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HomeRead, Watch, ListenArts & Culture
OpinionArts & Culture

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

The controversial blonde-meets-rabbi show is back. I will love-hate watch, bothered by so much but thirsty to see my struggles reflected on screen.
Merissa Nathan Gerson
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Adam Brody pours wine for Kirsten Bell as she looks lovingly at him in a still from Nobody Wants This

Adam Brody and Kristen Bell in a still from Nobody Wants This (Netflix still)

Published: 22 October 2025

Last updated: 22 October 2025

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.

The show is not centralising a rabbi, it is centralising the secular Christian American woman who is fetishising the rabbi

I am bothered by the treatment of this rabbi, the lack of what is called “kavod rav,” or respect for the rabbi, and the profound intensity, complexity, history, and depth of his role. I am bothered by the ignorance of this self-involved young woman he is dating, who, despite having a smartphone permanently attached to her hand, never thinks to Google “Jew” or “synagogue” or “shabbat.”

I am not okay with the way she shows up to his temple mid-sermon as if it’s a stage out in her secular world - it is not - and the way that Judaism is distilled for her. Or with how he is expected to apologise for doing his job when she shows up in the middle of it during his Shabbat sermon, demanding respect while simultaneously demonstrating none for the community he is serving and the job he is doing. Her complaint about a ten-minute wait outside the sanctuary illustrates her disregard for his rabbinic role, an undermining built into the structure of the show.

I am equally uncomfortable with her inability to honor his role, repeatedly, when they go to his work Shabbaton. I don't like it when he says, albeit a bit late, that he needs work boundaries, and rather than trying to understand (which she can’t because she has no work boundaries of her own) she goes back to the Jewish camp and talks about him to his colleagues, and worse, to the children he serves as a rabbi. 

This egregious disregard is not clocked or acknowledged as problematic by the show itself.

I also find this show does not respect ancestry; it does not respect first generation American rabbis, it does not respect the conditions of being part of an institution and a movement that might limit your movement when it comes to love. There is not attention to his mother, who they make fun of for her eating the pork from the trashcan, actually being someone who probably endured great religious persecution and then came to the United States, and has a son who she's allowing and protecting to be the very thing that was destroyed in her home country.

Perhaps the show is so compelling because the struggles inherent in it are the struggles of being Jewish

What I realised by the end is that the show is not centralising a rabbi, it is centralising the secular Christian American woman who is fetishising the rabbi. She doesn't bother to learn his history, she doesn't bother to understand what brought his mother to America, she doesn't bother to truly understand what it is to be on a pulpit on a Friday night serving a congregation or to enact ancient ritual. She ploughs through with her own worldview as central.

And yet, thirsty, I watched the whole first season of Nobody Wants This, not once, but twice during the holiest days of the Jewish year, carefully timing my viewing, even saving an episode for after Ne’ilah, the final service of Yom Kippur. This show was my unsuspecting high holiday companion. When I finished my pulpit work I curled up with this series and literally exhaled.

Rooting for the rabbi, it is like yelling at the screen in a sporting event. Perhaps the show is so compelling because the struggles inherent in it are the struggles of being Jewish, and fitting Judaism into the framing of either Christianity, or post-Christianity, all things Christian, in the world around me.

Am I comforted loving to hate to love watching this as a student rabbi, because I am reckoning with placing myself as a Jewish spiritual leader in the greater milieu of a Christian society? Yes. I believe so.

May Season Two be one of great redemption. Amen.

Nobody Wants This Season 2 begins on October 23 on Netflix.

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

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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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Comments1

  • Avatar of Michelle Braunstein

    Michelle Braunstein25 October at 10:12 pm

    I wasn’t as ambivalent as the author when I watched it. Perhaps it was due to the timing – while the progressive world was busy denying and justifying the rape, mutilation and murder of Jewish women, here was a series wherein every Jewish woman was a villain. From shrew, to obsessed ex, to controlling mother-in-law; the only trope neglected was the Jewish princess, though the shrew and the ex at times gestured in that direction. The gentile woman was represented as another tired cliche – the manic pixie dream girlfriend or “pick me girl”, as the younger generation call this equally exhausted stereotype. The only things that were appealing were the soft, warm LA palettes and street scapes. Ice-creams, cocktails, indoor plants, summer camp. I might hate watch the second season so I have evidence when the series-o-sphere inevitably bleat about how great it was.