How My Bat Mitzvah Turned Me Off Judaism

On March 25, 1978, the day after my bat mitzvah, I announced to my parents that I was done with Judaism and would never again set foot in a synagogue. Some of my disgust with Hebrew school was no doubt specific to my situation. Two years before I started, we'd moved from a working-class neighborhood in Philadelphia to the edge of a tony Western suburb. Our house was a tiny fixer-upper, but the location qualified me for top-notch public schools. My parents, struggling to make ends meet, couldn't pay the exorbitant prices for synagogue membership in our new community. Jewish education, like everything else when I was growing up, was inextricably tied to money and class, and that set me up to hate it from the start.Read more: http://forward.com/culture/384979/how-my-bat-mitzvah-turned-me-off-judaism/