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OpinionArts & Culture

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

Contemporary Judaism allows for more flexible attitudes to intermarriage than those painted by the Netflix series Nobody Wants This.
Merissa Nathan Gerson
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Image: Nobody Wants This (publicity still)

Image: Nobody Wants This (publicity still)

Published: 12 November 2025

Last updated: 12 November 2025

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.  

Something about this show’s conversion conversations stinks of a superimposed Christian Evangelical model of religious persuasion

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.  

And most strikingly, in Season Two the pressure to convert is revved up to the max. Noah’s brother captures it in his casual comment while playing basketball, “I gotta tell you, I thought that she would be Jewish by now…” But he never says, why. He never opens the Pandora’s Box of clear explanation or attachment to this desired outcome.  

This reductive treatment of conversion is deeply problematic. It is as if conversion is simply a box to be ticked, with no correlation to meaningful Judaism or spiritual seeking. And when Rabbi Noah and his family pressure his girlfriend into conversion, pressurised conversion then becomes a lazy, reductive trope for the way Jews generally deal with intermarriage. Ideally it is far more meaningful, mutual, and less coercive and guilt-driven. 

In the show, the pressure on the relationship is primarily and at times offensively tied to Noah’s job. That’s not unrealistic. I remember 15 years ago, a friend was weeping—a student at the Conservative Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. She had been told she was unlikely to be hired as a female rabbi if she wasn’t married. And she had to be married to a man. And he had to be a Jewish man.  

Expectations have loosened a little, especially depending on the movement, but if Rabbi Noah were indeed a real Jewish leader in a large Reform or Conservative shul, his love affair with the “shiksa” would be a real career stifler. For many synagogues this is a job that you can't acquire without the right kind of partner. This net calculation becomes the nexus of the show’s focus on conversion.  

Nobody Wants This season two focuses hard on capital gain as a reason for conversion. Rabbi Noah, now out of a job because of his romantic decisions, becomes an ongoing punchline of his girlfriend’s sister’s endless unemployment jokes. Little is raised about his calling, his skills, his service to the community. This focus on capital gain strikes an odd chord with Jews and money stereotypes and in this season, it is compounded by the introduction of a mega-church Judaism funded by Hollywood’s finest.  

The message is clear: if you want interfaith marriage affirmation, it will come only in a vacuous consumerist extreme. Diluted tradition, big funding and religious dating freedom are bracketed. The assumption is that intermarriage is only acceptable in an environment where anything goes—as long as it sells.  

Historically, many Jews forfeited Jewish practices to keep a job, a paycheck, save their family, or avoid persecution. This is the enduring echo of Dina D’Malkhuta Dina, the Talmudic statute mandating Jewish adherence to both Jewish law and the local law wherever they live. It was a survival method for thousands of years, and should not be merely a Netflix joke.  

The braiding of two cultures can result in a remarkable spiritual path, an opening, and a deepening  

Something about this show’s conversion conversations stinks of a superimposed Christian Evangelical model of religious persuasion, and something about this Judaism reeks of American assimilationist capitalist submission – a very un-Jewish move. After all, historically Judaism did not wed capitalism so simply. Jews weren’t even allowed to participate in most economies in an equal way until Emancipation.  

Grappling between the pulls of modernity and traditional Judaism isn't new. As Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan wrote in Judaism as a Civilization, “Before the beginning of the nineteenth century, all Jews regarded Judaism as a privilege; since then most Jews have come to regard it as a burden.” 

Yet, as someone training to be a rabbi in his Reconstructionist movement, and affiliated with the Renewal Movement, as someone who dabbled in Kohenet Hebrew Priestess training and who is intimately aware of the Havurah movement, I know there are places where there is no need to trade off between interfaith love and meaningful and legitimate Judaism. 

Intermarriage, and conversion, is ideally a weaving of two lives into one. It is a compromise, a passion, a sacrifice, any number of things. And the braiding of two cultures can result in a remarkable spiritual path, an opening, and a deepening.  

And these relationships don’t imply the demise of the Jews – in fact – often quite the opposite. It can be conversion and/or intermarriage that allows Judaism to thrive in the modern. Rabbi Noah, who was a modern progressive in Season One, becomes a stick in the mud relic to a bygone close-minded Judaism that makes little to no room for engaging the modern realities of love and dating in Los Angeles. His only option for this relationship: a capitalist sellout to the mega-shul. 

The profound, sacred struggle to resist full assimilation as a claim on an ancient, enduring inheritance is one of the great defining tensions of modern Jewish life. Reducing modern love and conversion and intermarriage to a deal for a rabbi to keep his job demeans the core Jewish drive for nuanced spiritual and historical preservation.  

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About the author

Merissa Nathan Gerson

Merissa Nathan Gerson

Merissa Nathan Gerson is a student rabbi at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in Philadelphia. She is a writer, speaker, and spiritual consultant, and the author of 'Forget Prayers, bring cake: a single woman's guide to grieving'.

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OpinionArts & Culture

Nobody wants this, but as a student rabbi I can’t look away

Comments1

  • Avatar of Dan Coleman

    Dan Coleman14 November at 11:06 pm

    Not to quibble, but THAT show about the rabbi really ought to be Reformed (HBO/Max) which offers a much more complex and nuanced view of Jewish life.