Sukkot shiksa special sermonizing spectacular
What one new Netflix series wrought
The ‘shiksa’ plot: Phoebe Maltz Bovy reviews ‘Nobody Wants This’
Nobody Wants This, a serialized Hallmark rom-com of a Netflix show, is what happens if you put Sex and the City, Annie Hall, early-aughts television and 2020s Instagram into a blender. Composed exclusively of familiar elements, the end result is something extremely now in its datedness…
Netflix enters the shiksa discourse in a very dumb way with ‘Nobody Wants This’
Whenever there’s a new mainstream TV show with a Jewish bent, Jewish audiences share a familiar reaction: excitement over representation, followed by dread over how bad that representation will be. The latest example is Nobody Wants This, the new Netflix rom-com series about a sex-advice podcast host (Kristen Bell) who, despite not being Jewish, falls for a hot young rabbi (Adam Brody). Gasp!
One key theme in the show is the nuance and viability of interfaith relationships, which, for Bonjour Chai co-host Phoebe Maltz Bovy, brought to mind the writer Meghan Daum. A prolific writer, Daum once penned a 1996 GQ piece called “American Shiksa”, which appears in her 2001 collection of essays, My Misspent Youth, and which describes the common Jewish-guy-meets-non-Jewish-girl love story from the female perspective. On this week’s episode, Daum joins to recall the origins of that article and helps dissects Netflix’s latest take on the age-old trope, which is both new and stale at the same time.
And after that, the hosts turn south to examine how Donald Trump spent the one-year Oct. 7 anniversary… by visiting the grave of Lubavitcher Rebbe and allegedly offering to sign siddurs.
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