The ceremony was a surprise to everyone, especially to the guest of honor. Ron Eliran, the Israeli “Ambassador of Song,” was getting the bar mitzvah that he never had.

He was 90 years old.

The place was a Midtown steakhouse. The Christmas wreath on the wall signaled holiday cheer.

The rabbi was a radio personality.

“I’ve never done a surprise bar mitzvah,” said the rabbi, Joseph Potasnik, one of the hosts on “The Rev and the Rabbi” on WABC radio and executive vice president of the New York Board of Rabbis. He once did a bar mitzvah for an 83-year-old, he said. But 90, never.

The back story was this:

Mr. Eliran, who is a much-traveled singer and bearer of an admirable head of hair, grew up in what was then the British Mandate for Palestine, outside the city of Haifa. As his 13th birthday approached, in 1947, his parents did what parents do.

“They bought the food, they invited like 75 people,” Mr. Eliran’s younger brother, Josh, said. “And then on the day of the bar mitzvah, the British declared a curfew. No one could go out. So we never had a bar mitzvah.”

ImageThe Scripture reading came as a surprise, but according to Rabbi Joseph Potasnik, Mr. Eliran’s Hebrew was “impeccable.”Credit...James Estrin/The New York Times

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In October, he is releasing a new book, “Revenge of The Tipping Point.” Mr. Gladwell feels that “The Tipping Point” became wildly popular because it matched the optimism of the late 1990s; it mapped how to create positive change at a moment of positive potential, with the Cold War over and crime declining. (The book promoted the “broken windows” theory of policing, which suggested that the way to prevent major crimes was to strictly police petty ones, a notion that gave rise to policing practices now viewed by many as discriminatory.)

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