(Scene from Netflix’s Nobody Wants This)
When the trailer arrived for Netflix’s series Nobody Wants This, I rolled my eyes. A rom-com about a so-called hot rabbi (Adam Brody) falling in love with a Gentile podcaster (Kristen Bell) with a potential monster mother-in-law (Tovah Feldshuh) had the potential to be a pernicious stereotypical mess. But, ever the cultural critic, I reminded myself—and my followers on social media—that one should never judge a show by its trailer. Media marketing campaigns aren’t known for capturing subtleties, and they often highlight the most conventionalized and thus recognizable aspects of a show. When the series dropped in late September, I found the first episode oddly compelling, albeit with some irksome moments, and I uncharacteristically binged the first season in a few days.
For this Jewish feminist, Nobody Wants This is a love-hate watch. Admirably, the male protagonist experiences the tug of war between love and work, a conflict more commonly assigned to women. None of us should underestimate such gender parity. And since the male lead’s line of work is rabbinical, the show’s branding and rebranding of Judaism for his non-Jewish love interest—as well as for viewers—is a significant narrative hook. Unfortunately, the rebranding of Judaism as fun and relevant, which might incentivize conversion and thus allow the “hot” rabbi to have it all, is continuously undercut by mean Jewish women. And therein lies the Jewish feminist rub. While there are rich possibilities here for interfaith, intercultural heterosexual romantic relationships, Nobody Wants This sets up Gentile and Jewish women as competitors for Jewish men. Ultimately, too much of the supposedly Jewish funny business in this show depends on anti-Jewish, anti-feminist catfights.
The Jewish women problem announces itself early in the first episode with Noah’s girlfriend, Rebecca (Emily Arlook). Determined to take relationship control after a multi-year courtship, she announces that it’s time for them to get married, that she found the engagement ring he had hidden, and that they need to plan the wedding. Unlike her Biblical matriarchal namesake, Rebecca’s attempts to manipulate her Jewish future do not come to fruition. Instead, Noah regretfully informs her that she’s not “the one” and, much to her surprise and heartbreak, he ends their relationship.
Soon he becomes smitten with Joanne, a podcaster focused on all things romantic and sexual. She is blonde, lithe, and sassy—and, of course, Gentile. Whether or not she is rebound material or his bashert (soul mate) is the driving force of the series. They meet at a party where rumor has it that a rabbi is in attendance. She assumes an out-of-shape, shaggy-bearded man is the rabbi, an assumption she confides to the fit, attractive, neatly-bearded Noah. When she sheepishly realizes that HE is the rabbi in question, her—and the viewers—stereotypical notions about rabbis and, by extension, Jewish men are upended.
In general, Noah is a breath of fresh anti-stereotypical air. After all, he is a “hot” rabbi—an oxymoron in the dominant cultural imagination. Despite being a rabbi, he is attractively funny, even and especially when he is countering profound ignorance about Judaism and soft antisemitism. When Joanne makes the sign of the cross in the synagogue, his comeback isn’t to become offended, but rather to simply say, “that isn’t us.” And when Noah hears a text from Morgan, Joanne’s sister and podcaster partner, that reads “he’s cuter than . . . expected” and “he doesn’t look that Jewish,” he does a rapid-fire discomforting bit calling out her antisemitism: “if I may inquire, what does Jewish look like to you? . . . Are you picturing a bigger nose or curlier hair? . . . Maybe we all look the same.” He then shifts tone, indicating that he’s “just kidding” and that he’s not offended. In another episode, he holds up a sheet with a hole in it as a gag to tease Morgan for invoking the persistent myth that observant Jews have sexual intercourse without full body contact. With his light, comedic touch, he performs the work of a kinder, gentler, hip branch of the Anti-Defamation League.
While Rabbi Noah counters ignorance with a light touch, he also deftly promotes Jewish positivity. One of the most romantic and assertively Jewish scenes in the series (and perhaps in contemporary media) occurs in a restaurant bar. Responding to Joanne’s regret that she didn’t get to experience Shabbat with him, Noah orchestrates a makeshift Shabbat. He explains the importance of doing Shabbat wherever you are and with those you “care about.” He then produces two candles. She lights them as he intones the Hebrew prayer associated with that weekly ritual act. After this impromptu candle lighting, they drink some red wine and he breaks a piece of bread in two and shares it with her. He omits the prayers over the wine and the bread (kiddush and hamotzi); three untranslated Hebrew prayers might have been pushing his luck with Joanne as well as non-Jewishly literate viewers.
In the Torah, Noah is identified as “blameless in his age,” and commentators have wondered whether that superlative might be a back-handed compliment: i.e., is Noah the best of men, or is he the best that his compromised generation can do and be? That question seems equally applicable to Noah in Nobody Wants This. At a Jewish camp, Noah introduces Joanne as his friend rather than his girlfriend because he knows that loving a “shiksa” (an offensive term for a Gentile woman and the original title of the show!) is not exactly a winning career move for a rabbi. He offers a seemingly sincere hip apology for this—that he was “sus” (slang for suspect) and again wins Joanne’s heart and, apparently, a lot of het female viewers.
However, when the head rabbi at his synagogue euphemistically tells Noah that he can’t eat crab if he’s to become the senior rabbi—with Joanne crudely positioned as the unkosher shellfish here—and suggests she convert, Noah pursues that path with Joanne. Without conversion, Noah will have to choose between love and work (a choice which mobilizes the drama and the angst of the season finale). Imagine instead that Noah had found the courage to tell the rabbi it might be “sus” to ask him to make that choice. Given that the Reform movement—after much debate—now embraces intermarried rabbinical students, Noah refusing to accept the conversion ultimatum would have been authentic and timely.
But my qualms about Noah pale in comparison to those I have about most, though not all, of the show’s Jewish women. Noah’s sister-in-law, Esther, is decidedly “not fun” and is portrayed as scarily aggressive and controlling (Jackie Tohn, who plays Esther, insists that she “feels proud to be on a show that even revolves around Judaism”). In sharp contrast to her Biblical namesake who arguably saved the Jewish people through intermarriage, Esther is antagonistic to outsiders, and remains allied with Rebecca, Noah’s ex.
Most troubling is Noah’s mother, Bina, brilliantly played by the legendary Tovah Feldshuh. Some might remember that Feldshuh was Golda Meir (mother of the Jewish nation) in Golda’s Balcony. She was also the mother in Kissing Jessica Stein who starts out as a meddling matchmaker during Yom Kippur services and is later transformed into a loving, albeit struggling, mother trying to ease her daughter’s queer coming out. When in that film, she subtly recognizes Jessica’s relationship with Helen and says almost inaudibly she’s “a very nice girl,” a quiet revolution in the depiction of the Jewish mother begins (to my mind, that revolution continues with the gradual complication of the initially loathsome and self-involved Shelly Pfefferman, the Jewish mother in Transparent). Given that trend, I had hoped that the trailer bit in which Bina whispers in Joanne’s ear that she’ll never marry her son would be a prelude to a similar transformation or complication. But those hopes are dashed as Bina is depicted as not only a monstrously stereotypical Jewish mother but also a bad, hypocritical Jew.
(Tovah Feldshuh in Nobody Wants This)
When Joanne goes to Noah’s house to meet his parents, she brings a charcuterie tray that includes prosciutto, a form of pork and therefore unkosher. Aghast, Joanne is also perplexed—she always thought prosciutto was beef (she’s not only Jewishly illiterate but also a profoundly challenged foodie). When she suggests that the tray can be salvaged if they eat around the taboo prosciutto, Bina is adamant that, since the prosciutto touched the other items, the whole tray must go into the garbage. However, Joanne later discovers Bina voraciously chowing down on the prosciutto in the kitchen. When it becomes obvious that the prosciutto has been eaten, Joanne covers for Bina, claiming that she was the one rummaging through the garbage like a “raccoon.” Here, Joanne has it both ways—she gets to play the Gentile savior of the pork-eating Jew while comparing that very same Jew to an animal. Viewers are led to believe that the power dynamics have now shifted between Jewish mother and Gentile girlfriend: Bina has gone from Mrs. Roklov to “my girl Bina” (the title of the episode). And by the end of the evening/episode, we think the war between Noah’s women has thawed. Bina indicates appreciation of Joanne and her sense of humor; like her son, she seems to think Joanne is fun. But when they are hugging goodbye, Bina goes in for the kill—this is the moment highlighted in the trailer when Bina whispers in Joanne’s ear that she has no chance with her son. Representational insult is added to injury if you take into account that Bina means “wisdom” in Hebrew. In Nobody Wants This, while Noah is represented as the best of his generation, the supposedly wise Jewish woman is cast as the absolute worst of hers.
There ARE some fleeting depictions of smart, inspiring Jewish women. Paradoxically, at the Jewish camp, a group of seemingly mean girls on the cusp of womanhood speak the truth about Noah’s “sus” introduction of Joanne, provide her with clarity about his disingenuousness, and talk back to him. Perhaps most interesting is Rabbi Shira, one of Noah’s colleagues who is also at the camp and recognizes that Joanne is hurting. She is kind, steady, and sassy. And she explains Shabbat so that Joanne not only understands it but can relate. This brief encounter is the set-up to Joanne regretting that she missed Shabbat and Noah’s makeshift ritual candle lighting in the bar. Apparently in Nobody Wants This, adolescence and rabbinical training exempt Jewish women from the representational morass of Jewish women hatred.
I’m hardly the only one troubled by the depictions of Jewish women in this series. Erin Foster, the show’s creator, has dismissed such criticism, saying “I think we need positive Jewish stories right now. I think it’s interesting when people focus on, ‘Oh, this is a stereotype of Jewish people,’ when you have a rabbi as the lead. A hot, cool, young rabbi who smokes weed.” And she shares that she is a convert, that the show is a “love letter” to her husband Simon, and that although she gets along well with her in-laws, “in a tv show, you have to have conflict.” According to her, Bina’s animosity to outsiders should be viewed as a byproduct of being a Jew who immigrated from the former Soviet Union. Although I always welcome the perspective of a show’s creator, I confess that some of this sounds more than a bit “sus” to me.
The show has already been greenlighted for a second season, and new creative talent is coming onboard. So there’s still hope that Tovah Feldshuh’s character might be complicated or even transformed. Until then, I’m going to honor my own ambivalence and acknowledge that many of us want some of this. I don’t want to cancel or boycott the show. I don’t want to deny my viewing pleasure or that of the rom-com crowd. And I don’t want the critical conversation about Jewish representation and its gender divide to be short circuited. In Talmudic fashion, I want the debate to be recorded and to continue.
