I was the ‘shiksa’. I feel misrepresented by Nobody Wants This

Warning: This article contains spoilers for Nobody Wants This.

Read Caroline Baum's review Nobody Wants This here.

As soon as I saw the trailer for Netflix’s hit TV series Nobody Wants This, the teenage crush I had on Adam Brody as Seth Cohen from The O.C. was reignited.

Here he was, all grown up, a rabbi, and the Jewish love interest in a conversion story. It felt like the show had been made for me as I was once a non-Jew who fell in love with a charming and handsome man.

Rabbi Noah (played by Brody) has high expectations of himself and of what he dreams his life will be. The ‘perfect Jewish girl’ is seemingly cast aside for a ‘shiksa’ (Joanne, played by Kristen Bell), and chaos ensues. 

I mentally noted the release date and binged the entire season in one evening. My husband arrived home from performing at a Jewish musical event at our shule to find me yelling at the TV, "THAT WOULD NEVER HAPPEN", and watched me rage about the unflattering portrayal of Jewish women as nasty, needy, possessive, and unapproachable.

There was zero consideration for investigating their perspectives and they seemed to exist purely as the villains in this cute rom-com about an unlikely romance between an outspoken woman of the world and a rabbi.

Simultaneously, whilst watching the show I remembered the pain of being labelled ‘the shiksa’, the pain of exclusion, of being seen as someone there to destroy the possibility of real Jewish grandchildren in a family of Holocaust survivors, and sympathised with Joanne and her complete inability to navigate Jewish spaces. The desire to win over the women in her new boyfriend's life was a brick wall I myself bashed my head against for many years.