Jewish actress Lisa Kudrow opened up about her past
experiences with anti-Semitism in a recent interview with the Saturday Evening
Post, describing how in college she faced a dispiriting backlash because of her
religion.
“In college there was more anti-Semitism than before
college, because there were people who never met a Jew before. A friend of
mine, when she found out I was Jewish, said, ‘Really? Oh, I don’t like Jews,’”
she shared.
The actress, who shot to fame playing the capricious Phoebe
on the TV show “Friends,” also recounted how she learned about her own family’s
connection to the Holocaust during an episode of Who Do You Think You Are?, a
show that traces the genealogy of a selected participant.
“I took a lot of Jewish history classes and studied Hebrew
for two years in college. But the striking thing to me is that while I studied
it, I never applied it to my own family history. So I didn’t have to be
burdened with the nightmare of what happened to people I knew. Then as I got
older my grandmother told me it was Hitler who killed everybody in her family,
and that’s the first time I came face-to-face with it. In my fully denial state
of mind it was, ‘No, no, we’re not part of the Holocaust.’ But I learned we
are,” Kudrow said.
Kudrow, who was bat mitzvah’d at her own choosing, told the
story of how her own 15-year-old son, Julian, came to be bar mitzvah’d.
“My son sort of wanted a bar mitzvah, but it was a lot of
work, and we didn’t belong to a temple. But then he was at the mall and two
Hassidic Jews, I think they were Chabad-Lubavitch, they went up to him and asked,
‘Are you Jewish? Did you have a bar mitzvah?’ He said he was half-Jewish. They
asked, ‘Your mother?’
“‘Yeah.’
“‘Great, come here, we’ll give you a bar mitzvah in 30
seconds.’ They did a ritual, took a picture. He was all by himself, and he had
his own bar mitzvah.
“It was a drive-by bar mitzvah.”
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