American Jews have a habit of believing that, just because they were born of one or two Jewish parents, they know what being Jewish is. This is vain and stupid. It is akin to my saying that because I am human, I understand how my digestive system works, or what is happening in my pituitary gland, or what the epiglottis does. If I were to have knowledge of any of these things, it would be only because I studied them, learned about them, and mastered that knowledge. But since I haven’t, it would be the height of arrogance for me to cast myself as an expert about my own body except what I can see of it with my eye or in a mirror.
If movies or TV shows about doctors were to work from a base of knowledge like mine about my own body, they would be laughed out of existence. Instead, they work very hard to seem ultra-realistic. They hire consultants to work with them on the dialogue and surface interesting and complicated diseases and potential cures. Those consultants help writers to produce scripts that place enormous demands on actors, who are compelled to memorize tongue-tripping dialogue about prepping this many ccs of that hard-to-pronounce drug. Their makers know they have to get the details right to achieve the suspension of disbelief necessary to turn any melodramatic story into something believable. Medicine is a profession. You need to get the details right when you portray it or your show will sound lame and you will be bound to fail.
Shouldn’t that be true of every life-and-death subject? Over the past year, Netflix has brought to the world two notable programs about the difficulties and challenges of Jewish life in America. Judaism and the Jewish people are three-plus millennia old, and their sociological and intellectual histories are so complex that they make open-heart surgery look like Operation: The Goofy Game for Dopey Doctors. You’d think Netflix would want and need to be careful about the details of a TV show about Judaism as it would with a show about medicine.
Ah, but see, “being Jewish” isn’t the same as Judaism. Being Jewish is, in present parlance, an “identity,” and an identity is an entirely subjective matter—in the end, your identity is what you say it is. So if you want to talk about your experience of being Jewish, who can possibly contradict you? It’s your experience. The two Netflix shows are about the experiences of two different American Jewish creators, and they couldn’t be more different.
Nobody Wants This is the brainchild of a “Jew by choice” named Erin Foster, who is described by Wikipedia as “an American writer, actress, producer and socialite.” It is a semi-autobiographical account of the culture clash between its lead characters, one based on Foster and the other based on her Jewish husband, Simon Tikhman, whom Foster married in 2019 after dating for a year. So this is a program in part about the Jewish experience made by a person who clearly had little exposure to it before her mid-30s, then became Jewish through conversion, and was Jewish for all of three years before she began making a rom-com sitcom about it. To say her inexperience shows is to understate the case.
The other Netflix show about American Jews is Long Story Short, whose creator, Raphael Bob-Waksberg, hit it big in the 2010s with a bleakly comic animated series called BoJack Horseman. Long Story Short is also animated, though it need not have been; there are no flights of fancy, only a time-shifting account of the difficult relationships of a mildly observant Jewish family in Northern California over the course of three decades. Imagine an amalgam of Allegra Goodman, Jonathan Franzen, and Modi Rosenfeld, and you get a sense of its indelible flavor. To say Long Story Short is a work steeped in Jewish life that strives to get the details right is also to understate the case.
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Romantic comedies about Gentile women and male Members of the Tribe have been can’t-miss showbiz cash cows for more than a century—beginning with the colossal Broadway hit comedy Abie’s Irish Rose in 1922 and then moving on through a 1970s sitcom called Bridget Loves Bernie on to Annie Hall and (implicitly) When Harry Met Sally. And so it has been with Nobody Wants This, which has proved to be a huge hit for Netflix, the only sitcom to top its charts in the streaming service’s history.
But this is no ordinary “goy-meets-boy” tale, because the Jew in question isn’t just a workaday Jew. Foster and Netflix decided they needed to “raise the stakes” to create dramatic tension in the relationship between the spectacularly magnetic Kristen Bell and Adam Brody. So the man in Nobody Wants This isn’t just a Jewish guy from a Jewish family. No, he’s a rabbi. In the pilot episode, hot young clergyman Noah decides he’s being railroaded into marriage by a grasping Jewess as well as his mother and stepmother and instead becomes hot for hot blonde shiksa Joanne. She happens to make her living talking explicitly about sex on a podcast she hosts with her even hotter, even blonder sister.
Do young rabbis fall in love with non-Jewish women? Sure they do. I’ve even known a few. What’s more, a successful novel of the 1960s by Noah Gordon, literally titled The Rabbi, turns on this exact plot point; the daughter of a Presbyterian minister decides to convert to marry Rabbi Kind and is thrown into an existential crisis when her father dies. The journey of a non-Jew into Judaism as a way of introducing key concepts of the faith tradition and peoplehood is also present in Exodus, the bestselling Jewish book of all time, with the romance between Zionist superhero Ari Ben Canaan and the widowed nurse Kitty Fremont.
But those are works consumed by the subject of what it means to lead a Jewish life. To say that Erin Foster and her team are uninterested in Judaism is, again, to understate the case. Perhaps if Foster had, in fact, married a rabbi, she would be able to discern the difference between, let’s say, Reform and Conservative Judaism. Rabbi Noah seems to be both, neither, and everything all at once. He does not wear a yarmulke, but the senior rabbi of his temple does. He will go out to bars on Friday nights. His synagogue is clearly supposed to be Reform, but it uses a Conservative prayer book called Lev Shalem, which is a teeny bit like handing around the liturgy of the Latin Mass in a Presbyterian church. His parents keep kosher, which is unusual for a Reform family, but there’s no indication Noah does.
Noah’s responsibilities to his congregation appear to be nonexistent, even though he is angling to become the senior rabbi upon his boss’s coming retirement. At no point in the series does he conduct a wedding, or a funeral, or attend a bris, or pay a hospital visit, or much of anything. He does play basketball with his brother Sasha on a team called the Matzah Ballers, a witless pun indicative of the cultural ham-handedness Erin Foster brings even to the secular content of her show.
There is a bat mitzvah in the final episode, and there is a great deal of tension and conflict about whether the shiksa will attend—but not a word is spoken of and not a second is shown of the actual bat mitzvah ceremony or the religious service during which a 13-year-old Jew participates in communal ritual for the first time. Apparently, Foster believes a bat mitzvah is simply a sweet-16 party three years early for girls whose mean grandmothers make them wear ugly dresses.
I could go on. Noah’s parents appear to be Russians who must have come from the Soviet Union to the United States in the 1970s or early 1980s and made it big. But then Noah’s mother, Bina, tells a bewildering story about being a young girl in New York at a nightclub where Frank Sinatra sucked on her finger. When would a Soviet Jewish girl have been in New York in a nightclub near Frank Sinatra at a time when Jews were forbidden to emigrate from the Soviet Union?
All this attests to the likelihood that Erin Foster is offering up a caricatured version of her own in-laws, the Tikhmans, who came to the United States in 1980 and settled in San Francisco. A 2014 interview with Foster’s real-life mother-in-law, Marina, reveals that she is a dentist and her husband Anatoly works in tech. Marina became deeply involved in Jewish communal life in the Bay Area; she and Anatoly have an older son who married a Jewish woman (as is the case in Nobody Wants This) and were likely distressed by the appearance of a completely secularized non-Jew in their younger son’s life. In the interview, Marina describes how her own parents had labored hard to preserve the family’s Jewish traditions in Moscow at a time when doing so was threatening to their well-being.
It’s understandable if all this has been difficult for Erin Foster, but in making Nobody Wants This, she has paid her in-laws back in spades. Noah’s father is portrayed as gregarious and harmless—though, in another wild vulgarism, we are meant to understand he is a Big Jew because he wears an enormous Star of David necklace—but the portrait of Noah’s mother is nothing less than vicious. Bina isn’t a professional, as Marina Tikhman was. Joanne makes a faux pas when she asks what Bina does for a living, since the only answer she gets is that Bina was there to raise her children. When Joanne foolishly brings a traif charcuterie board as a gift for Noah’s parents, Bina insists the maid throw it in the trash. Then Joanne finds Bina in the kitchen, gobbling up the prosciutto. So not only is the kosher-keeper ungenerous and rude, she’s also a hypocrite.
The Jewish women married to the men who play on Noah’s basketball team are a crew of JAP harpies, especially Esther, who is married to Noah’s dim brother Sasha. With the exception of Noah, who is sweet and funny and sexy and supportive and everything good, every Jew we see on Nobody Wants This is pretty awful. Now, of course, Jews can be pretty awful (take me, for example). But not all of them. I’m sorry for Erin Foster that her new associations seem to have proved so painful for her, but in making Nobody Wants This, she has spun her own psychological dross into show-business gold and used her husband’s people as cannon fodder.
What is hard to fathom is why Foster wouldn’t have paid someone a couple thousand bucks to go through her scripts and get the Jewish references right. Like: Put the Reform siddur, Seder Ha’Tefillot, in there instead of the Conservative Lev Shalem. Have the rabbi meet the gang on Saturday night, not on Shabbat. Above all, place Noah firmly in one tradition or the other. That they didn’t bother to do this is a suggestive display of wild disrespect that is entirely unnecessary—unless, of course, it’s part and parcel of Erin Foster’s (possibly unconscious) desire to take arms against the sea of troubles that came with her having to convert to marry the man she loved.
And here’s the worst/best part of it all: In most other ways, Nobody Wants This is wonderful. The two leads are dazzling, and their repartee sparkles in a way that invites comparisons not only to Nora Ephron but to Philip Barry, who wrote The Philadelphia Story, the greatest of all romantic comedies. The brother-to-brother and sister-to-sister relationships are delightful.
This is a lovable show with a hateful attitude. Its success is understandable. Its contribution to the storehouse of negative American clichés about Jews and Judaism will be inestimable.
Long Story Short, which is too idiosyncratic and specific to have anywhere near the cultural impact of Nobody Wants This, is a remarkable achievement both on its own and by contrast.1 As it happens, Long Story Short is also a show that deals with a very tough Jewish mother and how her children navigate and fail to navigate their way around her. Naomi intimidates, infuriates, and torments her kids, but the depth of her love is fathomless at the same time.
Her son Avi does everything he can to get away from her and the world he was raised in; the show begins with him bringing his Gentile college girlfriend home in 1996 for the first time to attend his brother Yoshi’s bar mitzvah. In the flash-forward-backward style of the show’s storytelling, we learn by the end of the first episode in 2022 that Avi and Jen have married, have had a daughter, and have gotten divorced. Jen has had a time of it with her mother-in-law, as we see throughout the series, but that is not true of Kendra, the black woman who becomes the spouse of Avi’s sister Shira.
What’s different here is that Kendra converted to Judaism as the result of a career-driven spiritual crisis before meeting Shira. In one of the most moving scenes involving Jewish practice I have ever seen, Kendra ends up in a synagogue on Yom Kippur as the congregants begin the section of the service known as Vidui, or confession. An elderly woman leans over to Kendra to explain that they are all acknowledging and taking responsibility for the sins they have committed in the past year.
Kendra, who has just executed a successful plot to fire an aged employee weeks shy of achieving the date of her pension, begins to cry with the realization of what she has done. “I am ashamed,” she says, and the old woman looks at her and says, “No, it’s ‘we.’ We are ashamed.” The prayer is known as Ashamnu—in Hebrew, “we have trespassed.”
We know nothing more about Kendra’s conversion than this, but the profundity of her first visit to a shul is all we need to know. Immediately, she becomes Naomi’s perfect daughter-in-law; Jen, who is sweet and nice and kind but shows no interest in being Jewish, spends years unable to make a dent with Naomi.
Avi is some kind of nightmare version of Raphael Bob-Waksberg—he’s a second-rate music journalist alone in his 40s with a teenage daughter on whom he is emotionally too reliant—and it seems clear Avi has tried and failed to make his life with Jen because she is everything his mother isn’t. He doesn’t like Judaism, he doesn’t want to be a Jew, he has done nothing to provide his own daughter with any grounding in being Jewish…and yet there is not a cell in his body that doesn’t betray the truth of who he really is. He is stunned to discover, at a JCC tribute to his mother he is forced to attend against his wishes, that she has spent her life working on behalf of others—inmates she has tutored, friends she has saved. Why, he and Shira wonder, has Naomi been so hard on them? Naomi explains to Shira: “You think love is passive. You just sit there and love. No. I push you because I love you.”
Yoshi, who is a directionless stoner, has the most surprising Jewish confrontation with his parents. When his family becomes convinced that his weekend silences and strange disappearances are signs he is an addict in need of an intervention, he is forced to confess that what has happened to him is that he has become Orthodox. He whips off his hoodie to reveal…a yarmulke. Oh, do not think for a second that this is a development entirely pleasing to his parents, who think they and people like them are just the right amount of Jew.
One of the few weaknesses of Long Story Short is that despite its psychological and sociological acuity, the one relationship it depicts in entirely sentimental terms is the same-sex, interracial relationship; Bob-Waksberg cannot bring his tough-minded satirical understanding of life to bear on this all-too-perfect politically correct pairing.
In the end, though, what matters is not only that this is a beautifully written and conceived work of popular art; it’s also that Raphael Bob-Waksberg knows what he’s talking about. The details of Jewish life in Long Story Short are meticulously and properly rendered, and the idea that a “Jewish identity” isn’t making matzah-ball jokes but rather is the sum of one’s own personal experiences and a time-immemorial tradition is central to the show’s humor and power. The Long Story Short of the title isn’t just a reference to the way we tell our anecdotes when they start to become boring. It’s the story of Jewry itself.
1 In an extraordinary coincidence, it’s likely that Raphael Bob-Waksberg’s father played a role in helping Erin Foster’s mother-in-law and her family with their transition to the United States, since he was the director of the Bay Area Council for Soviet Jews in the 1980s and 1990s.
Photo: Adam Brody and Kristen Bell in Nobody Wants This. Adam Rose/Netflix ©2024. All Rights Reserved.
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