This episode depicts Brad's Bar Mitzvah--the Jewish coming of age observance during which a thirteen-year-old boy reads the Torah and speaks in front of his community (the same observance for a girl is called a Bat Mitzvah, "bat" meaning daughter and "bar" meaning "son"). In a 2022 interview with Lior Zaltzman for Kveller Magazine, Julian Lerner (Brad Hitman) said that he was supposed to observe his own Bar Mitzvah on a family trip to Israel, but that had to be canceled because of the COVID pandemic. So he considered that in a way, the process of filming Brad's Bar Mitzvah for this episode also served as his own Bar Mitzvah: "It was great to kind of have one. There were cameras and stuff, it was a little different. But it was great."
This episode echoes an episode of the original Wonder Years series, "Birthday Boy" (season 2, episode 13), in which Kevin attends his friend Paul's Bar Mitzvah. Fred Savage, who played Kevin in the original series, directed this episode of the reboot.