“You KNOW you won't want to miss this!!! Seth Rogen and the Gang are going to throw me a Bar Mitzvah!” James Franco euphorically wrote on Instagram recently.
It’s actually an honorary bar mitzvah for the 37-year-old Franco, who’s known Rogen for ages as well as starred with him in bromance flicks like “Pineapple Express” and “This is the End.” Rogen and his wife, Lauren Miller Rogen, are hosting the simcha as part of their fourth annual Hilarity For Charity variety show at the Hollywood Palladium on Oct. 17 (tickets go on sale on Aug. 11). The organization raises funds to fight Alzheimer’s disease, which struck Miller Rogen’s mother when she was just in her mid-50s.
This won’t be the first time that Franco, whose mother is Jewish and late father was not, has yukked it up at a faux bar mitzvah. During an interview before his performance-art project at the Museum of Contemporary Art in 2010, he told me that the year before, a humorous fake bar mitzvah was part of the festivities when he was roasted as the Harvard Hasty Pudding Man of the Year.
On a more series note, Franco told me, he truly did want to have a real bar mitzvah some day. “Sadly, I didn’t have much of a Jewish upbringing, and I feel deprived,” he said. “I had a lot of Jewish friends, and so I went to plenty of bar and bat mitzvahs, but I never went to Hebrew school. I love education and, looking back, it’s like my friends had this whole other education that I didn’t have. And it’s a lot of subjects that now I’m very interested in. At UCLA, I took a whole series of classes on the Bible and the Bible as literature, and when I would talk to Jewish friends about what I was learning in class, they were like, ‘Oh, yeah, I learned that in Hebrew school.’ So I wish I had been exposed to it much earlier.”
Rogen – who did attend Hebrew school and become bar mitzvah growing up in Vancouver – wants everyone to wish Franco a big mazel tov. “Ever since I've known James, he's been talking about wanting a bar mitzvah,” Rogen said in a statement to Variety. “We're excited to see him finally become a man while also helping us raise awareness and funds for people living with Alzheimer's and towards research that will lead to a cure. And in celebration we'll also have a mohel and a live bris for James at the event.”
Yikes!
