Mark Oppen­heimer is the for­mer Beliefs colum­nist for The New York Times and the author of The Bar Mitz­vah Crash­er: Road-Trip­ping Through Jew­ish Amer­i­ca. He has a Ph.D. in Amer­i­can reli­gion from Yale and lives in New Haven, Con­necti­cut, with his wife and five children.