A century ago this month, Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan—a Russian-born American Jewish thinker who founded the Reconstructionist movement—held a bat mitzvah for his daughter Judith. Menachem Wecker revisits the event, and the history of the ritual in America:

That bat mitzvah came to be seen as the first public celebration of its sort in the United States.

European Jews were already celebrating bat mitzvahs, and the Reform Jewish movement had done away with bar mitzvahs for thirteen-year-old boys in the 19th century, opting instead for co-ed communal confirmations. The real story, to [the eminent historian Jonathan] Sarna, is that bat mitzvahs began proliferating after World War II, when Conservative—rather than Reconstructionist—leaders saw it as a way to energize Jews who were moving from urban Jewish enclaves to the suburbs, where they lived alongside Gentiles. Bat mitzvah was part of the rabbinic arsenal for keeping newly trick-or-treating Jews in the fold.

Judith Kaplan’s bat mitzvah 100 years ago was quite different from today’s ceremonies. Her father chanted from the Torah scroll, after which Judith did so from a book. She did not stand at the central bimah podium. “No thunder sounded no lightning struck,” she wrote later. “The institution of Bat Mitzvah had been born without incident.” She added that both of her grandmothers sought to persuade her father not to hold the ceremony, which was much more important to the father of the bat mitzvah than it was to Judith.

Stephen Daisley writes about the slaying of Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim:

Yaron and Sarah were murdered in a climate of lies and vilification and hatred. . . . The more institutions participate in this collective madness, the more madness there will be. The more elected officials and NGOs misrepresent the predictable consequences of asymmetric warfare in densely populated territories, where much of the infrastructure of everyday life has a dual civilian/terrorist purpose, the more the citizenries of North America and Europe will come to regard Israelis and Jews as a people who lust unquenchably after blood.

The most intolerant anti-Zionism is becoming a mainstream view, indulged by liberal societies, more concerned with not conflating irrational hatred of Israel with irrational hatred of Jews—as though the distinction between the two is all that well defined anymore.

For years now, and especially after the October 7 massacre, the call has gone up from the pro-Palestinian movement to put Palestine at the heart of Western politics. To pursue the struggle against Zionism in every country, on every platform, and in every setting. To wage worldwide resistance to Israel, not only in Wadi al-Far’a but in Washington, DC. “Globalize the intifada,” they chanted. This is what it looks like.