Am I a bad Jew for giving my play an 'offensive' title? - The Jewish Chronicle

Of all the posters advertising plays, there is one that sticks out more than any other. It's a picture of two young men and a woman beating the hell out of each other. Above them, in bold, unmissable lettering is the play's title: "Bad Jews".

"Nobody suggested I change it," says 31-year-old New York playwright Joshua Harmon. "But I was afraid they were going to. I know that the title offends some people. I've had hate mail." There is an irony here. If we assume that the people who sent those letters are Jews who find the title offensive, then they are also among the people most likely to enjoy Harmon's play. Set in a desirable New York apartment overlooking the Hudson River, Harmon's comedy is populated by a family who have come together for the funeral of Poppy, their grandfather, a Holocaust survivor. The main conflict is between cousins Liam (Ilan Goodman) and Daphna, played by Jenny Augen who has picked up an award for her performance during the play's UK premiere at the Ustinov Theatre in Bath last year.

Liam and Daphna are both Jewish of course, but Liam is your utterly secular, completely assimilated, has-a-WASP-girlfriend kind of Jew; or as Liam himself puts it, a "bad Jew"; Daphna, meanwhile, intends to make aliyah and join the Israeli army, and is much more Jewish than Liam. "She is the kind of person who when she steps into a room everyone knows she is Jewish. Everyone." says Harmon of his heroine.

The cousins' opposing attitudes to their Jewishness would probably be enough to create tension in the play. But, to this, Harmon adds their grandfather's chai and the question of who inherits the symbolic pice of jewellery. Hostilities between Daphna and Liam break out, with Liam's younger brother Jonah (Joe Cohen) and his WASP girlfriend Melody (Gina Bramhill) among the serious casualties. But it's Daphna and her barbed tongue who is the most terrifying of the combatants. Her sheer wit has marked Harmon out as a playwright who can write the kind of impact dialogue that can give you whiplash.

Melody is first to encounter it. She might have been an opera singer if she hadn't found auditions such a trial, so to remind herself of her love of music she has a treble clef tattoo. Daphna isn't impressed.

"Did you think you'd forget? Because you have your name, right?" Later she tells poor Melody that Poppy also had a tattoo. "But that was different."

The seed for the play - Harmon's first - was planted at a Yom HaShoah service. "I had been to Holocaust Memorial Day services when I was younger and there had always been a survivor present," says Harmon. "But in this particular service the theme was the grandchildren of survivors. So instead of an eyewitness it featured my contemporaries - students at my school. They were my age, they dressed and sounded like me and I found that whole experience quite unmoving which really frightened me. It was the first time I started to grapple with the idea that, in my lifetime, the responsibility for talking about this event is going to fall on people who did not bear witness."

That is a big theme upon which to hang a comedy, although Harmon describes his play as more a "drama with a sense of humour." In New York, "where there is a familiarity and comfort with talking about being Jewish," they laughed a lot. In Bath "where my sense is there wasn't a huge Jewish community, I think the play still spoke to the audience."

There was a time when Harmon thought that interest in his play about Jews would be limited to Jews, and possibly to only one Jew - himself.

"But the lesson I learned is that writing plays where you think you're the only one who would be interested is the best and right impulse for a writer." Though he was raised in a "Conservative Jewish" environment, he won't be drawn on how bad a Jew he turned out to be.

"It's better to keep myself out of it. It's my hope that the play gives voice to both kinds of Jew, so that the Liams of this world hear what Daphna has to say, and the Daphna's of this world hear what the Liams say." In other words, it is Harmon's hope that the play works for all Jews, bad and good.