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

Last year, at the end of Rosh Hashanah, I lay on the sofa with my mother. I had just finished my first week ever of leading high holiday services as a student rabbi. And together we watched the entire season of Nobody Wants This. In one sitting. 

The show is comforting. The show is offensive. The show is weirdly an offensive treat. 

I reluctantly confess that this year, again, through the breadth of the season of the Days of Awe, I rewatched the entire show, loathing it, and yet loving it - loving to hate it. I took great solace in the centralisation of a rabbinic character, played by Adam Brody. After all, I was dedicating my every waking hour to a Judaism unseen by the broader culture around me. 

But loving this show came with a cost. 

I am less concerned with the misogyny towards Jewish women, as I am with the representation of rabbinic clergy. The show subtly stomps Christian hegemony over a strawman figure of a rabbi. He is ultimately seen through the lens of the non-Jew, and despite me loving his centrality, craving some mirror of my niche social role, by the end of season one it was clear to me that he was subbing for the white American neo-Christian dream: the Jew is backwards – secularism is forwards – and all must bend to the blonde.