There is something slightly tone-deaf in this script. The heroine--who is generally portrayed as intelligent and sensible--sits with her devout Jewish mother-in-law and says this: "I'm enjoying getting to know the Old Testament. It's like I knew the main story--the Gospels--and now I'm reading the prequel." This sort of astoundingly foolish remark is met with a stinging reply: "Take your online conversion classes or don't. I feel like I've had a beautiful ceramic flower pot--it was given by one ancestor to another, to another, to my grandmother, to my mother, to me. And now I'm tossing it to a stranger--who has taken half of one on-line intro course with regard to gardening." I'm not quick to dismiss misanthropic writing. I do not demand that central characters in any work should seem "relatable." But I do require consistency. The brittleness of the characters in "Bad Shabbos" comes and goes. Sometimes, it seems we...