Carol Kane, 72, didn’t grow up with too many Jewish traditions. In an interview with us earlier this year, the iconic actress reminisced about Manischewitz wine and her dad’s wonderful matzah brei, but shared that her Jewish education mostly took place on movie sets.
In the upcoming wonderful “Between the Temples,” Kane plays Carla Kessler, a later-in-life bat mitzvah student. And in a video promoting the film, she and co-star Jason Schwartzman, who plays Ben Gottlieb, a cantor who falls for Kane’s character, play a game where he tries to guess what the actress’ dream bat mitzvah would be. His guesses are not so on the nose, but some would still make for quite a magical bat mitzvah. For example, he guesses that she would want to have a bat mitzvah at a butterfly sanctuary, which I feel like now I want to have a bat mitzvah there.
So what would the “Hester Street” star’s dream coming-of-age ceremony include? Well, first of all, it would be at a Broadway theater, which I think would be just majestic. The music would come from Kane’s mother, Joy Kane, a jazz singer who the actress said really inspired her in this role of a woman coming into her own later in life, as well as from Joni Michell, because Kane is iconic like that. The noshes, which Schwartzman guessed, would be a thousand of little plates of the tapas version of Kane’s favorite food (and mine!): baked potato — the most important food group of all. As for the theme, at first Kane said it would be Victorian, but when Schwartzman guessed 1920s Paris, she decided to change her answer to that. But the best thing would be, simply, love, the ideal party favor. Jason guessed pictures, which, to be fair, is how you would document said love.
At the end of the day, despite not guessing every answer right, some would argue that Schwartzman is still the winner, because he gets to play Kane’s love interest in “Between the Temples,” which is coming to theaters this Friday. Here’s hoping that Kane, like her movie character, does decide to have her dream bat mitzvah, and that we can maybe snag an invite.
