“So what the hell’s a bar mitzvah anyways?”

That’s what Jason Hervey, as big brother Wayne, asks in a famed episode in the second season of “The Wonder Years” that aired in 1989, just a few years before my own bar mitzvah.

Kevin Arnold (played by Fred Savage) and his brother learn what a bar mitzvah is when Kevin’s friend Paul — played by Josh Saviano — is getting ready for his big day. In the episode, the usually timid Paul stands up for his Jewish heritage when Wayne refers to the male Jewish head-covering as a beanie and downplays the significance of the special day.

“It’s called a yarmulke and for your information, it happens to be a very big deal,” Paul tells Wayne.

I was very proud to see this episode growing up, and I was proud to see an episode on the same topic in the reboot of “The Wonder Years” on ABC, which focuses on a Black family. It centers around Dean, played by Elijah Williams, who has great acting chops and is extremely likeable.

This episode gives some high stakes screen time to Brad (Julian Lerner), who is Dean’s Jewish friend. Like Paul, Brad provides comic relief, but he’s cooler and not allergic to everything. In the episode, called “Brad Mitzvah,” Brad fumbles with his index cards while preparing to give his bar mitzvah speech and it’s up to Dean to give him a pep talk to help him get it together.

We see Dean realize that he and Brad both face persecution, and are more similar than he thought.

Kudos to writer Yael Galena, who showcases an amazing joke that you might miss unless you are paying close attention, but more importantly, shows the importance of friendship at a time when Black-Jewish relations could certainly be improved.

As some Jews today fear wearing their yarmulke in public, the uncertainty of whether or not to publicly demonstrate Jewish identity is palpable, and it is timely to showcase a boy who realizes his Jewishness can be a source of pride.

Galena said the episodes are based off of showrunner Saladin Patterson’s experiences.

“So the idea came from the realization that he had … Jewish kids he knew growing up in Montgomery, Alabama, who were very private/secretive about being Jewish,” Galena said. “This was combined with my own experiences of being raised Modern Orthodox Jewish, and trying to fit in in the non-Jewish world. I really wanted to hone in on the desperation to fit in as a kid, which is then followed up with the immediate shame of wanting to deny who you are in order to do it. Wrestling with your identity is a universal experience, and I was really excited to get to show this in a specifically Jewish story.”

Galena said the original episode from 1989 served as an example, but they obviously wanted to make it different — and, in this case, it was from a 12-year-old Black boy’s perspective.

“This ultimately changed how we approached every aspect of the story,” Galena said. “Plus, writing Dean’s POV allows us to talk about some necessary and difficult truths from that time period without it feeling too heavy.”

She added that for the speech of the bar mitzvah boy, she took inspiration from Rabbi Reuben Poupko, her sister- in-law’s father.

Fred Savage directed the episode and is an executive producer.

“Working with him at all felt like a dream come true,” Galena said. “But Fred actually directing my first episode and pouring all of our Jewishness into it was beyond my wildest dreams!”

The author is a writer based in New York.

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