Nobody Wants This, a serialized Hallmark rom-com of a Netflix show, is what happens if you put Sex and the City, Annie Hall, early-aughts television and 2020s Instagram into a blender. Composed exclusively of familiar elements, the end result is something extremely now in its datedness.
The protagonist is Joanne (Kristen Bell), a poor man’s Carrie Bradshaw (a sex-and-relationships podcaster with a home more lavish than that job could plausibly support). She goes to a dinner party (meet-cute frowns on apps) and meets Noah (Adam Brody), who is a rabbi. A “Jewish rabbi” as some character puts it at some point, denomination unspecified (more on that later).
Noah is a Jew. A Jewish one. With a beard and everything. A kippah, sometimes, even. He is top-notch husband material—employed, ambitious, from a wealthy family, oh and a moral sort, a stand-up guy, a don’t-make-‘em-like-they-used-to who seems ready-made for the hygge, sweater weather coziness of this sort of narrative.
Joanne is a gentile. A Christmas-celebrating non-religious individual whose hair is blond. Naturally blond, according to a female rabbi who surfaces in what only feels like episode 10-million-and-12, and whose Talmudic expertise hopefully exceeds her ability to spot face-framing highlights.
The series title, Nobody Wants This, refers to the fact that the pair are not merely an unlikely couple but one whose very coupledom horrifies the wider world. At first, the obstacles come mainly from Joanne’s side. Should a dating podcaster really settle down, and with a rabbi? This is soon enough dealt with—sure, why shouldn’t she do this. In real life, one could imagine this playing out differently if, for example, the good ol’ question of Zionism entered the picture. (Her friends seem as though they might be against; the rabbi and his crowd, in favour.)
The bigger concerns are developed later, and are on his end. He can’t marry a gentile because…? Because this would hold him back from becoming head rabbi. Would it? On the show, it would. Because it would destroy his mother. Again, we take the show’s word for it, and I suppose not to dwell on the fact, and it is a fact, that if an equivalent man met an equivalent woman in real life, everyone would congratulate the two no-longer-that-young people for finding love and call it a day.
The show exists simultaneously in a hazy, nostalgic Then and the present day. Jews are identifiable on the show by brown hair (white people come in two varieties: brunette-and-Jewish and blond-and-‘shiksa’) and these big honking Star of David necklaces they all must wear, lest anyone forget which character belongs to which group. There are Capulets and Montagues. Such are the stakes.
And yet, there is an Asian-American lesbian best friend, sidekick, personal assistant, something or other. A slightly broader friend group with (seemingly) a Black gay man. Taylor Swift fandom is mentioned. Someone’s mother has a therapist named Isis who uses they/them pronouns. Podcaster is a viable profession, and people get from point A to point B via something called an Uber, not horse-and-buggy.
All of this is to say that it’s confusing to somehow also be in this all-white world where the only two possibilities are white-gentile and white-Jewish. We’re in the 2020s or thereabouts, and yet a man in his 40s (or are we pretending Rabbi Noah is in his 30s?) has a mother (played by Tovah Feldshuh) with the accent and demeanor of an old-world Jewish refugee from the 1940s. She’s supposed to be Russian, but I guess some part of Russia that the modern world didn’t touch, because she has no resemblance to any recentish Jewish arrivals to North America from the former Soviet Union I’ve ever encountered.
The hot cleric trope predates this series. Fleabag, which I have yet to see but very much want to, has a hot priest. Keeping Up Appearances, the 1990s Britcom I have watched ten trillion times on loop, has the “dishy vicar.” There was even a BBC 4 radio comedy in the late 1990s and early 2000s called The Attractive Young Rabbi, featuring a sexy lady rabbi (wild!) and, in a different role, the greatest Jewish actress of all time based solely on her role as surreal old lady Mrs. Warboys in One Foot in the Grave, Doreen Mantle. (I have not yet tracked this show down but fully intend to and will report back.)
Why is Rabbi Noah the “hot rabbi”? Partly because he’s played by Adam Brody—who is not the same person as Penn Badgley, I know, having Wikipedia’d it, having long conflated these actors who featured in some of my definitely very productive youth of not watching far too much television. This is a show where the characters are meant to look like the actors playing them. This is not the theatre. But also, he is a hot commodity, the proverbial hard-to-find good man. Everyone wants a piece of that.
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Most of what’s frustrating about the show has already been remarked upon by everyone who got to it first: It’s odd that a show in this day and age imagines a not-particularly-observant Jew having a non-Jewish partner would be a big deal, even if that Jew happens to be a rabbi. The show needs this to be a big deal, because a rom-com needs an obstacle. So it invents one, in the form of family and community (the women, that is; the men aren’t too bothered) getting into hysterics over the presence of a ‘shiksa’. It’s clear enough that this is a problem, the problem, but takes a minute to unpack why.
The Jews all appear to belong to a made-up hybrid denomination specifically invented for this show, in which intermarriage and trayf are verboten but otherwise everyone is somewhere on the liberal edge of Reform. The gentiles inhabit some strange version of Los Angeles where they work in media there yet are flabbergasted with new knowledge when confronted with the exotic word shalom.
The series poses a conundrum: Can a show whose creator is a Jewish woman stand accused of setting things back 30 (or 60) years for Jewish womankind? Erin Foster, the show’s creator, is a Jew by choice. She also created a show whose original title was Shiksa, and whose self-conception, fictionalized and otherwise, is thus. Joanne, the Foster-inspired protagonist, has not converted to Judaism in any of the 10 initial episodes. If this is an #OwnVoices depiction of Jewish women, it hinges on a technicality that—however relevant in some contexts—couldn’t matter less in this one.
The Jewish women characters are portrayed as grotesque harpies dead-set on snagging the only eligible Jewish man in all of Los Angeles, as well as confusing and… just confusing that Los Angeles would have only one compelling Jewish man. Or maybe not all that strange if you look at the bigger context.
The show is very much about there being One Good Man, with all the scarcity-panic this implies. Straight women all battling over the one viable straight man, it’s both passé (so heteronormative) and somehow extremely of-the-moment (men lagging behind, something something Richard V. Reeves). Rabbi Noah is hot because he is the bachelor. The one. The only eligible straight man on the planet.
The Jewish women are distraught not because they have a principled stance against intermarriage but for reasons akin to the ones some Black women have for being less than enthused about Black men dating white women. But Black women—and Asian men, for that matter—have demographics backing up any perception that they’re getting the short shrift. This isn’t the case for Jewish women, who these days are about as likely to marry out as are Jewish men.
But the rates for Jewish men used to be much higher, and the trope of Jewish women wailing that ‘shiksas’ are taking all the good men has alas outlived on-the-ground realities. It still feels plausible that Jewish women are all waiting by the phone (landline; very possibly rotary) waiting for the phone to ring, but Mr. Dreamboatstein is out with a woman whose hair doesn’t even frizz. It is possible for me to know the statistics, and to know from my own lived experience as a heterosexual Jewish woman that the pathos isn’t real life, and still to feel the weight of all those tropes.
One wonders whether any of these fictional Jewish women hurling themselves at Rabbi Noah, or being hurled at him by their Jewish mothahs, have ever heard of non-Jewish men (not that they much exist in the show’s universe), or for that matter of Jewish men other than Noah.
One wonders this most of all about Noah’s crazy ex-girlfriend Rebecca (not to be confused with Crazy Ex-Girlfriend protagonist Rebecca), played by Emily Arlook, who is ten years Bell’s junior and looks like every girl at Hebrew school the boys I would like would have a crush on instead. Why would this woman—or any woman—dig into her boyfriend’s drawer, locate an engagement ring he had bought with her in mind, and just start wearing it? I know this detail is meant to make her look terrible, but a part of me like her for this. Why should the marriage timeline be set by men, anyway? Good on her for not playing along with an outdated script. She’d be the only one on the show not doing so.
The show presents Jewish women’s fascination with Rabbi Noah not as a principled pro-endogamy stance, not a religious thing or a continuity concern, but as of a piece with The Jewess’s lack of sexual interest and curiosity. She just wants to be a good, pampered housewife, and doesn’t want her hair mussed from any of that. The ‘JAP,’ in other words, in the sense of Jewish American Princess.
This is a post-vibe-shift show, unconcerned with the fact that concepts like ‘JAP’ and ‘shiksa’ are (insert hectoring voice) very problematic, you know. I might just be nostalgic for the era when this would have been a concern, not because hyperwoke makes for good art, but because it can at push creators towards new ideas. Geeky Jew meets breath-of-fresh-air blonde, it has been done, and done better.
The show is set in the 2020s or thereabouts but exists in a universe where not only did Broad City never happen but neither did The Nanny. Or Crazy Ex-Girlfriend or or or. One that wouldn’t know what to make of a Natalie Portman (a brunette Kristen Bell) let alone a Gal Gadot.
Here is where I am obliged to mention that after I typed the previous sentence, I learned that a man that I know—know well, and I will leave it at that—was prompted by watching an episode of Nobody Wants This to have a dream about Natalie Portman. Clearly the “shiksa”-or-not dividing line isn’t the one reigning supreme in everyone’s subconscious.
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I am not offended, exactly. More like, confused: Why does the show depict interfaith relations in a way that seems out of a Woody Allen movie, that recalls George Costanza meeting Susan’s parents, or Meet the Parents?
The answer, I think, lies in the question: because that’s what intermarriage in the culture is. Curb Your Enthusiasm gave barely-fictional Larry David a blonde, gentile wife (played by Cheryl Hines), a choice made for who knows which reasons, but the end result is a vibe in keeping with American Jewish comedic tradition. After they split, on the show, Larry finds himself stuck (for complicated plot reasons) with an overbearing, same-age Jewish girlfriend named Irma (Tracey Ullman) and a Judeo-curious but very blonde-and-gentile Sienna Miller, playing a fictionalized version of herself.
The script—not of Curb, but on a meta level—assumes a Jewish man and a gentile woman (never the reverse) and each partner bringing a specific set of qualities and anxieties to the relationship. She’s a bit of a ditz, he’s a bit of a nerd. The nebbish-meets-airhead template is the romantic comedy. It’s When Harry Met Sally (unstated but we know), it’s Knocked Up, it’s countless lesser-known examples.
The rich history of ‘shiksa’-plot narratives gives a boost to Nobody Wants This. The viewer not only feels as if they’ve met these characters before (a plus, given how thinly-developed they are), but met them in a really good movie, a memorable one by a major artist. The happenstance fact that the show’s creator used personal experience marrying into a Jewish family as inspiration winds up adding a heft to that which is not otherwise particularly hefty.
When Jewish women and gentile men get together onscreen, it’s either not a whole thing, or offered as a sign that the man in question has sophisticated tastes. (Frasier Crane and Dr. House both fall for characters played by Lisa Edelstein—and who could blame them?)
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The twist with Nobody Wants This that unlike Philip Roth’s Portnoy and Woody Allen’s Alvy and Larry David’s George/Larry and and and, in this case, we’re getting the perspective of the gentile love interest of a Jewish man, rather than that of the man. The ‘shiksa’s’ eye view, as it were. A perspective better expressed—at a time when the concept itself had more relevance, and by someone quite a bit funnier—in Bonjour Chai guest Meghan Daum’s essay “American Shiksa,” which appeared in GQ in 1996 and in Daum’s 2001 essay collection, My Misspent Youth. The “shiksappeal” Seinfeld aired in 1997. By 2005, such narratives were around but already waning.
Is the ‘shiksa’ relevant in 2024? Did we—we Jews, that is—not just spend a solid year hearing how very very white we are, and reading social media posts where blonde IDF soldiers were held up—held up by antizionists, that is— as examples of this fact?
What comes across is the way Joanne’s sense of her own desirability mixes with a fear of not being enough. She seems almost envious of Jewish women, both because they get to be Jewish (where, as we’ve established, the show creator herself winded up) and because they’re a girl gang who won’t have her.
There’s this part where Joanne is telling Noah that she has thought about what hair type his Jewish ex-girlfriend must have, her thick hair, and she’s sort of apologizing to Noah for having thin hair, but then specifying that she doesn’t mean thin as in balding, but that she has fine hair. A part of me heard that and had I suppose thoughts not dissimilar to those of the proverbial Black woman hearing a white woman expressing envy at her locks. Another part of me was like, yes, she very well might envy us our natural volume.
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Can a Jew marry a non-Jew or nah? Napoleon asked this of the Sanhedrin more than 200 years ago. What began as a largely theoretical question—Jews lived in separate communities, Christians didn’t want to marry Jews any more than Jews did them, etc.—evolved, over the centuries that followed, into a more everyday concern. For a good long while, Jews and non-Jews could get married, and without either converting in locales with civil marriage, but this fact served primarily as inspiration for playwrights and politicians contemplating Jewish difference in the abstract.
The first to pose the Jewish intermarriage question in demographic terms may well have been antisemites like Napoleon (please don’t sue me for libel, Napoleon), whose sincerest hope was that the Jews would marry out into oblivion. He thought he could make a law to that effect, ignoring the aforementioned impossibility of more than a handful of such couples forming to begin with. It was really only much later—the end of the nineteenth century up until those 1930s-ish events we know so well—that antisemites soured on exogamy as an answer to what was, they felt, the Jewish problem.
But the Napoleon forced-assimilation strain never entirely left antisemitism. Whenever you hear complaints that those Jews are just too insular, you are, in a sense, in the realm of that legacy.
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The CJN’s senior editor Phoebe Maltz Bovy can be reached at [email protected], not to mention @phoebebovy on Bluesky, and @bovymaltz on X. She is also on The CJN’s weekly podcast Bonjour Chai.
