{"id":838,"date":"2014-11-14T15:09:08","date_gmt":"2014-11-14T20:09:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/id-demos.cms-devl.bu.edu\/responsive-framework\/?p=838"},"modified":"2014-11-17T09:20:52","modified_gmt":"2014-11-17T14:20:52","slug":"for-a-good-time-try-hanging-with-bad-jews-at-speakeasy-stage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/id-demos.cms-devl.bu.edu\/responsive-framework\/for-a-good-time-try-hanging-with-bad-jews-at-speakeasy-stage\/","title":{"rendered":"For A Good Time, Try Hanging With \u2018Bad Jews\u2019 \u2014 At SpeakEasy Stage"},"content":{"rendered":"

BOSTON \u2014 As play titles go, they don\u2019t come more loaded than \u201cBad Jews.\u201d Fear not, though. \u201cBad Jews\u201d is not an attack on anyone; it\u2019s more a Rorschach test that calls out not to anti-Semites but to members of the Jewish community themselves.<\/p>\n

To me, for example, a bad Jew is someone outside of the Klinghoffer family who tried to shut down John Adams\u2019 \u201cThe Death of Klinghoffer\u201d<\/a> at the Metropolitan Opera this week, as such censoring of the arts is totally out of keeping with the tradition of open dialogue and artistic freedom. To them, that makes me a self-hater, ready to apologize for Palestinian terrorists, hence a bad Jew.<\/p>\n

This is more or less the terrain of Joshua Harmon\u2019s <\/a>excellent one-act play, \u201cBad Jews,\u201d in a charged SpeakEasy Stage Company<\/a> production at the Boston Center for the Arts (through Nov. 29). Harmon gives Jews a chance to think about these questions and even laugh \u2014 uproariously at times \u2014 about how they\u2019re asked. (But not answered. Harmon doesn\u2019t pretend to have the answer.)<\/p>\n

Not that the play is only an internal dialogue any more than James Joyce\u2019s \u201cThe Dead,\u201d Amy Tan\u2019s \u201cThe Joy Luck Club\u201d or Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie\u2019s \u201cAmericanah\u201d are. The question of assimilation vs. ethnocentrism is a universal one, and one that each individual has to answer for him or herself.<\/p>\n

The problem is that many people try to answer it for everyone else. Which often leads to fierce arguments within the community \u2014 and, in this case, great hilarity onstage. There is also the matter of the Holocaust in this case. Is the \u201cnever again\u201d legacy a rallying call for Jews, as one of the characters in the play would have it? Or a cry that no one anywhere should have to endure ethnic cleansing, or even hatred, again? Alan Wolfe calls it the particularists, who lean right, vs. the universalists, who lean left, in his new book, \u201cAt Home in Exile.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

\"Daphna<\/p>\n