These female rabbis have thoughts on how their profession - and Jewish culture - is portrayed on ‘Nobody Wants This’

While it’s nothing new for Netflix to capture the zeitgeist with an original series, the vibe of “Nobody Wants This” – a sweet and firmly hipster Los Angeles-based rom-com – is far from the genre trappings of spooky titles like “Squid Game” and “Stranger Things.”

While it’s nothing new for Netflix to capture the zeitgeist with an original series, the vibe of “Nobody Wants This” – a sweet and firmly hipster Los Angeles-based rom-com – is far from the genre trappings of spooky titles like “Squid Game” and “Stranger Things.” The discourse around this hit series, starring Adam Brody and Kristen Bell as a new couple navigating friends, family and religion, has been swift and ubiquitous though, with people sharing their perspectives on the show’s depictions of Jewish women, conversion and “shiksas.” A brief catchup, in case you somehow have missed the (currently) no. 1 show on the streamer (which also just this week was confirmed to be getting a second season) – Bell plays Joanne, a sex-forward podcaster of no particular religious affiliation who falls for Brody’s Noah, a “hot rabbi” (the show’s words) who is a major figure at his progressive congregation and comes from something of a traditional Jewish family. The pair’s undeniable chemistry soon causes friction in their respective circles, which include Joanne’s acerbic sister Morgan (Justine Lupe) and Noah’s brother Sasha (Timothy Simons), sister-in-law Esther (Jackie Tohn) – who is still besties with Noah’s heartbroken ex Rebecca – and mother Bina (Tovah Feldshuh). In the pilot episode, Joanne decides to visit Noah at his temple, where he is inundated with congregants who hound him with questions and requests to set him up their daughters now that he is no longer dating Rebecca. The very last moment sees various onlookers at the synagogue – including veteran actor Feldshuh – looking agog as Noah greets Joanne warmly. When Esther asks Feldshuh’s Bina who her son is talking to, she simply replies, “A shiksa” (a somewhat derogatory term for a non-Jewish woman, especially in a relationship with a Jewish partner), which closes the show. That moment, along with others, prompted reaction about how certain Jewish themes and tropes were handled in the series. For Rabbi Amanda Greene, a senior rabbi at the reform Chicago Sinai congregation in Chicago, some of it – even the parts that may have seemed somewhat extreme – rang rather true. “There’s a word ‘yenta’ out there, right?” Greene said, laughing, during a recent interview with CNN. “Is that the best of who we are? Maybe not. But is that a reality of who some of us are? Maybe.”