I was five episodes into Netflix’s smash-hit Nobody Wants This, when my dislike for the series segued from minor irritation into a more bubbly kind of rage.The problem with the new ‘hot rabbi’ rom com isn’t its representation of Jewish women – it’s that it ignores October 7.
Sasha, the hot rabbi’s goofy, married, Jewish brother was talking to Morgan – Joanne’s non-Jewish, blonde, single sister, about how good looking she is, when he casually states that “a couple of years ago I met this hostage negotiator at a bar…” Morgan flinches. “Oh, this isn’t a hostage situation,” she tells him. But Sasha, mansplaining, corrects her. “Everything in life is a hostage situation,” he says with deadpan certainty. And he’s not wrong.
For more than a year, ever since Hamas terrorists invaded Israel murdering 1200 people and abducting 250 more into Gaza, I – and I’m sure many of you – have thought about the hostages and their impossible situation, non-stop. When I shower, when I eat, when I clean my teeth, when I wash my clothes, when I laugh, when I ride the bus, when I stand at a rally in the rain or the burning sun, I think of the 101 innocent people of more than 20 nationalities who are still held hostage in Gaza. They don’t get to breathe fresh air, celebrate Jewish holidays, light candles for Shabbat or even stand-up – so low are the ceilings in the pitch-black, underground tunnels in which they are held.
And yet, in this programme that purports to shed light on what life is like inside the Jewish community, the only mention of hostages comes in the form of a cheap gag. I wouldn’t expect Sasha to wear a “Bring Them Home NOW!” T-shirt, or have a poster of Keith Siegel, Edan Alexander, or any of the other six Jewish American hostages still held in Gaza on his wall. Any acknowledgement of the struggle Jewish people collectively face in 2024 would be welcome. Yet such abandonment of reality shouldn’t really come as a surprise. For in the cutesy, sunlit, white-picket fence universe of Nobody Wants This, there’s no room for talk of ugly things, like the FBI declared 63 per cent increase in antisemitic hate crimes in America in 2023, or the actual events of October 7.
Of course some of this could be due to the fact that TV shows are in development for years before they hit our screens. Nobody Wants This was greenlit in March 2023, with Adam Brody joining the cast a month later. Filming may have started before last year’s atrocities, but it certainly carried on afterwards, so it feels salient and deliberate that the producers chose to look the other way and distance Noah and the Jewish characters from Israel itself. The only references we get to the Jewish state are in the form of signage and props, like the T-shirts the teen girls wear at sleep-away camp (emblazoned with the word “Haverim,” Hebrew for “friends” and the Star of David), and a one-time sighting of The Beth Israel Hospital, where Noah’s ex-girlfriend Rebecca is taken in episode three. This hospital, along with Noah’s dad’s job as CEO of a company neatly reinforce the stereotype that Jewish people are rich – rich enough to build hospitals and call them whatever they want.
There is a chance I’m just sensitive. As a Brit who has swapped London for Tel Aviv, I can no longer separate Judaism from Israel. I’ve also faced the same question, of whether contemporary art should reference contemporary reality, or back away from it. For the past two years I’ve been developing my own TV series – a black comedy with the working title The Lifeguard Diaries. The show is inspired by my first summer in Israel, when I met a handsome Israeli beach lifeguard at sunset, and everything changed. The events took place in 2016, but it would be impossible to film in Tel Aviv without October 7 creeping in – there are stickers memorialising the murdered on every lamp-post; graffiti demanding a hostage deal on every wall. Life here has irrevocably changed. So I made the decision to re-contextualise my series: to have the main character travel to Israel in the summer of 2024. Her motivation is partly the rise in antisemitism in the UK and partly because – if Israel really is the homeland of the Jewish people, shouldn’t she be there, living and suffering among them?
This decision is making it harder for me to sell my show. Producers are worried they won’t be able to export it to a global streamer after a local premiere, because it shows unpalatable events, like Pro-Palestine rallies in London and Israel as a place where normal people live, work and play. The creators of Nobody Wants This must be delighted that Gen Z and millennial publications like Cosmopolitan are “absolutely buzzing,” by the recent announcement that a second season is on the way.
But if Nobody Wants This shows me anything it’s that we – as Jewish people – have to stand up for ourselves and tell our stories truthfully, as we see them, because evidently, nobody else will.
