Overview
Thirteen true stories of famous Jewish Americans at exactly your age. The perfect bar or bat mitzvah gift!
Maybe your bar or bat mitzvah was last week. Maybe it's next year. Either way, you're in very good company.
Before Steven Spielberg made Jaws and E.T., he was a kid who was afraid of almost everything. Before Jack Kirby co-created Captain America, he was getting chased across Lower East Side rooftops. Hank Greenberg was already over six feet tall at his bar mitzvah. And Gilda Radner told jokes with her dad long before she made the whole country laugh on Saturday Night Live.
From a kid in 1630s Amsterdam to the woman who ran YouTube, these thirteen stories span nearly four hundred years of Jewish life in America. Some of these kids had bar and bat mitzvahs; some grew up before girls could have one. All of them were twelve and thirteen once, still figuring themselves out.
Funny, frank, and moving, The Bar and Bat Mitzvah Years is part history, part biography, and part coming-of-age mirror. It's proof that the people who shaped Broadway, baseball, comic books, the Supreme Court, outer space, and the internet once stood exactly where you're standing now.
From Joshua S. Levy, author of the National Jewish Book Award winner and Sydney Taylor Honor Book Finn and Ezra's Bar Mitzvah Time Loop.
Inside you'll meet: Asher Levy, Rachel Gratz, Emma Lazarus, Louis Brandeis, Irving Berlin, Hank Greenberg, Jack Kirby, Richard Feynman, Ruth Kirschstein, Gilda Radner, Steven Spielberg, Judy Resnik, and Susan Wojcicki.
Also includes: Full-color illustrations by Alexander Mostov, plus a timeline, glossary, who's who, and notes on sources.
A meaningful gift for bar and bat mitzvahs, Hanukkah, Jewish American Heritage Month, and more.
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