\n\tAbout 20 years ago, when Six Feet Under ruled the prestige-TV roost, a casual moment unfolded in which the secular Jewish Brenda talked with her mother about her late father\u2019s relationships. The father and his brother did not get along, the mother explained, because one could not forgive the other for \u201cgiving up Chanukah.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tEven my younger, less-formed self thought that line was funny, because, while Chanukah is a lovely holiday, it is not so central that its neglect could be a euphemism for assimilation. In fact, Chanukah is the one holiday that even many highly assimilated Jews celebrate.<\/p>\n
\n\tThis was a small moment in a much bigger show that had nothing to do with Judaism. So I just laughed it off; it was far from the first or last time a TV show bungled a nuance of the Jewish (or any other) tradition. Points for trying; let\u2019s move on.<\/p>\n
\n\tThat would normally have been my response to a moment<\/a> early in the recently released second season of Erin Foster\u2019s Nobody Wants This<\/a>, when Seth Rogen, as some corners of the Internet made mockingly clear<\/a>, mistook Tu B\u2019Shvat for Tisha B\u2019av \u2014 when he called the saddest day of the Jewish year by the name of the birthday of trees. Rogen\u2019s rabbi is proudly unconcerned with the details, so it could have been a comic mistake from the character as he was talking to Adam Brody\u2019s more idealistic clergyman, lead character Noah Roklov. But Roklov doesn\u2019t correct him and the whole thing just seems like an unfortunate production blunder. (Netflix<\/a> curiously could still just overdub the two words, but another matter.)<\/p>\n \n\tI might have again had the Brenda reaction \u2014 \u201cpoints for trying, let\u2019s move on.\u201d But this was a smaller moment in a much bigger show that has everything to do with Judaism. And sadly that moment epitomizes so much of what I think Nobody Wants This troublingly gets wrong.<\/p>\n \n\tMuch has been made about the caricatured depictions in the first season of the Netflix series about the relationship between Noah and the non-Jewish Joanne (Kristen Bell), with Noah\u2019s sister-in-law Esther and mother Bina coming right out of an old-time ethnic joke book. Esther becomes more dimensional this season; Bina, ever the cartoon villain, does not. But that\u2019s not the show\u2019s biggest problem. The main issue with Nobody Wants This is that it does not seem especially interested in the very Judaism it purports to be about \u2014 and worse, seems too often to suggest that there\u2019s not even much to be interested in.<\/p>\n \n\tLike many religions, Judaism can provide moral grounding, community bonding, daily meaning and, at its most elevated, an awareness of and engagement with the divine. You\u2019d never know it from watching Nobody Wants This, where it mainly seems like a way for family members to be suspicious of each other (Bina especially, vis-\u00e0-vis Joanne).<\/p>\n \n\tTwo of the more promising moments \u2014 the kind that made me sit up and think we were actually going to get a full-blooded exploration of tradition \u2014 both fizzled into deracinated nothingness. An on-screen Purim party, which, despite 2,500 years of tradition that varies greatly by region, contains barely a single moment that has anything to do with the holiday, just becoming a Halloween party like so many others happening this weekend. And a \u201cbrit bat,\u201d a daughter-naming tradition that has emerged as part of a gender-equity movement alongside the bris, teases you with talk about Ashkenazi naming traditions \u2014 but then its main takeaway becomes that Jews having babies live in very opulent houses and give ridiculously hippie names. (Seriously, who calls a baby \u201cAfternoon\u201d?)<\/p>\n \n\tAlso, sorry, but in what world do Jews gather in a room in the last two years and not once mention, let alone debate, October 7, Gaza, Israel or hostages? In the real world unaffiliated Jews are discovering roots, asking questions, evolving beliefs, grappling with worldviews. My own synagogue has at least three new attendees currently doing just that. Yet in Nobody-world the main expression of Judaism for anyone who isn\u2019t the rabbi is the donning of a \u201cMatzah Baller\u201d jersey. It\u2019s not just cringe \u2014 it\u2019s out of date.<\/p>\n \n\tEach episode of Nobody Wants This contains nothing offensive per se, by which I mean there\u2019s no awful slur or (those Bina and Esther depictions aside) horribly crude stereotype. (Let\u2019s not mention the first-season scene of Bina surreptitiously shoveling prosciutto in her mouth<\/a>.) But the combined picture is nonetheless a dispiriting one, a vision of Jews who are celebrated only by how much they seem like everyone else \u2014 and not all by how much they\u2019re like themselves. When you make a show about a rabbi for whom customs and commandments are supposedly very important, you would seem to have a bigger responsibility to show traditional Judaism for what it is. And Foster\u2019s series, while often delightful and even moving, flubs the job.<\/p>\n \n\tGetting Tu\u2019B\u2019shvat and Tisha B\u2019Av mixed up is not the biggest deal. Yet it still makes it hard to take a show about representation seriously. Could you imagine black-ish confusing Martin Luther King and Martin Luther? When you don\u2019t seem to be that interested in what the icons mean, everything starts to feel like a gesture.<\/p>\n \n\tFoster seems excited by how fun she made one of the lead characters, and uses it as a defense against charges of stereotyping \u2014 \u201c[Y]ou have a rabbi as the lead. A hot, cool, young rabbi who smokes weed,\u201d she told<\/a> the LA Times, defensively \u2014 seemingly unaware that the best argument for how dimensionally you portray a tradition is not by how much the people leading it are like anyone else. This is Judaism as hood ornament, elements dropped in to make you feel like something is being explored but in a show that has zero interest in actually doing the work. I know writers talked to<\/a>\u00a0a\u00a0rabbi as a consultant, but\u00a0it\u2019s not clear from watching the show how much they asked about or listened to what they said.<\/p>\n \n\tThe Noah character is an idealist, and the show does have moments when it actually seems to grasp something about affiliated Judaism; when he explains to Joanne how Jews like to ask questions from all sides, he really does catch a quality embedded deep within the tradition. But those moments are too few and far between, replaced instead by Judaism as something that mainly exists to stop you from being with your boyfriend. Even Noah\u2019s idealism seems cut-and-pasted from another, more generic show. This may sound crazy but a few times this season Noah reminded me of E From Entourage,\u00a0futilely trying to hold the line on idealism while everyone just tells him to get over it.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tWe\u2019ve certainly come a long way from the Judaism in that show, which was mainly limited to Ari sneaking away to make calls on Yom Kippur. But when your biggest step forward evokes Vince and Johnny Drama, you may not have come as far as you think.<\/p>\n \n\tWhat kills me is that there are stakes and substance to the central relationship here; Nobody Wants This is more than just a guilty pleasure. Based partly on Foster\u2019s own life, this is a show smart enough to insightfully engage with all kinds of issues \u2014 marriage, career, siblings, even real estate. Yet somehow it can\u2019t spare any of that thoughtfulness for Judaism. As my colleague Daniel Fienberg recently wrote<\/a>, Joanne and her sister in the first season possessed \u201ca lack of knowledge or curiosity about Jewishness\u201d to the point that it even \u201cfrequently resembled playful antisemitism.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tTaken on its own this would be uncomfortable enough, a supposed step forward for representation that actually sets it back \u2014 a Netflix hit that six years after Shtisel burned up the platform<\/a> reverts us to a world in which many Jewish people have seemingly little allegiance to tradition and are accorded no depth to their faith. (Netflix was also the home of the hilariously caricaturish\u00a0Unorthodox and My Unorthodox Life, so make of that what you will.)\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tBut this isn\u2019t about\u00a0just one representational botching. Sociocultural shows never drop into a vacuum, and Nobody Wants This arrives in a world where Jewish identity has been completely transformed, even before October 7 but certainly after. Look no further than the reaction to Zohran Mamdani, the frontrunning mayoral candidate of the country\u2019s biggest city and my own hometown, who has become a divisive figure in the Jewish community for his views on Israel. Mamdani has tried to calm the fires by talking about his planned police budget and hate-crime vigilance. But I can\u2019t help feeling like he\u2019s missing the point. Millions of Jewish New Yorkers identify with Israel, the place where nearly half of the world\u2019s Jews<\/a> now live, and have felt at home in New York precisely because of the bond between the places. The potential future leader of their city saying Israel shouldn\u2019t be a Jewish state can\u2019t but make them feel, at a very deep primordial level, they might not really be welcome in New York either.<\/p>\n \n\tWhat gnaws about Mamdani is the existential discomfort of not feeling at home in one\u2019s home, which is the kind of thing that can\u2019t be addressed by budget allocation. His mistake is, in many ways, the same as Foster\u2019s \u2014 in thinking Jewish representation and solidarity is about box-checking, not about an attempt at genuine understanding.<\/p>\n \n\tI know, I know, Nobody Wants This is just meant to be \u201centertaining,\u201d as a colleague of mine said when we were hashing this out. But somehow that doesn\u2019t feel good enough. A show like blackish could have used that defense but never did, instead examining issues the Black community was going through with regular rigor while never sacrificing the comedy. You can choose not to do that in the first mainstream sitcom about a traditional Jewish person in decades, I suppose. But then you\u2019re tokenizing and emptily trading on a faith and even missing an opportunity. This is the one chance many people will have to learn about Jewish tradition. And they come away knowing the thing they mainly knew before \u2014 it stops non-Jewish women and Jewish men from getting married.<\/p>\n \n\tEarlier this month the last of the alive Israeli hostages returned home from Gaza. The videos spreading across social media of Jews reuniting with their families, often with effusions of Jewish prayer \u2014 secular and religious, young and old, Ashkenazi and Sephardi \u2014 filled so many Jews \u00a0(and plenty of non-Jews) with joy. For a brief moment our screens were awash with the kind of positive expressions of Jewish identity one too rarely sees on\u00a0media platforms, giving a glimpse at the kind of respectfulness of purpose Nobody Wants This could have aimed for but too frequently chooses to avoid.<\/p>\n \n\tLate in this new season,\u00a0when Sasha asks Noah while they\u2019re playing ball if he would choose Judaism if he wasn\u2019t born into it, the show seems tantalizingly, refreshingly, on the cusp of actually diving into questions that a show about representation purports to care about. But then Sasha hoists up a shot, makes a joke and the scene ends, no answers given. Instead, you\u2019re left wondering about a different question, one I found myself mentally asking again and again watching this season: why would a TV show go out of its way to focus on a religion in which it has such evidently little interest?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"About 20 years ago, when Six Feet Under ruled the prestige-TV roost, a casual moment unfolded in which…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":109941,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[146,85,46,400,30652],"class_list":["post-109940","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-netflix","tag-nobody-wants-this"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109940","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=109940"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109940\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/109941"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=109940"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=109940"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=109940"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}