Remembering Ed Asner and His First Performance -- A Failed Bar Mitzvah Reading

Ed Asner, the burly and prolific actor who became a star in middle age as the gruff but lovable newsman Lou Grant, first in the hit comedy “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” and later in the drama “Lou Grant,” died Sunday. He was 91.

As reported in The Times of Israel,

Asner was born in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1929, to Orthodox Jewish parents, Lizzie Seliger and Morris David Asner, who had immigrated from the Soviet Union. He was given the Hebrew name Yitzhak.

He almost became a newsman in real life. He studied journalism at the University of Chicago until a professor told him there was little money to be made in the profession.

He quickly switched to drama, debuting as the martyred Thomas Becket in a campus production of T.S. Eliot’s “Murder in the Cathedral.”

As Grant aged, many of his characters were more explicitly Jewish, from Joe Danzig, a worn-out principal at a troubled inner-city high school in “The Bronx Zoo,” in 1988, to Sid Weinberg, the abusive stepfather in the recent “Karate Kid” reboot, “Cobra Kai.”

Asner was interviewed as part of the Yiddish Book Center's Wexler Oral History Project. In an excerpt from the interview, he described his harrowing first performance -- his Bar Mitzvah, where he was criticized by his father and his uncle. Having failed his first performance, he became determined to be an actor.

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