Real, contemporary Jewish life has a better place for Rabbi Noah  

More often than not, when I reveal to someone who isn't Jewish that I’m training to be a rabbi, they immediately bubble over: “Oh, did you see that show about the rabbi?”  

Nobody Wants This isn't really a show about a rabbi. As I’ve written before, it is about a rabbi’s girlfriend—a small, thin blonde woman with little knowledge of Judaism or the Jewish people—through whose limited, peripheral eyes we are allowed to gaze at the rabbi.  

But for the masses who have no living, breathing Jewish person in their orbit, this number one Netflix series has become the accidental emblem for what a Jewish person is. That means that when Rabbi Noah is whiny or Rabbi Noah is scared of a larger complex new world of Jewish life that becomes a stand-in for the way all rabbis, if not all Jews, feel. And as a rabbinical student, I will reckon with all this show conjures in the onlooker’s imagination. 

The writers of Nobody Wants This “nebbished” Noah in Season Two, turning him into a stereotype more than a person. They took a sensitive, witty, sexy and compelling character and turned him into a Judaism Chat GBT bot, a tone-deaf myopic geek who wants to press his tradition on his self-obsessed girlfriend without ever unpacking why Judaism might be worth preserving or sharing.  

Where did that edgy, confident, sexy Noah from Season One go? We have lost the character of the “cool Jew”, replaced by a slightly sanctimonious drag struggling to keep his job and his girlfriend.