'Nobody Wants This' Is About Beating the Jews
The Netflix show isn't anti-Semitic, but it certainly doesn't care about Judaism despite the central conflict.
[Spoilers ahead for Nobody Wants This]
My wife and I are in an interfaith marriage. I was raised Jewish, and she was raised Christian. When we started dating, our different faith backgrounds and thinking about our future was a major issue and something we had to work through envisioning what we would want our wedding, our marriage, and, if we had kids, their upbringing to look like. These are difficult questions, and I can see that a story about navigating those differences is worth interrogating, even if it’s in the guise of a romantic comedy.
But for the new Netflix hit series, Nobody Wants This, the story of an agnostic woman falling for a rabbi, questions of faith or religion aren’t worth asking. I wouldn’t mind if Nobody Wants This were irreverent towards Judaism—but far worse, it’s indifferent.
Last month, I wrote about how I decided to bail on the show after a few episodes because it didn’t seem worth continuing, but curiosity got the better of me. I needed to know how the show would attempt to resolve this conflict, assuming it ever gave it any serious consideration. After all, creator and showrunner Erin Foster based the show on her life. Like Foster, Kristen Bell’s character Joanne is a podcaster with her sister. Foster fell in love with a Jewish man and ultimately converted to Judaism before they married.
I don’t know what the pitch for the show was, but there appeared to be the thinking that, “Well, an agnostic marrying a random Jewish guy isn’t interesting enough. What’s the most Jewish a person can be? Rabbi!” Which is fine. I don’t mind that Adam Brody’s character, Noah, is a rabbi in Reform Judaism. But if that’s the direction you want to go, then the story needs to address that the massive gulf between an agnostic and a rabbi raises real questions of belief and change.
Nobody Wants This chose a different direction.
Within the bounds of Nobody Wants This, Judaism is not a rich faith tradition or the story of a people over 5,000 years or what it means to have a covenant with God. In Nobody Wants This, Jews are a clique, and it’s up to Joanne to show repressed, humorless Jewish women that they are not going to keep her away because she’s too cool and too confident. She may have moments of doubt, but her growth doesn’t come from engaging with Judaism; instead, it comes from realizing that she doesn’t have to run away after finding a nice, normal guy. Joanne’s story in Nobody Wants This is not about learning about Judaism from Noah (he shows her Shabbat and Havdalah, and that’s in between bouts of trying to hide her because Joanne being a gentile threatens his chance of being promoted to the head rabbi at the synagogue). Her story is about how she can “win” by plowing past her doubters (i.e., Jewish women) and getting the guy.
I’m not the most observant Jewish guy in the world. But I was raised Jewish, I had a bar mitzvah, and I think that Jews are as worthy of respect as any other people. It feels cheap and dismissive to reduce Judaism—or at least the Judaism that a practicing Reform rabbi would have to observe—to nothing more than a niche. The show has no interest in how Noah feels about a woman who doesn’t share his faith. Noah’s Judaism, despite being a rabbi, matters as much to his interests as his recreational basketball league. Nobody Wants This is indifferent about Judaism as a religion, and the biggest problem for Noah isn’t that Joanne may not believe in God; it’s that Noah’s career advancement could be in jeopardy. At that point, you may as well say Joanne is from the big city, and Noah is a hot farmer, and he’s not sure how his community will feel if he marries someone who thinks farming is a cute hobby but one that doesn’t move her one way or the other. In an attempt to make the story more universal—how can people from two different worlds find love—they’ve removed any details that would define those worlds in any meaningful way.
I find this surprising because Foster converted to Judaism, and that’s an intensive process. Perhaps this is something they’re holding back on for a second season (because streaming shows love nothing more than dragging out stories to keep you on the platform; as I said in my previous article, Nobody Wants This should probably just be a 100-minute rom-com), but Joanne’s triumph isn’t defined by realizing that she loves Noah so much that she will study Judaism and convert for him. Her triumph is defined by dominating spaces where the Jewish women in Noah’s life do not want her.
This reaches its disgusting, self-aggrandizing apex in the season finale. Noah’s niece Miriam (Shiloh Bearman) just had her bat mitzvah, and now she’s having her party.1 Joanne and her sister Morgan (Justine Lupe) stride into the party (to which they were not invited, nor did they attend the preceding service because religion, yuck, no fun) as if they are the heroes here. This is not played as two oblivious women centering themselves at a party being held for a teenager. It is played as a victory lap where Joanne and Morgan are finally bringing their big personalities to these staid, un-fun Jews. The shikshas are now here. You’re welcome, Jews.
Nobody Wants This is another reminder that it’s not enough to simply tell diverse stories; it’s important who tells your story. For a woman in an interfaith relationship, Foster apparently had little interest in questions of faith, which makes Judaism small and no match for a story of one lady learning she deserves to be with a nice guy. Given Netflix’s major platform and the show’s success, it worries me how many people might come away from Nobody Wants This thinking that Judaism isn’t a big deal or that interfaith relationships ask nothing more of its participants than being true to yourself, whatever that means.
This is a minor thing, but her party appears to be in the middle of the afternoon. I went to a lot of bar and bat mitzvahs when I was in middle school, and the party was always at night because everyone needed a breather between the ceremony and the celebration. You don’t go right from the kiddush meal to a big party. I don’t know. Maybe they do things differently in L.A.