Alex Edelman’s column on the “Just For Us” special

Until this year, I was worried about Just for us‘ opportunity.

Just for usif you haven’t seen it, is a comedy about a Jewish guy—me—who attends a white nationalist gathering in Queens. Eventually, they got it. The show has had a long and blessed life, making its way through the world of English-language comedy, finding a nice home on Broadway last summer before landing on Max this past April. However, when it debuted in 2018, I was just a few months away from the gathering on which it was based, and I was trawling it through comedy venues in Britain and Australia. Small theaters, pubs above a shoe store, anywhere I could fit in.

And accompanied by the (faint!) praise was the word “timely.”

Remember 2018? Those Thai kids had to be rescued from that cave and Meghan and Harry got married. There was also the recent Charlottesville shooting and the Tree of Life, so “topical” made sense. A pretty timeless topic, though. A comedy show even vaguely related to anti-Semitism would be relevant in 2018, but it would also be relevant in, say, the 1960s. Or the 1940s. Or the 1490s. Every time someone offered the word “topical” as a descriptor or compliment after the show, I had to somehow restrain myself from rolling my eyes.

But when the show first aired in the US, it was a different story. It was December 2021. I had wasted most of 2019 writing about a Netflix series I hadn’t watched in a flash, and I had spent the 18 months leading up to our New York premiere in lockdown, learning about sourdough. At that point? Speed ​​was an issue.

“What if this is a time capsule? What if the attitude seems outdated?” I asked my director, Adam Brace, two days before our first preview. In the show, as in the real-life event it was based on, I didn’t do much to challenge white nationalists: I thought I had very little chance of convincing them, and I was also curious and a little scared. So I mostly listened. I worried that, in a world where the political atmosphere seemed much more tense, a comedy about someone quietly eating a muffin in the presence of truly regressive and prejudiced views might seem quaint (at best!) or offensive (at worst!).

“I think we’ll be fine,” Adam said, sipping a beer. We both were, to be honest. “Everyone is now in rooms with people who think their opinions are offensive. Sometimes those people are their family members.” He was right, and in the conversations we had with the audience—what they responded to during the show and in the late-night conversations in the lobby afterward—we discovered something interesting. People were interested in the topics we were talking about around our proverbial water cooler (still on Twitter, sort of) but they were more interested in how we talked to each other. The compliment “timely” was replaced by “empathetic.” At one of our last live shows in March, someone asked…