by Rabbi Dov Fischer in The American Spectator

Adam Sandler’s new Netflix film You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah (hereafter BM) pairs beautifully with another recent Netflix release, You People. I discussed the latter piece of garbage at some length here. These two painfully disgusting Jewish tragedies are “comedic” in style — although never funny in You People but cutely garnering six or seven giggles during BM’s one hour and 43 minutes. Together, these two films portray all that is vapid, spiritually empty, garishly materialistic, utterly devoid of Judaism, and philosophically bankrupt in the woke echo-chambered G-dless ethnic ghetto of “progressive” Reform Judaism.

Netflix, a woke outlet for Obama and Hillary hagiographies, presumably has some anti-Semite, whoever he is or she is or they is, assigned specifically to find and produce movies denigrating Jews and Judaism in the most despicable ways. Thanks to that Judaism hater and his or her or their (singular) or their (normal grammar) team, I have gained new sociological insights as an Orthodox Jew (i.e., a Jew who believes in the G-d of the Bible and believes Judaism in its authentic form is a beautiful way to live). To wit, I am more persuaded than ever that there now are two different “Jewish people.” One of those people are Jews, and they practice Judaism. I am a member of that community. The other, a societal aberration and a demographic conundrum, are “Jews” who either (i) are not Jews altogether, or (ii) are AJIDs — Accidental Jews in Denial. The latter group — those pitifully in Denial — share none of the characteristics of their forbearing biblical forebears who lived near Da Nile.

More than half of the G-dless Reform community simply are not Jews. They may tell Pew survey people they are “Jews,” may tell political pollsters they are “Jews,” but they simply are not Jews. They cannot be bar/bat mitzva’d at Orthodox synagogues, they are not buried in cemeteries of Orthodox congregations, and Orthodox rabbis will not conduct their marriages. Orthodox rites are wrong for them. Through 3,300 years (give or take a day) of Judaic history, the definition of “Who is a Jew” has been simple: A Jew is someone either (i) born to a Jewish mother or (ii) converted to Judaism by affirming a belief that all of the Torah is true, that G-d exists and expects of Jews as He says in the Torah, that the converting person will live his or her life as the Oral and Written Torah command, augmented by the rabbinic teachings of the Talmud and the Mesorah (the traditions Jews have assumed and to which we have adhered these thousands of years).

That is who a Jew is, for better or worse.

Consequently, from a purely demographic perspective, rooted in black-and-white data (i.e., facts), at least 40 percent of all “Jews” in America are in fact not Jews. Marilyn Monroe converted to Judaism? So says Reform Jews. So said the Reform rabbi who “converted” her. So said the left-wing mainstream media of the day. But she was not Jewish. Uncle Ben’s rice may be converted, but she was not. Nor are the other various celebrities and less famous who “convert” via Reform rabbis, typically to marry a Jewish person whose parents have said they will write him out of their will if he marries someone non-Jewish. For them, it all is perfunctory, even if they briefly imagine the process seriously. That is why so many truly motivated Reform Judaism “converts” later come to Orthodox rabbis to “convert again,” this time for real.

Elizabeth Taylor likewise “converted” when she married some Jewish guy named Mike Todd, a Hollywood biggie typical of the AJID, the Accidental Jew in Denial. “Mike Todd”? Gimme a break. He was Avrom Hirsch Goldbogen, son of Orthodox rabbi Chaim Goldbogen and Rebbitzen Sophia Hellerman. So Elizabeth Taylor “converted.” Soon enough, she was marrying Richard Burton, thereafter Richard Burton (not a typo), Sen. John Warner, and Larry Fortensky. She was a wonderful actress in her youthful National Velvet, then powerfully as Maggie in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and later in Raintree County. She was an even more wonderful person, an exceptional human being who also became a strong supporter of Israel. But she was not Jewish.

It is this demographic mess, where 40 percent or more of all American “Jews” are not Jewish, that accounts in great measure for the crazy fake-news poll numbers that show disproportionate numbers of “Jews” in America supporting the Left and even anti-Israel Democrats like Ocasio, Rashida Tlaib, and Ilhan Omar, who not only are overtly anti-Israel but also deeply anti-Semitic. How can Jews vote so insanely against self-interest and indeed their own survival? Because half of those polled as “Jews” are not Jews to begin with. In this, they are joined by some children of Jewish mothers like Ben Cohen, Jerry Greenfield, and Bernie Sanders who are AJIDs, Accidental Jews in Denial. They do not believe in the G-d of Israel. They do not identify with the Torah that exists, only their fabricated pseudo-Jewdo mishmash of ACLU liberalism, Obama wokeism, and New York Times causes.

And so we come to You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah (BM). In BM, we see the girls told, again and again, that their Bat Mitzvah will be the “single most important day for the rest of their lives.” And indeed that is Reform Judaism in a nutshell because after the day marking a girl’s 12th birthday or comprising a boy’s 13th, their Judaic journey ends. They will have been taught pitifully little for their BM. No Chumash (Torah text) or Tanakh (remaining Bible books) or Rashi or Ramban or Rambam or Ibn Ezra or Mishnah or Gemara or Shulchan Arukh or Mishnah Berurah or Halakhah (Jewish laws and customs). Virtually no Hebrew. No serious exploration of Jewish history. Rather, they will have been assigned to memorize singing one paragraph of Hebrew in the Torah and a few more in a Book of Prophets, not understanding a word of it, often reading it in English transliteration, learning merely by repetitively listening to the same recording over and over and over and over and over again for months. And they are told that will be the most important day in their Jewish lives. And they will get lots of presents. The focus is not on Books of Prophets but on booking profits.

The movie’s storyline focuses on a Jewish girl whose BM is approaching. Naturally, her classmates all are approaching the same age and readying for their own BMs, especially her best friend. A cute boy in their Hebrew School class, who otherwise is a runt of a jerk, attracts both their hearts. The main girl, Adam Sandler’s both movie and real-life daughter, vies to be his girlfriend, as does her BFF. This competition sets them against each other. The story proceeds formulaically. As we streamed the flick, I kept telling my wife what to expect next. She wondered whether I already had seen the movie and was impolitely and uncharacteristically inundating her with spoilers. I explained, “Chabibi, I have seen this movie every day for the past half-century.” And I have. You see one Reform BM destroy a Jewish kid’s future engagement with G-d, you’ve seen ’em all.

But, in sooth, there were some variants here worth noting. Of all the sacrilege I ever have seen in a movie made by Jews about Jews — because no non-Jew outside Hitler’s Germany ever would dare portray such stuff — this was the first time I ever saw a boy and girl hide behind the parokhet (the curtain covering the Holy Ark and its sacred Torah scrolls) making out — in front of openly exposed sacred Torah scrolls. Hollywood would never dare stage something as vile toward the Koran and Islam, or their studios would be bombed to smithereens. But BM portrayed that.

The “rabbi” is G-dless, essentially a circus clown in a yarmulka. She — of course, a woman “rabbi” — is so G-dless that she teaches a class session proclaiming to the young pre-BM kids: “God is random.” (I spell out the word without a hyphen because, whatever God she is talking about, it is not the G-d of the Torah.) “God is random,” she again proclaims. And then she compels all 20 or so kids in the classroom to repeat after her: “God is random. God is random. God is random….”

Then she transitions to the only Bible story referenced in the whole movie: “Let’s pick up … with our old buddy, David…. Homeboy was about to get his groove on with the foxy Bathsheba…. What a snake David is!” She is talking to a class of Judaic ignoramuses, assured a lifetime of Judaic ignorance thanks to her Reform School teaching. Next, she points at an innocent boy and demands, “Are you a snake, Aaron?” He responds, deeply mortified, “N-N-No.” She continues, going at him, “You ever pull something like that, cheating on your wife?”

G-dless. Painful. Disgusting.

(Oh, by the way, she later tells him she was “just messing” with him.)

In Judaism, David is a deeply holy figure, and space does not allow for amplifying here. The story that serves as the “rabbi’s” one homily to her children’s class is actually layered in greater complexities than this fool’s presentation. Not surprising: The “rabbi” is portrayed by SNL player Sarah Sherman, herself an AJID who previously has tweeted such gems as: “what do i have to do to get cast as an ugly jew with a diarrhea disorder in a safdie bro movie.” The ADL’s Jonathan Greenblatt never goes after people like this self-styled “Sarah Squirm.”

The various girls’ respective BM parties are disgustingly garish, but true representations of the vapid waste typical at Reform Judaism’s BMs. These are the selfsame woke who are oh-so-concerned about the destitute. Yet, they will spend upwards of $100,000 on a three-hour party honoring a pre-teen who has not yet achieved anything greater than falling off a tricycle 10 years earlier, and perhaps pulling a girl’s braids or making a whoopie-cushion sound in third grade. As an Orthodox rabbi, I recoil with revulsion.

Throughout the movie, we see the way these “Jews” manifest their “Jewishness” — by sprinkling in a Yiddish word every 17 minutes of the movie: tataleh (sweet little boy), mamaleh (female variant, rhymes with “Kamala,” which is why Doug Emhoff’s non-Jewish-only children called his second non-Jewish wife by that nickname), mishpachah (family), boobeleh (another term of endearment), references to matza ball soup, and such. The moronic and offensive BM DJ publicly humiliates a sweet boy in front of an entire BM crowd while playing an endless selection of too-loud non-Jewish songs as the 12-year-old girls in skirts that barely cover their waists — and their “rabbi” — shake their torsos. He is aptly named “Schmuley.”

Tellingly, the girls have names like Lydia Rodriguez Katz, Kym Chang Cohen, and others names conveying that so many Reform Jewish men “marry out” that it is an acknowledged “thing.” Indeed, the national leader of Reform Judaism brags publicly that more than half of all Reform Jews marry non-Jews (site at p. 28), and even some of their rabbis now are non-Jews.

The people behind this G-dless sacrilege of a disgusting film, like those behind You People, are So Invited to My Three Zoom-based Weekly Classes on Judaic Topics and Bible Study because anything I teach will be worthwhile revelations to them. For starters: The bar/bat mitzvah is not the most important day in a Jew’s life. More important: the day of a boy’s bris (circumcision, entering G-d’s Covenant with Abraham), the day a boy or girl graduates yeshiva high school, the wedding day, and the day one’s own child is born. And perhaps the most important day of all: Today.

Originally published in The American Spectator

Photo Credit: געוואלד on Wikimedia Commons