But even that was funnier than the cold open the week before, following Rick Santorum’s near-victory in the Iowa caucus. Santorum lost to the monotoned Mormon by just eight votes, and his statements on the trail since his rise in the polls must have seemed like belated Christmas presents to comedy writers. Surely Andy Samberg, the goofiest cast member, would let his freak flag fly, right? Instead, Samberg spent five minutes setting up a joke about Santorum’s 100-day, 99-county Iowa campaign, pledging to visit every county in America to beg for votes, even braving the “heavily armed population” of Monroe County, Tenn., that inspired “Deliverance” and the “thousands of angry pillow biters and doughnut bumpers” of San Francisco county. Why? Get ready for the punch line: “This is about the country that has given so much to me and to which I want to give something in return,” says Samberg-Santorum, “so that maybe one day, long after I’m gone, my grandchildren can look me up on Google and find something, you know, different from what’s there now.”

Samberg’s Santorum would’ve gotten more meaningful laughs if he’d just turned up wearing a foamy mocha-latte mustache, promoting the chocolate-frothy caffeinator as his official campaign beverage. Even Jay Leno had sharper barbs (“He lost by only eight votes … You know what’s ironic? He could have won if he’d just gotten the gay vote”).

It’s been that kind of year on “Saturday Night Live.” The Republican presidential field is an embarrassment of crazy-train riches. But the writers have been lazily broad-stroking caricatures of the candidates, and the result has been surprisingly edgeless and increasingly lame sketches. There’s no bite to Sudeikis’ Romney, played as a mere socially inept square. Kenan Thompson’s Herman Cain was a clueless, oversexed black man with dumb luck and box loads of pizza metaphors. “Fences. Jesus. Papilloma. Eyeballs,” is the essence to Kristin Wiig’s Michele Bachmann — exact words borrowed from Wiig-Bachmann’s actual post-Iowa closing statement on the Jan. 7 “Weekend Update” (even the pith of “Weekend Update” anchor and “SNL” head writer Seth Meyers has dulled this year).

The “SNL” writers wrote off Newt and Ron Paul as viable candidates early in the game — surge be damned — so Bobby Moynihan has been left to grin idly in his Phil Donahue wig, when he could have, at the very least, seized an opportunity to spoof Gingrich’s amazing concession speech in Iowa, a study in aggressive passive-aggression, directed at Romney. Why wasn’t more made of Romney’s relationship to Jon Huntsman, a distant relative from a rival Mormon clan — where’s the “Big Love” sketch? At the very least, a “Romeo and Juliet” number with one of Huntsman’s daughters and one of the Romney boys. I’d even take a “Brady Bunch” skit. With each GOP contender flitting away — after Huntsman’s exit on Monday, we might never see two Republican Mormons running for president — so too goes another missed opportunity, the unrealized jokes piling up like stacks of yesterday’s newspapers.

Though “SNL” is not strictly a political-satire show like “The Daily Show” or “The Colbert Report” — two shows that have had no problem doing both smart and funny work in recent months — it does have a reputation for edgy political commentary, for shaping the national conversation. And while the “SNL” cast and creators often dismiss criticism of the show by suggesting that everyone believes the show’s heyday is when they were in high school, you don’t have to go back far to find a golden age of political comedy. During the 2008 election, the sketch-comedy show was even lauded for being a game-changer: Tina Fey’s entitled, ignorant Sarah Palin (“I can see Russia from my house”) was spot-on, and Amy Poehler perfectly evoked the rage and righteous indignation of her Hillary Clinton, and made viewers appreciate her plight for the White House, her resentment of Obama, her outright hatred for Palin. Neither required too much embellishment — that was the beauty of the sketches, and the performances — and as a result, our hunches about the various candidates were confirmed, through these laugh-out-loud depictions, during an election when so many Americans were sitting on the fence. And so these enter the pantheon of iconic “SNL” political impressions: Chevy Chase’s buffoonish and clumsy Gerald Ford, Dana Carvey’s catchphrase-obsessed George H.W. Bush, Phil Hartman’s white-trashy fast-food-bingeing womanizer Bill Clinton (and later, Darrell Hammond as a cool-headed smooth-talker through Whitewater and Monica), and Will Ferrell’s willfully ignorant playboy Dubya.

“SNL” has had an undeniable impact on the culture, on the way candidates are perceived, and as recently as the last election, it has proven how persuasive it can be — or, at least how it can nudge us in a direction we were considering. And edgy is best left to the professionals, the Stewarts and Colberts. To be fair, that’s not “SNL’s” aspiration or mandate. They just need to make viewers laugh. Because if viewers are laughing, it means they’re listening.

And this is where “SNL” is failing viewers right now, by resting on those laurels of 2008. They’re writing as if, in the words of Vanessa Bayer’s moderator in “Yet Another GOP Debate” sketch from October, “No one is watching, so the stakes are low.” As the race whittles down, and Republicans seem more and more likely to settle for Romney, pens need to sharpen — right now, it is too easy to watch “SNL” on DVR, with a finger on the fast-forward button, searching for a chuckle. Sudeikis is leaving at the end of the season: It’s an opportunity to have more fun with Romney (please let it be Taran Killam). And must we really endure another year of Fred Armisen’s Obama, as a too-calm, emasculated, disempowered world leader? It’s a dreadfully boring narrative thread.

But if these writers had a hard time making the present cast of GOP characters interesting, it’s hard to imagine that they’ll be inspired by the next 10 months of Romney and Obama. We expect Romney and Obama to be cautious candidates — but that’s hardly an excuse for such timid and uninspired satire.

So, where is Chelsea, then? Roseanne starred in “Roseanne.” Jerry starred in “Seinfeld.” Louis C.K. stars in “Louie.” Even her caustic pal Whitney Cummings — who barely registered a blip outside of the comedy circuit until this past fall — stars in her eponymous sitcom. Handler appears in only seven of the 13 episodes, cast — by choice, she says — as the conservative Christian sister to her fictional twentysomething alter ego. (Handler claims she was too busy with her talk show to be the sitcom’s star or head writer.) Instead, Laura Prepon (Donna Pinciotti from “That ’70s Show”) plays young Chelsea Newman, ventriloquizing Handlerisms like a white kid reciting a Chris Rock monologue (if only she were savoring the jokes as breathlessly. If only the jokes were so worthy) while Handler’s presence in these early shows underline how flaccid her emasculating quips sound when intoned by anyone but her.

The pilot opens with Prepon’s voice-over, narrating as Chelsea Newman proudly “power-slurps the worm” out of a bottle of tequila to show up the guys at the sports bar where she waitresses. Cut to the county jail, where she spends the night with a bunch of lecherous lesbians from central casting — she’s gotten busted for a DUI. Just as one of the burliest broads starts in on her, she prays: “Are you there, vodka, it’s me, Chelsea.” The Lord Grain Alcohol answers her, apparently, because she’s bailed out by her hugely pregnant, judgmental sister, Sloane — Handler in a mousy brown wig, looking haggard, baiting Prepon with the line “Vodka is not the Lord.” That earns this meh quip: “Are you sure? They’re both invisible and have a hand in unexplained pregnancies.” Onto the sports bar, where we meet the rest of the crew: Chelsea’s best friend and gatekeeper, Olivia (Ali Wong), a petite Korean woman as shrill as a yipping Chihuahua; bartender and one-time-roll-in-the-sack Rick (Jake McDorman); bar back and resident little person (Handler would seem to have a fetish) Todd (Mark Povinelli). Don’t worry, they don’t make fun of his height — he’s color blind [insert sad-trumpet sound here]! Chelsea’s miserly, drunken father Melvin (Lenny Clarke) is, I suppose, Cliff-like in this “Cheers”-less bar, trolling for free drinks, except that Cliff would have been disturbed by his daughter offering her male friends “handies” in his presence.

All of these people are just set decoration for Chelsea’s posturing as a brazen, unapologetic bad-ass. She can drink not like a man, but “two men” — though we don’t witness her getting drunk so much as hear about it (they did take “vodka” out of the show title, after all) — and can trash-talk anyone under the table. Her sexploits in evidence are aborted missions  — in one, she wrestles to top a fellow-alpha sex partner; in another, she interrupts foreplay to attempt to trim the overgrown pubes of a red-headed conquest who repulses her. And, sure, she talks blue, but when more dynamic female characters go dirty, they do so with the searing wit of “30 Rock’s” Liz Lemon, and the cursing conviction of “Dexter’s” Deb Morgan. When she and Olivia boast about popping “lady wood” as they admire the décor of a prospective apartment, owned by a gawky virgin named Dee Dee (Lauren Lapkus, who manages to bring in the only bit of funny in evidence), it’s not racy, or shocking, or even ewww-worthy. It’s writers trying too hard to lend an edge to aimless, underdeveloped characters. Which is why the only laughter you hear after all these clunkers comes from the accompanying laugh track. Just like “Whitney.”

Whitney Cummings is at least fully devoted to being “Whitney,” a caustic, often-unlikable woman with a supportive boyfriend and serious abandonment issues. I can even bear, in small doses, “adorkable” New Girl Jess (Zooey Deschanel), in all her sing-songy tweeness. She may not be grounded as an individual, but she is at least fully realized as a character. But Chelsea, that girl’s nowhere to be found. And unless the writers find a way to give us a sense of who she is, why seek her out?

So I am ecstatic that 17 years later, after an illustrious career on the big screen and onstage, Danes has returned to series television to portray someone even more challenging: Carrie Mathison, a bipolar CIA agent gone rogue, on Showtime’s “Homeland.” Not since Helen Mirren’s detective, Jane Tennison — an alcoholic with a messy romantic life — from the BBC’s “Prime Suspect,” has a female protagonist asked us to suspend our judgment for the greater good. Here are smart, resilient women amid a sea of testosterone, ballsier, so to speak, than any of their male colleagues because they have to be, to be heard, to barrel through bureaucracy and egos and sociopathy. But Tennison’s occasional missteps both at home and at work, while frustrating to behold, were forgivable, because she’d secured viewers’ unwavering loyalty from the moment we met her. Carrie is a tougher sell.

During a mission to Afghanistan, Carrie learns that a returning U.S. Marine officer — a POW long considered dead — has been turned by al-Qaida. No one can corroborate her evidence — her informant has been killed — so it’s up to her, and only her, to prove to the CIA that America’s new hero, Nicholas Brody (Damian Lewis) is a sleeper cell. As her boss David Estes (David Harewood) says, “There is no bridge [she] won’t burn, no earth [she] won’t scorch” in her pursuit. It’s true. Carrie is single-mindedly focused on her mission — to unmask Brody and stop him from destroying the country — and she will make an enemy of anyone who stands in her way, sometimes, unwittingly, at the risk of national security. She’s a trees, not forest, kind of gal.

Estes proves to be an enemy. He’s a disbeliever, mostly out of spite (and, as it is later revealed, career-driven motivation, in bed with the crooked Dubya-like vice president) — he had an affair, years earlier, with Carrie that led to the breakup of his marriage and the breaking of his heart. But in her rogue mission, she betrays her one ally, her former boss, Saul (Mandy Patinkin), when she sets up a clandestine surveillance operation in Brody’s home and then attempts to placate her mentor with a seduction (they, too, had a brief fling years earlier). While watching Brody through the surveillance cameras, she becomes obsessed with her subject and starts pursuing him in the flesh. Not only does she end up sleeping with the enemy; she falls in love with him, too. It’s hard to say which is worst of all, but this might qualify: None of her colleagues, not even Saul, knows she’s manic-depressive — the disclosure would cost her her security clearance, her credibility, her job. Too bad — she’s in it now. Integrity, schmintegrity: Her instincts, her ability to connect the dots in this splattery-smudgy-redaction-filled constellation, are better than anyone else’s. Too bad no one will hear her — her bipolarity reveals itself after she survives a bombing but endures a complete breakdown in the aftermath, rendering her a Cassandra. The events she is trying to warn everyone about, the connections she’s been drawing between Brody and al-Qaida, fall on ears deafened against the temporarily insane.

Patinkin’s Saul is easier to like; he’s a patient papa, forever exasperated with Carrie, but he goes to the mat for her and her insights time and again. Why? Because he knows she’s right. Because she is bold enough to continually put herself on the line. And so too is Danes — she will not choose to win your heart the easy way. Now more than ever, with those big, wise doe eyes, she has imbued a difficult character with complexity and intelligence and a touch of the crazy, and gets you to love her in spite of yourself.

I thought I was doomed to a life of desolation, but then I found salvation on the local college radio station, with a DJ named Brenda, whose playlist introduced me to a host of what could be described as proto-emo (preemo?) bands: the Smiths, The The, Bronski Beat, Tears for Fears. I didn’t always fully grasp the meaning of their lyrics — some of the work was rich with homo subtext — but I felt a genuine psychic connection to their anguish, their longing and their morose revelry. Finally, my misery found company.

That was 25 years ago. Today, my partner of seven years and I are sorting out our plans for this weekend’s Gay Pride festivities in New York, and I’m reminded, as I wistfully listen to these songs, how I never imagined I’d one day make a home and plan a family with a woman I love. I credit shrinks, of course, and the changing times — if only we’d had gay-straight alliances in schools, or “Will & Grace” and “The L Word” on TV — but most of all, I am grateful to these bold musicians who provided the soundtrack to those difficult years in the early and mid-1980s. I offer, with highly personalized liner notes, my coming-out mix tape — a veritable K-Tel anthology of adolescent high drama. These anthems allowed me to claim the label I had not yet acted upon; they emboldened me to pursue the one thing I thought would eternally elude me: requited, consummated same-sex love.

1. “Mad World” by Tears for Fears (from “The Hurting,” 1983)

I was in the eighth grade, still wearing a headgear, growing back my then-thin hair after a bout of trichotillomania (a compulsion to pull out your own hair) and finding perverse comfort in my genuinely felt, but never fully realized, suicidal ideations. I literally wanted to die after going to a classmate’s bat mitzvah, when a girl from school caught me glancing at her in her Gunne Sax mini-dress. It was as if her beautiful, deep-set eyes were pointing at me, yelling “J’accuse” for leering at her; they knew the truth of who I was, every lurid thing I could and would ever conceive of. My face blushed fire, as if I were copping to a crime I didn’t even know existed. This whole exchange took place in less than 10 seconds; I replayed it in my head for years.

Being the Carrie White of our school — friendless and under virtual house arrest — provided me plenty of time to self-eviscerate about that moment. When I heard the clanging opening of the synth xylophone on this track while listening to my radio Walkman a few months later, I knew I’d found my alienation theme song. Roland Orzabal crooning, “I find it kind of funny, I find it kind of sad, the dreams in which I’m dying are the best I’ve ever had.” Nearly 20 years later, Gary Jules would cover the song (which largely found its audience when it appeared in “Donnie Darko”). He made it sound even more devastating by swapping the synthesizer for a single piano and his somber, understated voice.

2. “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” by the Eurythmics (from “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This),” 1983)

The Brits have cornered the market on white soul singers, from Dusty Springfield to the rehab-averse Amy Winehouse. But 25 or so years ago, Annie Lennox and Boy George (see No. 3) added another identity-bending layer: drag. They weren’t the first, not at all, but I can pinpoint the moment I saw the “Sweet Dreams” video as if it were a historic event. The sight of Annie Lennox — her shocking red Ziggy Stardust-like crew cut and smart tailored suit, standing in that futuristic boardroom, wielding a pointer and moving in a visual staccato like a dominatrix robot — was the most subversive thing I’d ever seen at the age of 12. And then there was that otherwordly, gorgeous voice booming from her succulent, if severe, lipsticked mouth. That image of Lennox was as aggressive as punk — her face-off between masculinity and femininity as exquisite as it was dangerous. But whereas punk was determinedly ugly, Lennox armed herself with fierce beauty as a weapon and dared to invite everyone to take a cold, hard stare at her.

3. “Do You Really Want to Hurt Me,” by the Culture Club (from “Kissing to Be Clever,” 1982)

And then there was Boy George, who playfully blended black eyeliner and pale foundation — more makeup than I would own in my lifetime — and wore a Hasidic-like black fedora over his long black semi-dreaded locks (suggesting a head full of payis) and a long white tunic emblazoned with Hebrew words. What a mind fuck! Maybe it’s because my mother saw the video with me and immediately fell in love that I found him to be more accessible, clownlike without being creepy. I didn’t equate the gender bending of Boy George or Annie Lennox with homosexuality, but I did intuit that something most definitely queer was going on. And it was gorgeous and glamorous.

4. “I Wanted to Tell Her” by Ministry (from “With Sympathy,” 1983)

When I was 14, the only lesbian and gay people I knew in Oak Park, Ill. — and in the world — were either only rumored to be so (i.e., my gym teachers and Liberace) or were the class creeps (few of whom, if any, were actually gay). But my freshman year of high school, I glimpsed the connection between coolness and lesbianism, if only for a minute during art class, when I was easel neighbors with a senior who would boast about sleeping with her best female friend. “Nancy” wore a lot of black, fancied herself a punk rocker, aspired to be the next Diane Arbus, was perpetually stoned and quickly became my idol. She made lesbianism seem less daunting, so much so that I wanted to tell her my most unspeakable secret. It was the first time I even considered juxtaposing the word “lesbian” with the phrase “I am a.” But then Nancy had an affair with her 40-something-year-old male English teacher, whom she later married, and I discovered the meaning of a new word: “poseur.”

5. “The Soul Mining” by The The (“The Soul Mining,” 1984)

This song, and indeed the entire album, was the score for the pit of my sophomore year despair. I had started to date — and subsequently grew weary of and mentally unengaged with — guys and became utterly, and stutteringly, speechless around a steely-eyed junior who edited the school literary magazine. It was time for a more careful evaluation of my sexuality, and that meant withdrawing from everyone — except my shrink. The The’s Matt Johnson could evoke the darkest of moods with the music alone: It sounded like he was performing from the bottom of an empty well, or in a desolate tunnel. But it was the lyrics that pulled me in and gripped me for years: “Something always goes wrong when things are going right. You’ve swallowed your pride to quell the pain inside. Someone captured your heart like a thief in the night, and squeezed all juice out until it ran dry.” Yep.

6. “I Want the One I Can’t Have” by the Smiths (“Meat Is Murder,” 1985)

Morrissey is the laureate of morose revelry, and he was my demigod. At 15, I let my “mentality … catch up with [my] biology” by acknowledging my same-sex infatuation with a fellow traveler on a summer trip to Israel, the first of many inaccessible girls to capture my heart. The girl couldn’t have been straighter — or nicer to me, for that matter. I swore I spied a flicker of hope when she told me she was going to Barnard the next year, thinking she might have a sexual discovery of her own. But she had a different epiphany: She upgraded her Judaism from Conservative to Modern Orthodox.

7. “Smalltown Boy” by the Bronski Beat (“The Age of Consent,” 1984)

I don’t know what’s eerier: Jimmy Somerville’s castrato-like voice or the narrative he lays out in this song, about a young man cast out by his parents and gay-bashed by a guy he fancies. The video terrified me so much I didn’t come out to friends until college — though I soft-launched a disclosure to my Jewish liberal parents when I was 15 by telling them, “There’s a pretty good chance I am experiencing bisexual tendencies.” They dismissed it as a phase for more than 10 years.

8. “Gloria” by Patti Smith (“Horses,” 1975)

I’d never listened to Patti Smith until I was about to go to college. By the time I heard that “Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not [Miss Smith's],” I was ready and eager to find that sexy chick who was “humpin’ on the parking meter, leanin’ on the parking meter” and be like Patti, who claimed not to care about the “people [who said] ‘beware.’ The words are just rules and regulations to me. Me!” The proto-punk goddess provided my liberation anthem, which propelled my college quest to find myself, lose the self-consciousness, “[take] the deep plunge” and “put my spell on her,” whoever she might be.

The song drove me to my first Gay, Lesbian & Bisexual Alliance meeting just weeks after being dropped off by my parents at Rutgers to begin my freshman year, and I searched in vain all over campus for that Gloria. I was so eager to test-drive my new lesbian identity that I made out with the first willing female participant I could find, despite my lack of attraction to her. It was as sloppy and unerotic as my high school experiences with guys, but finally, I was on the right track.

When I spotted the Gloria of my rock ‘n’ roll dreams in the dining hall later that year — she was a sophomore English major and aspiring singer-songwriter — I was desperate to take the deep plunge, to validate everything I’d been feeling since junior high as real and true and significant. She was not feeling it so much, not for me, at least. But she would eventually seduce me, two years later, and then, if only for a night, I was assured that this desire could be, if not fully requited, then totally, excellently consummated.

I had no more questions. Except to ask for more.

But I was not among the lucky ones. Instead, my mother hired an Israeli folk singer to entertain my small handful of friends from middle school and Hebrew school, as well as members of our family, and the colleagues and golf club pals of my pediatrician grandfather, who was footing the bill. For two hours, we weren’t even going to get a few hyper rounds of “Hava Nagila.” Nope, just a lonely lady strumming her acoustic guitar, wailing somber Hebrew favorites like “Yerushalayim Shel Zahav (Jerusalem of Gold)” and the Israeli National Anthem, “Hatikvah.” In other words, my bat mitzvah party sucked.

Nothing like the b’nai mitzvah Mark Oppenheimer crashed in Scarsdale, N.Y., and Tampa, Fla., for his impeccably researched, if too often flippantly narrated, cultural history of the Jewish rite of passage, “Thirteen and a Day: The Bar and Bat Mitzvah Across America.” The former New Yorker staffer, and current editor of the New Haven Advocate, attended the ceremonies and receptions of American Reform, Conservative and Orthodox Jews across the nation to find out why so many of us “take such trouble to keep this one part of their faith.”

Oppenheimer, who holds a doctorate in religious history from Yale and hails from secular Jewish stock — his Jewish mother was raised by atheist communists; his father, by irreligious German-American Jews — never had a bar mitzvah. “Leftism, not Torah or Zionism, was what mattered” in his family, while growing up in the predominantly Catholic town of Springfield, Mass. But, as he got to know more Jewish people at Yale, and had his first encounters with Jewish rituals like Sabbath dinners and the blowing of the ram’s horn (the shofar), Oppenheimer experienced something like a cultural awakening. “I felt as if I were meeting other Jews for the first time … Jews who had been to Israel, Jews who could read Hebrew, Jews who planned to be rabbis, Jews who, with a kitschy irony, still wore T-shirts received as Bar Mitzvah party favors.”

Years later, when Oppenheimer took a job as a religion writer for the Hartford Courant, he absorbed even more knowledge about Judaism from rabbis and Jewish scholars, further whetting his appetite as a “journalist, historian, Jew.” It was then he decided he “wanted to investigate the wild and growing popularity of b’nai mitzvah.” That is not to say, as he is careful to note, that he wanted to study to become a bar mitzvah. Why would he? When Oppenheimer’s journey begins in New York, he’s sneaking into swank Scarsdale synagogues and ritzy receptions at Manhattan hotels — gaudy, excessive spectacles thrown by parents who seem more intent on impressing friends and colleagues than celebrating their Jewish children’s rites of passage into adulthood. Not exactly the stuff of religious inspiration.

Oppenheimer can barely contain his grief — at times, awestruck revulsion — at events like these. While that may seem predictable, the thing that really riles him is sitting through b’nai mitzvah ceremonies that hijack the Jewish Sabbath (Shabbos) morning services. The rabbis often cut short the usual rituals at the expense of the regular congregants to accommodate the guests of honor. “By robbing the day of its central purposes, communal prayer and public Torah reading,” writes Oppenheimer, “b’nai mitzvah’s heightened importance within the Jewish community actually seemed to cripple the ritual’s religious potential … The first Torah service a young man or woman takes part in is not a true Torah service at all, but a reasonable facsimile of one … the child is guaranteed success for an audience of invited friends and relatives.” It especially infuriates Oppenheimer because so many of these families join the synagogue on a short-term, opportunistic basis, becoming members a year or two before their child’s bar or bat mitzvah, with no interest in engaging spiritually or communally with the congregation. In fact, most of them don’t renew their memberships once their children complete their rites of passage.

After the ceremonies, Oppenheimer follows the guests to the over-the-top b’nai mitzvah parties, which are fully staffed with DJs, tarot card readers, bartenders, caricaturists. Some of the receptions have “party motivators” — people hired to “chat up the guests at cocktail hour, often engaging the boys and girls in flirtatious — but not too flirtatious — conversation, and then dance, dance, dance when the music starts to play.” He even attends a couple of bar and bat mitzvah party expos in Teaneck, N.J., and Greenwich, Conn., to take note of the latest cultural trends in the realms of photography, entertainment and catering. “The saddest thing about the party culture,” he writes, “is not that it is lavish, but that it can affect a self-perpetuating ubiquity and a sense of helplessness. A family is still free to do its own decorating, build the piñata, cook the food, and play CDs from a stereo … But where a spending race has, like an arms race, heated up, increasingly professional and sophisticated party choreography threatens to make homemade celebrations seem corny and juvenile.”

Oppenheimer eventually moves away from the more revolting b’nai mitzvah — we read about plenty of those in magazine exposés, anyway — and uncovers families for whom the ritual holds serious significance. With this shift, his attitude changes, from disapproval to varying degrees of amazement, and his expressions of smugness, too, adjust from outright disgust to gentle sarcasm. The proximity to religiosity, spirituality and any glimmer of sentimentality appears to threaten Oppenheimer; here, he’s like a smart-alecky teenager whose running commentary is more entertaining to him than the surrounding stimulus. He did warn us; Oppenheimer explains early on that his secular parents raised him to be cynical about organized religion. I presume, then, that he is soulful and brave to pursue his intellectual curiosity with such vigor and intelligence. If only he didn’t feel the need to assert a distance with snark, as he does when describing a frosted-haired Torah tutor, and a Jewish Renewal ceremony in Alabama. He is even a bit righteous when he goes to Beth El-Keser Israel (BEKI) synagogue in New Haven, Conn., which has a decidedly egalitarian Conservative Jewish congregation whose vibe is “a mélange of Shetland-wool intellectual and post-sixties hippie.”

The bat mitzvah girl at BEKI, Annie Bass, has chosen to obey all religious strictures. (As Oppenheimer notes, the bat mitzvah is a relatively new creation, invented in 1922 by Mordecai Kaplan, the founder of the liberal Reconstructionist movement. Conservatives didn’t catch on until the 1950s.) Annie’s observant family raised her to keep “Shabbos” — withholding from writing or working, operating electrical appliances, or exchanging money on Friday nights and Saturdays until sundown — but she’s decided to pray every day. “It’s pretty and it’s meaningful. I don’t know what it means, but it’s meaningful,” Annie explains to Oppenheimer. She also wears the small black boxes that contain scraps of Hebrew scripture known as tefillin, which are traditionally only worn by men. “With this religious devotion, she was choosing to accept that there are things one does not choose,” writes Oppenheimer, who holds her up as an example of Jewish wholesomeness, and her bat mitzvah, as “the antidote to Scarsdale.”

Oppenheimer knows Annie is unlike anyone he will ever meet. She comes from an anti-materialistic family, and designed her own bat mitzvah. Opting out of a knock-down, drag-out party, she instead preferred a small gathering for a buffet lunch at the synagogue after the morning service. The author is keenly aware that Annie is special, “venerated for being the kind of young Jew rabbis and teachers and parents hope for, spiritually committed and spiritually gifted.” “I felt slightly ashamed of the burden that, unbeknownst to Annie, I was placing on her,” he writes. Indeed, only the Lubavitcher bar mitzvah boy he encounters in Alaska appears as devoted as Annie — these two make for exceptional, obvious studies — but that is not to say that they are the only dedicated, earnest Jewish souls he encounters on his cross-country trip.

Mendy Greenberg, the Lubavitcher living in Anchorage, Alaska, is not the kind of 13-year-old you meet every day, though. He is eager to have his bar mitzvah so he can have the honor of carrying on the missionary work of Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson, who died in 1994. To him, manhood is “the onset of his responsibility to save the souls of world Jewry.” Part of this involves undertaking Schneerson’s obligatory “Tefillin Campaign,” a mission to get as many Jewish men to wear tefillin as possible — Oppenheimer, who doesn’t know how to lay tefillin, offers himself up as a student.

In Tampa, Oppenheimer hooks up with tutor Judi Gannon, who teaches “trop” — or chanting — of the Torah. Chanting from the Torah is one of the most difficult tasks, because the entire Torah is written in consonant letters, with no vowel markings, making it nearly impossible to sight-read. One of Oppenheimer’s strangest missteps appears here, when he offers an unsettling example to convey the complexity of trop: He likens it to singing a piece by Hitler’s favorite composer. Is he nuts, naive, or was this truly the only example he could conjure, as when he writes, “To chant the entire Torah … is akin to singing all the parts in Wagner’s Ring cycle from a text that has neither vowels nor any musical notes.” Not a few Jews would be horrified to see “Torah” and “Wagner” in the same sentence.

After making fun of Judi’s frosted hair, her breathless enthusiasm (he quotes her in paragraphs, and describes her manner of telling her life story “as if she were the emcee of a variety show, introducing one act after another”) and her house full of b’nai mitzvah tchotchkes, he finally pays her the respect she deserves. Judi is wholly committed to her students and the synagogue, and boasts an immense knowledge of the Torah — and she is a necessity in a town with such a small Jewish community.

Indeed, one of the reasons the bar and bat mitzvah has endured in American culture, Oppenheimer discovers, especially in predominantly non-Jewish areas, is the fact that it is a public declaration. “It’s a natural opportunity for Jews to proclaim that they exist and to perform their existence in a way that the neighbors can see,” as Jacob Newman does in Fayetteville, Ala., at his hippie-ish Jewish Renewal ceremony. “At Temple Shalom, the very occasional bar mitzvah, perhaps one a year, is a gathering of the Jewish and the Jewish-ish — the fellow travelers, the onlookers, the bookish folks and literati, the liberals and hippies, the somehow different — and a sizable cluster of sympathetic but more clueless Gentiles, the classmates and co-workers who are happy to see what this Jewish stuff is all about.”

Jacob’s bar mitzvah at the Unitarian Universalist Society has congregants picking instruments out of a bag before the service — mariachis, wooden eggs, tambourines, glockenspiels — to accompany a guitarist who sings and strums the service in Hebrew and English, not unlike a 1970s guitar Mass. But it’s not as cloying as all that, according to Oppenheimer, who said he was “unexpectedly moved to poignant gratitude, one that persuaded me to quiet my cynical side, just for a moment, and sway in time to the guitar.”

If only we got to know the bar mitzvah boy as intimately as the kookiness of his ceremony, not to mention the local color. Indeed, with the exception of rare cases like Mendy and Annie, who appear in “Thirteen and a Day” as sideshow attractions, we have little sense of the b’nai mitzvah kids. We don’t learn much about how most of these boys and girls feel about preparing for the big day, how the ritual resonates for them, and how their Jewish identities fit into their respective communities. They are, after all, the VIPs, if only for a day.

But that’s only a quibble in light of the unexpected — and delightful — payoff to Oppenheimer’s painstaking research: By investigating the history of this Jewish coming-of-age ritual, he has become more knowledgeable about it than a bar mitzvah boy. As Oppenheimer explains the nuances of trop, or describes an irrepressible young teenage boy wrapping the leather straps of the tefillin around his forearm, the author’s cynicism melts away, and he lets slip his own naked enthusiasm for the beauty of these rituals. I am a secular Jew who harbors her own skepticism for organized religion — I hated Hebrew school — but I was admittedly verklempt when I first went to the Western Wall, and I am always humbled when I hear the sound of the shofar. One of the things I admire most about Judaism is that it rejects blind faith. By definition, Judaic thought invites cynicism — questioning reaffirms faith and some sects are open to adapting to a new age. So, even if his writing persona comes off as a little grating at times, there really is no better guide than a sardonic intellectual like Oppenheimer, who has opened his mind wide enough to let himself find out what he’d been missing all those years (and see if he actually missed it). And, unlike most kids preparing to be men and women of the commandment, he will probably retain this information far longer. Insist though he does throughout “Thirteen and a Day” that he doesn’t want to be bar mitzvahed — too bad. His investigative pursuit transformed him into something of an honorary, if reluctant, bar mitzvah boy — the kind any rabbi or Jewish parent would be most proud of.