Nobody Wants This — My Take

Nobody Wants This

One of the smash hits on Netflix this year is a Rom-Com called Nobody Wants This. It is the story of a good-looking Rabbi who falls in love with an even better-looking non-Jewish woman.

Let me begin by saying it is a feel good, charming story of the love between these two. You can’t help but feel the growing love between them even as they try to navigate the great divide that exists. The dialogue is witty, the Jewish scenes have some degree of authenticity for what I believe is a centrist Reform synagogue and community. Kirstin Bell is wonderful as the “shiksa” (I use the term only because they do in the show. As I will soon show it is an archetype.) and Adam Brody is the handsome sensitive Rabbi. I even identified with a lot of his experiences, the handsome and sensitive part for sure but all the mothers trying to fix him up truly reminded me of a time in the pulpit after my divorce when I was 20 pounds lighter and everyone who knew a single Jewish woman was trying to fix me up. Cheryl, my wife and the winner of “who will marry the Rabbi lottery” still tells everyone how I was the most eligible bachelor in Broward county.

We have a family Whats App group. Of those who participated in the conversation, my kids and grandchildren all loved it and in fact binged it over a weekend. Some wondered what I would think about it and one grandson wrote.” Zadie is definitely gonna (sic) hate it”.

Well Zaydie didn’t hate it, but it did leave me disappointed and disturbed. Most commentators have talked about the negative stereotyping of the Jewish women, so I don’t need to go there, but my disturbance came from something else. First some background.

Jewish boy with immigrant or traditional parents meets beautiful blond non-Jew who you want to dislike but can’t because she is so cute and sensitive and loving, is a very old movie genre. In fact, the first talkie movie was the Jazz Singer about the Cantor’s son whose father wants him to carry on the Cantorial family tradition but he wants to be a jazz singer and he falls in love with the sensitive and loving non-Jew.

Abie’s Irish Rose preceded the Jazz Singer as a play in 1922 and was a movie in 1946. In 1972 it morphed into a tv series called Bridget Loves Bernie with David Birney playing Bernie Steinberg and Meredith Baxter playing Bridget Fitzgerald. (I am leaving out Keeping the Faith, with Ben Stiller and Jenna Elfman because the story arc is different and I don’t want to leave spoilers for those who have yet to see “Nobody Wants This”) So there is nothing new in this series. It is a rom-com wrapped around a Jewish man meets a non-Jewish woman genre. But it left me with one question which I don’t know if anyone else has asked.

Why was the Jewish man a Rabbi?

In most of the examples certainly of the older incarnations the man was not a Rabbi. Even in the Jazz Singer the protagonist was a Jew trying to get away from the familial clergy cantorial tradition. So why a Rabbi here?

It haunted me for a few days and then it came to me. In today’s world the dramatic tension that underlies the romance would not work if it was a typical Jewish man. In a world that over half the Jewish marriages are between a Jew and a non-Jewish woman who would care? Everyone has made their peace with intermarriage. I often don’t hear about the intermarriage of the many kids that grew up in my shule. If it comes up I usually get some version of, “ Rabbi she is not Jewish but except for that she is wonderful and I have never seen my son so happy”. And I understand where that is coming from.

The idea that parents have some say in whom their children marry seems like something from a prehistoric time. We want happiness in our lives and surely in the lives of our kids. The protagonist in the series had to be a Rabbi because find me a family today that doesn’t have someone intermarried. The battle to stop that has been lost.

In fact, the acceptance level has gone so far in the opposite direction that the Reconstructionist movement and now the Reform movement will ordain Rabbis who are in a committed relationship of marriage with a non-Jewish partner. There is a quiet but simmering debate in the Conservative movement arguing for Rabbis to officiate at mixed marriages, and I understand that. If you are a Rabbi and your sibling or child is marrying a non-Jew, don’t you want to be there to share their joy? (I wanted to call it their simcha but I can’t get there, but I understand)

Even the Rabbi in the series has a conflict about his situation but it is not what you might expect. He is up for a promotion in his synagogue from assistant to senior Rabbi and the retiring Rabbi tells him that he will be the chosen one he does not eat pork or shellfish and does not marry a non-Jew. So this modern version requires the Jewish man to be a Rabbi, so as to have a dramatic conflict, but even here it is not about his deeply held religious values or the future of Jewish survival, it is about his desire to become head Rabbi of an affluent LA synagogue.

The series is disturbing to me because it really is an accurate window into the state of Jewish life in today’s North American Jewry. As the saying goes, “it is what it is”.

I hope these marriages are successful in terms of the couple’s life and happiness, but I also hope that the Jewish partner retains a strong enough connection that they will bring their children up with a strong connection to their Judaism but my hope is a prayer and not a realistic expectation.

“It is what it is!”