How a real rabbi advised on making interfaith relationships more realistic on Netflix’s Nobody Wants This

“Nobody Wants This,” the Netflix romantic comedy starring Adam Brody as a charming Los Angeles rabbi who falls in love with a blonde, agnostic sex and dating podcaster played by Kristen Bell, is somewhat based on a true story.

Erin Foster, the show’s creator, is a blonde from Los Angeles who found a partner in a Jew, although not a rabbi – her husband is the owner of the Simon Tikhman record label – and converted for him. Like her character, Joanne (Bell), she too “got it” when her then-Jewish boyfriend eagerly tried to impress his mother with a bouquet of oversized sunflowers.

In other words, Foster is the “shiksa” of the eternally nice Jewish boy. “Shiksa,” as Joanne quickly discovers in “Nobody Wants It,” is a Yiddish pejorative used by Jews to describe non-Jewish white women with varying degrees of blonde hair. “Shiksa” is also the original title of the 10-episode series, which will premiere on Netflix on Thursday.

Reactions to the hotly anticipated series varied. After the trailer premiered earlier this month, Brody’s fans were delighted with his portrayal of the “hot rabbi,” and one early reviewer praised the series as “a smart and sexy story where Jews are the main plot, not the punchline.” Others bristled at stereotypes about domineering Jewish women.

Steve Leder, former senior rabbi of Wilshire Boulevard Temple in Los Angeles, provided advice to the cast and crew as a consulting rabbi. It had its own connection to a true love story – Foster converted to Judaism at his synagogue. (“Temple can be very boring,” Foster recently told New York Magazine, but she praised the eight-week Choosing Judaism course she took with her husband before they got married).

Leder’s task was to test Jewishness on screen, from the schedule of the devout Rabbi Noah (Brody), through the pronunciation of Hebrew words, to ordering candles, wine and bread for Shabbat. Brody has gained fame playing Jewish characters on screen, most notably Seth Cohen on “The O.C.” and, most recently, Seth Morris on “Fleishman’s in Trouble.” But in real life, he says, he “barely went to a bar mitzvah and didn’t keep anything from it,” and Leder helped him on his own journey through books, podcasts and documentaries about Judaism.

“Everything in this series that is, for lack of a better term, overtly Jewish, I did my best to make sure it was done with authenticity and respect,” Leder told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

The show’s central tension – whether Noah can marry a non-Jew while continuing his path as a rabbi – is also realistic, Leder said. Although some rabbis marry non-Jews, he said it is more common for their partners to eventually convert. Traditional Jewish law, known as halakha, prohibits marriage between Jews and non-Jews.

Still, “Nobody Wants This” comes at a time when American Jewish institutions are increasingly accepting married rabbis. Hebrew Union College, the Reform movement’s rabbinical seminary, announced in June that it was lifting a ban on interfaith contacts for rabbinical students. The Reform movement is by far the largest denomination in the United States, and four in 10 of its members are married to a non-Jew. Reform rabbis were never prohibited from intermarrying.

The HUC decision followed similar changes at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College and the pluralist Hebrew College. Both of the Conservative movement’s seminaries continue to ban interfaith unions, something the movement reaffirmed this year over the denomination’s commitment to halakha, but since 2018 its rabbis have been able to officiate at interfaith weddings. (Noah’s confession in “Nobody Wants It” remains ambiguous, but his practices suggest that his synagogue is most likely Reform).

According to a 2020 Pew survey, institutions adhere to norms among American Jews, who have increasingly intermarried in recent decades. Religious intermarriage is on the rise across the United States, and Jews are significantly less religious than American adults as a whole by conventional standards of religious attendance and belief in God.

Long-standing concerns among Jewish leaders about the continuity of the community – seen as threatened by intermarriage and demographic decline – have also been alleviated by research into how intermarried families actually raise their children. The Pew study found that most intermarried parents are raising their children with some form of Jewish identity.

But you wouldn’t guess the trend of acceptance from Noah’s Jewish circle. Though he fears rejection from his congregation, he is almost equally afraid of the judgments of his own family — especially the women, and especially his mother Bina (played by Broadway star Tovah Feldshuh, who also played the Jewish mother in “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend”). Bina comforts Noah’s recent Jewish girlfriend by saying, “Everyone knows shiksas are only for exercise.”

Bina is bossy, demanding and tries to kiss her son on the lips. Noah’s sister-in-law, Esther (Jackie Tohn), is similarly tenacious, dominating her helpless husband Sasha (Timothy Simons) and drawing sharply degrading contrasts with Joanne, whom she calls “Whore #1” (Joanne Morgan’s sister, played by Justine Lupe, is “Whore No. 2” The only Jewish woman who immediately greets Joanna is a rabbi she meets briefly at Noah’s former camp, who coincidentally also happens to be blonde.

Stereotypes of Jewish women can sometimes be based on bullshit because they are essential to the show’s comedic contrast between the funny, outspoken, sex-positive shiksa and the strict, withholding Jewish women who see her as a threat. But Leder said that while their exaggerated tendencies were written for laughs, the Jews were in on the joke.

“Basically, these characters were based on real people,” Leder said. “You know, there’s an old joke about Jews… ‘Jews are like everyone else, only more so.’ So it’s a kind of TV, right – it’s real, but more so.”