Joshua Harmon’s title came to him on the heels of an awkward Yom Hashoah service in honor of Holocaust Memorial Day. It was Harmon’s sophomore year of college, and a group of students spoke about their grandparents’ experiences surviving the Holocaust. Harmon calls it “a depressingly unmoving service…it was strange and sterile and laden with clichés but lacking in genuine feeling. It scared me.” Shortly thereafter, the title Bad Jews came into his head.
It would take him eight years to circle back to the story of the play, a savage comedy about identity, family, and legacy. The night after their Holocaust survivor grandfather’s funeral, three cousins battle it out over an heirloom—a necklace of a chai, the Hebrew word and symbol for life—that saw their Poppy through a concentration camp and into his new life in the United States.
As for the title, Harmon admits that his grandmother has asked him if he could change it to Good Jews, to honor the attempts of each cousin to honor their grandfather in her or his own way. But Harmon’s sticking with the title he’s got: “It makes people uncomfortable, but I didn’t invent it. The title refers to a very particular generation.”
There’s one self-professed “Bad Jew” and a whole lot of bad behavior in his play. Harmon’s verbal brawl is both heartfelt and over-the-top, ridiculous in its extremity but grounded in the deepest beliefs of these very different twenty-somethings, each struggling to reflect and magnify the best of what they learned from one remarkable survivor.