A few weeks ago I was at an event about Jewish families. Featuring Howard Jacobson, David Baddiel and Claudia Roden, it was a lovely evening that reminded me of the joy of being Jewish, and how our identity contains so much more beyond antisemitism and October 7 and unrelenting darkness.
As I left, I thought to myself that it was the first Jewish thing that I’d been to in the last year that was uplifting. Not in a spiritual way, but in a joyful, unencumbered by what’s-happening-in-Israel, beautiful-in-it’s-mundanity, life-affirming way. And while that wouldn’t have been novel any other time, it felt different enough that it stuck in my head. And that’s exactly what I thought when I watched the new Netflix Jewish show Nobody Wants This.
The show itself is not special. It’s a sappy rom-com thing with pretty thin writing and half-baked stereotypes. But it was very Jewish. And it was Jewish in such a nice, escapist way. For the last year, every interaction most of us have had with Judaism has been (rightly) consumed with the war, the hostages, and what it means to be Jewish and Zionist.
These are valid and important and necessary topics, but they are not nice.
They are a constant reminder of the things that delineate us from mainstream society, our differences rather than our similarities. And they are sad, and confusing, and frustrating, no matter where you stand on the specifics issues. In short, they are not good romcom fodder. When you watch a romcom, you want pleasant escapism, you don’t want to have to think about the horrors of the world. And comedy more generally is only made worse when you’re forced to shoehorn in news events and reminders of unpleasant stories.
All of which to say, it is completely correct that a show about an interfaith relationship in modern-day Los Angeles did not mention October 7. Sure, maybe including a hostage gag was ill-thought-out, but I’m not in the business of telling comedy writers how to write a script and think it’s wrong to demand that all shows cater to our specific political causes.
Sure, there’s an argument that the war and the backlash to Israel’s waging of it is significant enough to merit a mention - but I think that’s the wrong way to look at it. There’s so much more to modern Jewish life than antisemitism and Israel’s wars. While we’re all consumed by it at the moment, there will be a life after the war and there will be a resumption of normal Jewish life. There always is.
And in the same way that TV shows and films from the last few years don’t tend to mention Covid, because it automatically dates the work, the same should be true of this war. It’s a sitcom after all, not a piece of Israel advocacy or a community call to arms for the diaspora. It’s a pleasant story about a rabbi falling in love, aimed at a mass audience. And that’s a good thing. It cements in the minds of millions of Netflix viewers that Jews have more than just October 7, that we’re part of a tribe that has other strings to our bow.
This depiction of Jews has been one that has been sadly missed for more than a year. If we are to repair the insane divisiveness wrought by the last year, isn’t it right that sometimes we don’t force everyone to mention the war? Can’t we just have a laugh about the funny quirks of the ways Jews act? To those who complain that this silly show refuses to confront October 7 sounds to me like saying, why didn’t Sex in the City appropriately address 9/11? Why didn’t Friends have a whole episode on Israel’s war with Lebanon? Why didn’t Friday Night Dinner mark the assassination of Daniel Pearl by ISIS? See how nuts that sounds? Demanding every time Jews are shown on screen that they recognise the inherent challenges of being Jewish is unproductive and diminishes Jewish life to just the negative aspects. We are more than just October 7, we are more than being hated. And I don’t think a show that recognises that is anything to be ashamed of.
