Revisiting the first "Sex and the City" bat mitzvah

It features a very sassy 13-year-old played by a familiar face.

Long before Charlotte Goldenblatt’s kid Rock had a they-mitzvah that wasn’t on “And Just Like That,” there was a “Sex and the City” bat mitzvah — and it featured a now pretty famous Jewish TV actress.

Back in September of 2000, when people were watching the salacious show each week as it aired on HBO and not binging its sequel on Max (which was almost a quarter century ago if you want to make yourself feel old), the episode “Hot Girl in the City” premiered.

In the episode, Samantha Jones, successful publicist that she is, is asked to take on the event of the city — the bat mitzvah of Jenny Brier, played by Kat Dennings in her first TV role.

For those of you who don’t know the Jewish actress born Katherine Victoria Litwack, who is now starring as Tim Allen’s daughter in the new sitcom “Shifting Gears,” she is most well-known for playing the Jew-ish Max Black in “2 Broke Girls” (which incidentally also had a very odd bar mitzvah episode in which Max aptly calls kugel "the lasagna with the crazy raisins").

She also played the very Jewish Norah Silverberg in “Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist,” based on the Rachel Cohn and David Levithan book. She played Jules Wiley in one of my favorite quirky shows, “Dollface,” and plays Darcy Lewis in the “Thor” franchise. She’s also married to rockstar Andrew W.K.

But before she was all that and more, she was a bat mitzvah girl on the raunchiest show on HBO, where she called Sarah Jessica Parker’s Carrie Bradshaw “fucking fabulous” and said that her column about secret sex was “hello, my life!” Jenny has a very clear and very lavish vision for her Jewish coming-of-age ceremony, one that has Samantha dubbing her a "brat mitzvah bitch.”

The premise of the episode was that 13-year-old girls were acting like adults, while the four “SATC” ladies were, like all women their age, trying to chase youth.

“In today's youth-obsessed culture, are the women of my generation growing into mature and responsible adults, or are we 34 going on 13?” Carrie wondered in her weekly column, a question that still feels sadly pertinent.

Meanwhile, Jenny and her junior high friends are all already having sex and talking about which NSYNC member they’re about to seduce. Samantha leaves the celebration happy that, unlike them, when she was 13, she got to be an actual kid.

Fortunately, Dennings herself, who is secular but proudly Jewish, was nowhere near as jaded at age 13 when she starred in the episode. She had to ask her mother about certain terms, to which she responded that they’d discuss it when she was 18. Unfortunately, that meant that when she tried to watch the episode — her first big break — with her teen friends and their moms, the content felt anything but age appropriate.

Aside from Jenny’s musings about her teen sex life, which Dennings already knew about, a lot of very not-safe-for-kids moments happen in the episode. Miranda gets braces and her date makes fun of how hazardous a blow job would be; Charlotte and Trey go to sex therapy and give nicknames to their genitals (this was before Harry gave us the most problematic but endearing Jewish rep of the show, though after, I believe, Charlotte’s affair with a Haredi artist) and Carrie sleeps and smokes pot with a man who still lives with his parents (in their very nice New York apartment).

Dennings’ mom got cable especially to screen the episode at their viewing party, but when they started watching, she had to run and turn the TV off and profusely apologize to all the guests.

What a delightful origin story for one of my favorite actresses. And while rewatching “Hot Girl in the City,” Jenny does play really hard into the JAP stereotype, Dennings does an incredible job playing the spoiled young New York socialite, and honestly, my favorite line of the show is when one of Jenny’s fans yells at her: "Jenny, I love your haftora portion!” Iconic.

Do you remember this episode? What’s your favorite Jewish “Sex and the City” moment? Are you excited for the upcoming new season of “And Just Like That?” Let me know in the comments!