It’s been two years since Joshua Harmon’s three-hour drama Prayer for the French Republic premiered Off Broadway, but the issues it raises about the plight of modern Jews in a world that seems stubbornly hostile to them is arguably even more timely. Director David Comer’s production, which opened Tuesday at Broadway’s Samuel J. Friedman Theatre with its four critical female roles all intact, delves into capital-letter issues about the legacy of antisemitism, the threat of violence and the responsibilities of individuals amid no-good-choice questions about measuring the severity of a situation.

Harmon focuses on a single family that encapsulates the evolution and accommodations of Jews in France, where the family has lived, more or less, for centuries — mostly operating a piano store that is now on its last legs. Betsy Aidem plays Marcelle, a psychiatrist married to an Algerian physician (Nael Nacer) who was raised with her brother (ER alum Anthony Edwards) unreligious, with a Catholic mother, but now keeps shabbat and other traditions in part to accommodate her more observant grown son, Daniel (Aria Shahghasemi), and her daughter, Elodie (Francis Benhamou), a depressive curmudgeon still living at home in her late 20s.

In flashbacks unfolding on Takeshi Kata’s turnstile set, we also meet Marcelle and brother Patrick’s grandparents (Nancy Robinette and Daniel Oreskes), an elderly couple who managed to remain in Paris during the Nazi occupation in the 1940s and who toward the end of the war welcome their son Lucien (Ari Brand) and grandson Pierre (Ethan Haberfield), who will grow up to be Marcelle and Patrick’s father. It’s an emotionally fraught homecoming — with certain details, like the absence of Pierre’s wife and their three daughters, strictly off limits for discussion.

But these 1940s scenes also foreshadow the questions that have surfaced for Marcelle and her family, triggered when a yarmulke-wearing Daniel is beaten up in the streets of Paris — just a year after the slaughter of four shoppers at a kosher grocery in the city and other alarming acts of antisemitic violence. Is Paris still safe for the family? Or, as Charles suggests, would they be better off pulling up stakes (as Lucien’s siblings did when Naziism was on the rise) and moving away, this time to Israel — where at least there would be a day-to-day acceptance of their Jewish identities? Family members debate the issue from just about every side in ways that will seem familiar to watchers of cable news over the last several months.

It helps that Harmon has created some straw people for some of the arguments, including a mostly naive distant American cousin, Molly (Molly Ranson), a college student on her junior year abroad whose chief function seems to be to provide the sort of Americanized anti-Israel arguments about “settlements, and human rights violations, and uhm, I’m not sure what the word is in French, maybe it’s the same– apartheid?” But Molly is not as two-dimensional as she might seem, and her budding relationship with Daniel (and political discussions with the maddeningly domineering Elodie) reveal an openness to change that you would not expect at first.

My main quibble is with Edwards’s Patrick, who serves as a mostly unnecessary narrator — and who unfortunately bears a too-close physical and vocal resemblance to Nacer’s Charles. Patrick is another straw man in Harmon’s schema, bristling at his sister’s re-embrace of her Jewish faith traditions and making an unconvincing case for complete assimilation into the dominant French society (an idea represented by the show’s title, referring to an actual patriotic prayer recited in French synagogues since the early 19th century).

Harmon is on more secure ground with other members of the family. His great gift is also his ability to inject their conversation with humor and wit that make the three-hour running time fly by. (You can argue, of course, that his dialogue owes more to New York Jewish traditions than to French, but why quibble?) His female characters are particularly well drawn, aided by performances — especially by Aidem and Robinette — that strike at the heart of this family’s fight-or-flight dilemma. If protecting the family is the primary goal, how can you tell when you’ve reached a tipping point where staying in place is no longer advisable? The late appearance of Marcelle and Patrick’s father, played by the legendary Richard Masur as an elder (in the best sense of that word) statesman, crystallizes a lot of the issues that Harmon has developed on both a broad and small scale. Prayer for the French Republic combines the virtues of family drama, history lesson and the spark of the best Sunday-morning political panel shows.