Nobody Wants This, Netflix
In the blithe, chaotic days of university I was befriended in third year by another student who’d, like me, been a bit lazy and distracted by boyfriends and all the fascinating stuff that was always happening in the late 60s and early 70s. She was studying English language and literature too and we had a lot to catch up on. Lectures and tutes were brilliant, fantastic, but so were the books in the restricted stacks in the Baillieu. Middle English was great, but scholarship was tough, so on a long weekend before the exams Hannah* invited me back to her family home in Caulfield.
We’d talked during tutes and after lectures, not always about the books on the course. We caught a film or two with our respective boyfriends, some good, some kind of meh. Just like the films. Then the exams loomed, our tutors started saying ‘get that essay in or else’ and we panicked. And so, I got to visit and be Jewish-mothered in a real kosher-keeping home.
All I knew about Jews was what I’d learned from my parents and my reading about the war. In those days, even in the throes of Vietnam protest, there was only one they were referring to when they said ‘During the war …’ I didn’t know about keeping meat and dairy separate, I only knew they didn’t eat pork. When I said I wasn’t ready for a huge lunch, Hannah’s mother looked at me and asked what I’d had for breakfast and I said, before even thinking to lie, ‘Oh, eggs and bacon so I’m really full – ’
I looked up, suddenly aghast. Had I blown it? Would she be disgusted? But she was looking at me quizzically and said ‘Well, it’s not surprising that you have a bad stomach after that. I’ll get you an Alka-Seltzer perhaps? Or maybe just a dry matzoh and some tea to settle your tummy so you can have a proper dinner tonight?’
By this time Hannah was looking mortified and said that she would just have a sandwich.
‘A sandwich? So you’ll study properly on a sandwich?’
‘Mother! You always do this! You know I’m trying to lose weight!’
‘With the chocolate biscuits in your room?’
Hannah flounced out of the large, spotless double kitchen.
Her mother, unfazed, called up the stairs to the slammed bedroom door: ‘I’ll make you a tuna salad.’
I was thinking maybe I should be embarrassed by this little scene and then I realised that Hannah’s mum was so like my own that I actually felt comfortable. Hannah’s mum didn’t mind and even seemed pleased that I was a Catholic, and we got on like a house that wasn’t on fire, but pleasantly warm. I was a shiksa, I was never going to be Jewish but I certainly wasn’t the right age to be a problem for Hannah’s younger brother. It was all OK. That night at dinner I learned the word Mazeltov. In fact, I learned more that weekend than a dozen books about the war had ever taught me. Which is partly why I enjoyed Nobody Wants This.
Written by Erin Foster, and based on her own life, the subject is the sometimes-hilarious cultural friction that occurs when a Jewish man and a Gentile woman fall in love. Jewishness is transmitted through the matriarchal line, so unless the woman converts to Judaism there is a problem. It’s not surprising that since there are so few Jews in the world compared to other ethnic groups, they want to preserve and continue their line. After all, their numbers have still not really recovered to pre-Shoah levels: In 1939, the world’s Jewish population was just over 16 million. It plummeted by six million during WW2 and has only just reached the 16 million again in the last year.
It's billed as a rom-com on Netflix. But the subject matter has made some people uncomfortable, even though it is based on the real life of Erin Foster, the woman who wrote the script. Some articles, notably one in Time, has charged the series with being ‘mean-spirited’, and with seeming to ‘loathe’ Jewish women, portraying them as nagging harpies. I’m not Jewish, so in these times it isn’t surprising that some Jewish people will perhaps feel attacked, given that antisemitism is everywhere now.
But going by my own response to the series, I thought the women in it were not harpies or hateable by any sane standard. They felt real, not performative. Sure, they were naughty. Even tough and contentious sometimes, but Foster hasn’t created cardboard figures – we see all kinds of people being suddenly honest and humble, able to be reached emotionally. I loved those women. They reminded me of another mother, this one of Miriam*, another Jewish friend. Let’s call her Mrs Goldstein*. She once chased my sister and Miriam down her garden path into the street with a Tupperware container full of cheesecake because they might get hungry at the rock concert they were going to. My sister told me ‘I was already so full of food I could scarcely fasten my jeans, but Mrs Goldstein was convinced I was starving …’
And the late, wonderful Esther Rosenberg, scolding my 20-something son for smoking, poking him in the arm: ‘Just stop, darling! Look at me, I used to smoke two, three packets a day. If I can stop, you can too!’
Next time he saw her:
‘Have you stopped smoking yet?’
He let her scold him and was touched by her genuine concern for his health. She was tiny, because Dachau had stunted her growth as a young teenager; she only came up to just above his elbow, but she was a titanic mother-force to reckon with. We adored her, she was a blessing.
The vivid warmth and honesty of the Jewish women in Nobody Wants This is combined with a necessary defensiveness in a harsh world (although the time of the series seems to be set in those halcyon pre-October 2023 days when antisemitism was a mere undercurrent in academia and the far left and right), of a people whose specialness seems to be so very apparent, punching way above their weight in so many areas. Academic research, artistic excellence, business acumen, humour, contribution to public life, all these are things for which Jews are both admired and yet hated by some. They are exceptional, and I found the women in the series recognisable, perhaps exaggerated a bit, but only a bit, and absolutely wonderful.
The Gentiles are much more problematic characters in the series: still complex but suffering from privilege and spiritually adrift. The lives of privileged Californian Gentiles come in for some sharp and funny commentary. Joanne’s parents are even more confused than she is, her father is gay and her mother is still in love with him and living in a constant state of chaotic, permissive denial, spiritually rudderless, unlike the Jewish characters.
Their daughter, Erin Foster’s protagonist Joanne (Kristen Bell) is a privileged and liberated Californian WASP who runs a podcast with her sister Morgan. The podcast is lucrative because they talk about everything, especially the reality of living the sex-positive fourth-wave feminist life, with sort of an updated Sex in the City vibe – oversharing is an understatement for it. We learn that Joanne was a goth at school, then a ‘lesbian for a year’, and now sweeps through straight dating apps with very little joy or satisfaction. The sisters’ conflicts are funny and real and, in the last episode, reach a point of crisis with a moving and humble resolution. But overall the worth of the series came from the believable chemistry between the two main characters, Joanne and Noah (Adam Brody) and the hilarity of the cultural clash.
I wish I could tell you why it’s so funny without giving spoilers, but suffice it to say that the episode in the sex shop and the episode of the lunch party at Noah’s parents’ house gave me laughs that I haven’t had since Father Ted. Add to that the real tenderness between the two lovers, and you’ve got something unusual: a believable romance, funny and sometimes surprisingly honest with little moments of humility and vulnerability. Watch it, to see people believing in real love and still being able to laugh.
But I can’t talk about anything to do with Jewish people without addressing the giant shadow in the room. I’m writing this in the dark vigil hours of the day before the anniversary of when we, when the whole world, all lost a kind of innocence. A year ago, we didn’t have to face such things. Deeds and sights that we wish were unthinkable, but which are starkly present now and we are all scarred and smirched by what happened that day. Above all, my Jewish friends are wounded and targeted yet again, even in our own land of Australia. I thought that such evils were in the dark past, in the memories of the people who had to see things we didn’t think we would ever see again. I hope now for days with no more hate.
*(not her real name)
Juliette Hughes is a freelance writer.