Actress Lisa Kudrow recently opened up to the Saturday Evening Post about her family history, facing antisemitism, and her son’s quickie bar mitzvah amongst other things.
Q: You’re doing a biographical show with Who Do You Think You Are?
LK: That’s more like a documentary series than a reality series. They call it alternative reality because they think no one will want to watch documentaries.
Q: You traced your own genealogy for one episode. You knew that some of your family had been lost in the Holocaust—what did you find out that you didn’t know?
LK: Since I was a kid I had seen documentaries about the Holocaust, and I read what I could about it. I watched World at War—remember that series? They had a number of episodes on the Holocaust. There was some pretty graphic stuff in there. 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.
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Q: Have you ever experienced anti-Semitism?
LK: Yes, I have. 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.”
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Q: You were bat mizvah’d. Was he bar mitzvah’d?
LK: Yes, and no. It was similar to me. I was bat mitzvah’d because I asked my parents for it, and we had a friend who was a rabbi who agreed to tutor me—not in person but with tapes I listened to, and then I read phonetically. 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.
Q: That’s a very funny story.
LK: It is. It was a drive-by bar mitzvah. [Laughs.]
Here is the episode of Who Do You Think You Are featuring Lisa. It is definitely worthwhile watching.
I sincerely hope the experience helps Lisa realize the importance of her heritage to a greater extent than evidenced by the circumstances of her son’s bar mitzvah.
