfortable as my own. He can lie in bed and get a…
Psychoanalysis, dialectic materialism, nothing; laws of supply and demand, nothing, nothing; fiction, nothing. Nothing seemed applicable…
I belong to the generation that celebrated its bar mitzvah during the Six-Day War. Then, in 1967, the surging energy of our adolescent hormones was coupled with the intoxication gripping the entire…
This linen coat with silk-thread embroidery was worn by a Jewish boy in Bukhara (today in Uzbekistan) on the occasion of his bar mitzvah celebration. Jewish economic life in Bukhara was closely tied…
Bernardo Tzalkin stood there as though he had just been drenched with a bucket of cold water. Perplexed, at a loss for words, he tried to ask the doctor whether the boy could possibly get out of bed…