In the Spirit of the Channukah Season, It's: Disco Bar Mitzvah

Terry Gross and Fresh Air are not single-minded when it comes to the ‘holiday season.’ In the spirit of Chanukkah, she will have on two authors today who celebrate another Jewish rite of passage, the Bar/Bat Mitzvah. The old school ones.

Leisure suits, big hair and the Bee Gees are just part of the draw of a new book, Bar Mitzvah Disco. With essays from Jonathan Safran Foer, Sarah Silverman and others, the book documents bar and bat mitzvahs from the 1970s through the '90s.

Contributors to the book -- and to the authors' Web site of the same name -- seize the chance to relive -- (or merely to purge themselves) their dreaded coming of age ceremony, from over-excited relatives to nervous presentations of a portion of the Torah.

Roger Bennett and Jules Shell, two of the book's authors, have several other projects in the works, from the Web site adlerpants.com to a quarterly magazine about modern Jewishness, Pain and Guilt. Its third author, Nick Kroll, has written for Comedy Central's Chappelle's Show.

Fresh Air with Terry Gross
Today @ 3PM
90.5 KUT
On Fresh Air’s website@ whenever you got the time