A bar mitzvah celebration could be held in conjunction with any Jewish service in which there is a Torah reading, to wit, Sabbath morning, Sabbath afternoon, Monday morning, Thursday morning, Rosh Hodesh morning.

In theory a Bar Mitzvah celebration could be held in conjunction with a holiday Torah reading, but I do not know of such a case.

MY COMMENT: A very interesting and thoughtful post!

Well–I had no idea that Bar Mitzvahs occur as a rule on saturdays and plan to promptly forget the fact, as it is of zero consequence for me.

Further, I'm uncomfortable with this constant preoccupation with Kafka's Jewishness. It's there, it plays a role, but you don't hear people going on ad nauseam about how the architecture in Prague influenced Kafka, (though one can be pretty sure it did). I suspect that what we are really talking about is OUR jewishness, and how we're like Kafka and have a spiritual bond with Kafka and are mystically linked with Kafka. It's a form of self-flattery. That's because Jews are unwilling to look at the truth, which is that most Jews have far more in common with Bernie Madoff than they do with Franz Kafka, an utterly unique, in so many respects, inscrutable figure. I feel it's a reduction of Kafka to harp on his Jewishness. He's so much LARGER than that. The same is true of any great artist. We'd never mistake Shostakovich for anything but Russian. But at the end of the day, so what? He transcended his Russianness to become Shostakovich, just as Kafka transcended the terms of his existence, his dreary legal paperwork, his stultifying Jewishness home life, to become Kafka.

Wait a minute: that's what Jews have done to Euro-Christian identity and Western civilization! But I guess from the ethnocentric Jewish perspective, Western civilization has never produced someone so esteemed as Kafka, so it's really no big deal.

It is true that many Jews are particularly tribal and this carries over into their reading habits. They want me to believe that as a Jew, I ought to have a far greater affinity for Franz Kafka than for Fernando Pessoa. That, of course, is absurd.

Me, I guess I’m an just an old fashioned multi-culturalist libertarian who wants to see Christianity survive, Judaism survive, Islam survive…but not all rendered together by the State Combine and turned into sausage. But that makes me a heretic in the “post-tribal” world of State-enforced “progressivism” (read: Communism).

Re "the Christian persecutors of thought and reason":
Ever hear of a little thing called the Reformation? The Enlightenment was just another example of Christianity splitting off from itself and reforming, that time in a secular incarnation. It has gone through the same process thousands of times in thousands of different ways, which is why there are so many Christian denominations and Christian-ethos based groups, hospitals, charities, institutions…many of them even secular.

Only dogmatic Communists profess to believe that the Enlightenment was a final repudiation of Christianity. You're just repeating old Communist tropes, whether you know it or not.

Awesome composer. Way better than anything America has ever come up with. Walter Benjamin was a devoted Marxist. It's as silly to cast out great communist thinkers because of Stalin and the Soviet state as it is to cast out great Jewish thinkers because of some imbecile like Judge Judy.

And you, Ed, just keep on repeating the old Birch society anti-Semitic tropes and I'm sure you do know it. I expect you to inveigh against "secular humanists" any time now.