At the urge of many friends, I watched a few episodes of the new Netflix show Nobody Wants This, which centers around the romantic relationship between a (male, presumably Reform) rabbi and a non-Jewish woman. This adds up to the fairly small corpus of film and TV works I’m familiar with that seek to highlight the lives of Jews in America: early Woody Allen (especially Annie Hall), some episodes of The Wonder Years, the Charlotte-Harry relationship in Sex and the City, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and, most recently, You’re So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah.
I watch these things in part to make up for a considerable gap in my Jewish experience. I was raised in a secular home by a secular mom and a dad with Orthodox religious background and studied quite a bit of Talmud and Jewish law in infancy with dad, in school, and at university. I’m studying Jewish Studies at the Graduate Theological Union and I’m a rabbinical student. That’s not where the gap is: the more I encounter folks who grew up as American Jews (as opposed to Israeli Jews) the more I realize that an American Jewish upbringing is a subculture of its own, with a wealth of its own institutions, trappings, and tics: Jewish schools, shul programming, Jewish summer camps, Hebrew school, very particular ways of celebrating Bar or Bat Mitzvah, etc.
This, in itself, is not remarkable, and as I explained elsewhere, it is delightful to me that people look back at these experiences with nostalgia, as formative elements of their personhood. That’s great! And I’m sure it is owed, at least in part, to the prominence of Reform congregations. The US is a big country, and being Jewish will look and feel different in different places, to different people, but congregations that are welcoming to kids, that make outreach efforts, and that feel meaningful and cool are such a gift. It is because of these progressive denominations that the American Jewish kids I run into have experienced plenty of female and queer rabbis, connections between halakha and socio-political issues that are interesting to them, and other ways that make their Judaism relevant to their spiritual and moral development. In fact, I suspect that the marginalization of Reform Judaism in Israel, given the hegemony of the Orthodox rabbinate and its stranglehold on the government, is a big reason why so many Israelis feel completely alienated from their own spiritual culture.
Still, while watching Nobody Wants This I found myself puzzling over some of the depictions of U.S. Jewish culture. I didn’t get particularly hung up on the stereotyped and somewhat insulting depiction of Jewish women, though some folks understandably found offense there. Rather, I was somewhat surprised at two parallel things: first, the utter and complete ignorance of Judaism and Jewish culture by the non-Jewish characters in the show (who were apparently unfamiliar with the word “Shalom” and ignorant of the concept of Shabbat) and the stunning insularity of the Jewish cast of characters. Judy Berman, in her review for Time Magazine, comes close to this when writing that the show feels “short on insight into the realities of Jewish-gentile relationships in the 21st century”:
[That Noah’s environs pressure him not to date a gentile woman] is all believable enough within the context of Noah’s vocation. What feels less realistic, considering how cool and easygoing he’s supposed to be, is the homogeneity of his personal life. All of his friends seem to be Jewish couples . . . He and Sasha play on a recreational basketball team called the Matzah Ballers.
There’s a fine line between exploring Jewish identity and essentializing it, and Foster [the show’s creator, who converted – H.A.] sometimes crosses into dubious territory. Noah’s ruminations on theology and tradition can be lovely, and they feel true to his pensive character. But when Esther sends Sasha to the schvitz, where his dad spends all day every Sunday, to request a promotion at the family company, so that she can print his impressive new title on their daughter’s bat mitzvah announcement? It starts to seem as though nothing ever happens with Noah or his family that isn’t explicitly about being Jewish. Meanwhile, unlike just about any real person of her generation raised in a major metropolis, Joanne has never so much as heard the word shalom.
Perhaps Berman is right that this insularity makes sense (if barely) in the context of Noah’s vocation, and perhaps this is supposed to depict a very particular kind of Jewish community; maybe rich Jews in LA are as much of a representation of the overall U.S. Jewish experience as Cher and her friends in Clueless were a representation of the overall U.S. teen experience. Still, the insularity beggars belief. My professional and social environment has lots of U.S. Jews in it, raised on both coasts. These are all people who work and socialize with non-Jews, who participate in activities with non-Jews, who marry non-Jews and raise multifaith children in ecumenical homes.
True, some friends converted to Judaism before marrying Jews, and other friends married someone who converted in the context of their marriage. This is not my personal cup of tea for various reasons, and it would never occur to me to ask for something like this, but the folks I know who did it are happy with their choice. Good for them! None of them thinks it’s the one and only choice for Jews in the 21st century, and I know plenty of folks who made a different choice–including the composition of my own family. According to a 2020 Pew survey, 42% of all currently married Jewish respondents indicate they have a non-Jewish spouse. Among those who have gotten married since 2010, 61% are intermarried. True, intermarriage is very rare among Orthodox Jews, but Orthodox Jews are a mere 10% of the U.S. Jewish population. The idea of anti-miscegenation, or “marrying outside the faith”, is obviously part of Jewish history, but hey, Hebrew Union College now ordains reform rabbis who are in interfaith relationships. It’s been a change long in the making, and it reflects a realistic understanding that, given the statistics, to reject Jews who are married to non-Jews, not just as congregants but also as potential spiritual leaders, is to eject them, effectively, from communal Jewish life. HUC’s president Andrew Rehfeld explained that “a prohibition around Jewish exogamy … is no longer rational because intermarriages can result in engaged Jewish couples.” Still, I want to believe that this long-overdue wisdom doesn’t reflect merely utilitarian considerations, but also the more profound understanding that reaching deeply and intrusively into people’s loving relationships and intimate lives can be traumatic and destructive (see Ezra 10 for what I consider a particularly ugly, albeit perhaps historically understandable, example of such religious insularity).
If this were just about a show that depicts Jewish insularity in an archaic light (even if it’s wildly popular and overall well received) I wouldn’t bother. My concern, though, is in what this depiction of insularity says about possible growing trends in U.S. Judaism in the last year. You see, the many Jewish people around me who have, for many years, been at the forefront of progressive political goals, active in politics, in human rights, in equality work, in animal rights, and in environmental protection, participate in these efforts precisely because they don’t see the world through an insular lens. The young Jewish men who were murdered alongside Black men trying to register people to vote in Mississippi did it because, to them, blocking people from voting was not just a “Black issue”: it was a political issue that needed to concern everyone. For decades I’ve worked on issues involving correctional conditions and animal rights, not because there’s something particularly Jewish about these causes, but because I am a human being with a conscience who tries to live a moral life, and I care about everyone‘s wellbeing, not merely about the particular folks who share my demographic slice. I’m far from being alone in this.
Thing is, as more and more areas of intellectual, political, and artistic life in the U.S. shut down to Jews, and as people are stunned to wake up and see their friends, colleagues, mentees, and beneficiaries turn on them with horrific viciousness and stunning ignorance, many Jewish people are looking for new avenues for their world-improving energy. It’s not ridiculous to forecast that these efforts are going to be directed more inward from now on. Heck, I’m doing the same myself by looking to pivot professionally into Jewish spiritual leadership. Folks who discover that they have supremely shitty friends are going to look for better, more supportive friends, and where might those be found? in the Shul, in Jewish learning environment, in Jewish organizations and nonprofits. As The Godfather‘s Michael Corleone says to Kay when they reunite after he comes back from Sicily: “I’m working for my father now, Kay.”
My fear, therefore, is not that this Netflix show falsely depicts Judaism as insular (though it probably does). My fear is that the current climate will have life imitate art in the sense that more and more Jewish people will choose insularity–socially, professionally, politically–not to be exclusive or superior, but rather because, as individuals and as a people, we have to respond to this really, really difficult moment by reinventing ourselves.
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