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Was Teddy Roosevelt’s favorite play the original ‘Nobody Wants This’?
The Emmy-nominated Netflix show Nobody Wants This, a series about the challenges of an interfaith romance between a “hot rabbi” and his non-Jewish girlfriend, is now back for a sophomore season. When it debuted last fall, Nobody Wants This sparked heated criticism for trafficking in negative stereotypes about Jewish women. A writer for Glamour called her own mother to lament of the series: “I can’t imagine any guy who watches this show who would then say, ‘I really want to date a Jewish girl!’”
The commentary on Nobody Wants This is just as noteworthy for what it does not emphasize: the possible implications of interfaith marriage for the perpetuity of the Jewish people. That silence is all the more notable given the Jewish reaction more than a century ago to another dramatization of Jewish-Christian romance: The Melting-Pot, by the British Jewish playwright Israel Zangwill.
Whereas the early 20th-century play provoked outrage for seeming to endorse Jewish self-erasure, the modern TV program has not stoked such existential angst. Comparing Jewish reactions to these two tales of interfaith love reveals how much the landscape of Jewish life has shifted to accept blended families.
Noah Roklov, the hot rabbi in question played by Adam Brody, confronts professional and familial pressure to leave Joanne Williams (Kristen Bell) in favor of a Jewish substitute; Joanne—memorably described by Noah’s senior rabbi and boss as a “nice blonde crabcake”—struggles to confront the reality that she might have no place in his future.
When Nobody Wants This debuted, there was practically instantaneous pushback to its portrayal of Jewish women, all of whom were depicted as either materialistic, nagging or controlling—or some combination thereof. There’s Noah’s ex-girlfriend, Rebecca, who cares far more about achieving the milestone of marriage than about who she would be marrying. Even worse is Esther, Noah’s sister-in-law, whose principal purpose in life is to berate her daffy husband into obeisance.
The apex of Nobody Wants This’ deeply flawed Jewish female representation is that of Noah’s mother Bina, who tries to puppeteer her son out of his relationship with Joanne through both cajoling and sabotage. (Would it even be a hackneyed Jewish trope without the archetype of the overbearing Jewish mother?)
In contrast to the portrayal of Jewish women, the communal response to a rabbi in an interfaith relationship was notably muted. The show itself was very much alive to those stakes—Noah’s boss cautions that his path with Joanne, absent her conversion, would lead to a world in which every Jew “marries a goy, then there are no more Jewish children, and then our people become extinct.” Yet critiques of the series overwhelmingly focused on its unflattering portrayal of Jewish women.
This relative silence from critics about Jewish continuity would have stunned Jewish audiences of Theodore Roosevelt’s era, who railed against the celebration of Jewish-Christian romance in The Melting-Pot. That play tells the tale of David and Vera, both emigrants from Russia who found their way to New York. David is a Jewish survivor of the notorious Kishinev pogrom, a real-life massacre in what is now Moldova that took place in 1903. Vera is the Christian daughter of a Russian military official.
Their improbable romance takes root in the assimilative soil of the New World. The young couple is even able to overcome the morbid revelation that Vera’s father had ordered troops to shoot innocent Jews during the Kishinev pogrom. Yet in Zangwill’s idealized version of the United States, newcomers like David and Vera could free themselves from the tired identities and bitter tragedies of the Old Country and smelt their ethnicities into an unadulterated American identity.
In the play’s closing scene, David watches the sun set over the Western horizon and reflects in awe, “There she lies, the great Melting Pot. … Celt and Latin, Slav and Teuton, Greek and Syrian, black and yellow.” Vera warmly presses into David and adds, “Jew and Gentile.” He goes on, “Yes, East and West, and North and South, the palm and the pine, the pole and the equator, the crescent and the cross—how the great Alchemist melts and fuses them with his purging flame!”
The Melting-Pot premiered in October 1908 at the Columbia Theatre, mere blocks from the White House. Then-president Theodore Roosevelt himself was in attendance on opening night. After the final curtain, the president called down to Zangwill from his box, “A great play! A great play!” Roosevelt’s Jewish constituents did not share his enthusiasm.
Across the country, Jews denounced The Melting-Pot for ostensibly making a virtue of self-annihilation through interfaith marriage. A throng flooded into the Free Synagogue on the Upper West Side to hear Rabbi Leon Harrison condemn Zangwill’s production. The rabbi warned that “the little Jewish race would be diluted to extinction” if life imitated Zangwill’s art. Harrison excoriated the playwright for “sacrificing the ancient sanctities of his people’s faith on the altar of sentimental claptrap.”
The repudiation was no less pointed on the other side of Central Park, where Rabbi Judas Magnes of Temple Beth-El seethed against Zangwill’s “pernicious” play. “The melting process glorifies disloyalty to one’s inheritance,” Magnes griped. He saw in The Melting-Pot the alarming prospect of voluntary eradication, insisting, “We cannot be thankful to anyone for preaching suicide to us.”
Even as Zangwill’s fantasy of mass assimilation into the American Dream applied to all subgroups, Rabbi Magnes argued that intermarriage posed a particular menace to the Jewish people. After all, the new immigrant from Ireland or Germany could marry outside their heritage while resting assured that back home, their people would endure from generation to generation. But the Jew had no homeland where fellow coreligionists would ensure Jewish survival. “America spells his great hope for the preservation of Judaism,” Magnes pleaded.
The divergent reactions to Nobody Wants This and The Melting-Pot are striking. Perhaps one reason that the TV show has prompted a muted response regarding Jewish perpetuity might be that multi-faith matches have become normalized. When Zangwill’s play first ran, interreligious unions for Jews were exceedingly rare; his idealization of Jewish-Gentile love shocked the Jewish conscience.
But nuptials between a Jew and non-Jew are now more common than not, especially outside the Orthodox community. A 2020 study from Pew found that 72% of non-Orthodox Jews who had married in the preceding decade were wedded to non-Jews. Another possible explanation why Nobody Wants This did not elicit angst about Jewish self-erasure is that the children of Jewish-Gentile couples are increasingly likely to identify as Jewish. That same Pew study determined that among children resulting from interfaith marriages, those under 50 were more than twice as likely to identify as Jewish as their older peers.
This trend might preempt worries that intermarriage inevitably marks the end of Jewish tradition for that family line. Still another factor is Israel: no longer do Jews lack a homeland designed to safeguard their peoplehood.
The Jewish responses to Nobody Wants This and The Melting-Pot are in a sense mirror images of each other—the former effectively criticizes Jewish characters for being too insular, the latter for not maintaining enough distance. After all, the Jewish women of Nobody Wants This are at their worst in their rage-laden rejection of Joanne. Critics’ consternation about the show’s gender stereotyping can be understood, then, as a kind of plea: “America, don’t believe this show. Jews are actually warm and welcoming, not gratingly clannish.”
It is telling that the most favorably depicted Jewish female character, Noah’s former Jewish camp counselor, is also the one most favorably disposed toward his Gentile girlfriend. The Jewish reaction to The Melting-Pot was, of course, just the opposite, inveighing against any embrace of interfaith romance.
But in another sense, critics then and now have really wrestled with the same question: how should Jews navigate the fraught relationship between belonging and survival? To win the acceptance of Gentiles is to ensure Jewish security. Yet when acceptance becomes so complete that Gentiles are willing to marry Jews and raise children together, then Jews risk dissolving into the broader society. Belonging could well spell the end of survival.
Such is the tightrope walk of the Jew. Too little inclusion can threaten your safety; too much might result in your self-induced disappearance. Whether to shift your weight more to one side or the other in order to maintain equilibrium will depend on the contingencies of the day.
With season two of Nobody Wants This finally here, our own critical reaction—even more than the show’s plot—will suggest much about how Jews think they can best maintain an always precarious balance in our own uncertain moment. To stick to the tribe at all costs, or melt into the culture around you? No matter the decade, the same Jewish questions persist.
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Chef Alon Shaya shares the stories, resilience and recipes of World War II survivors
(JTA) — In 2015, while visiting Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial, James Beard Award-winning chef Alon Shaya came face-to-face with a World War II artifact that moved him deeply.
It was a red cloth triangle — cut from a Nazi flag — embroidered with the names of a few dozen female prisoners at the Ravensbrück concentration camp.
In a place where they were starving to death, he learned these women had formed a clandestine “food” club. Together, they talked about recipes, their Friday night Shabbat candlesticks and cherished memories of home.
That red cloth was “100% the catalyst,” Shaya said, for his deep interest in food as “an agent of survival, defiance and bringing people together.”
Now, 11 years after that defining moment in Jerusalem, Shaya’s second book, “Memories of a Good Meal: Recipes of Resilience Inspired by Stories of World War II Survival,” is being published on Oct. 6. Co-authored with food historian June Hersh, the book gathers accounts from survivors and heroes of World War II, illustrating the outsized role that food — and the memory of it — played in human survival. While featuring 80 recipes, it functions as much as a history book as a cookbook.
“The recipes are there to support the stories,” Shaya said. “It’s not the other way around.”
Shaya and Hersh tell the stories of 10 distinct groups impacted by the war, including Jewish partisans, hidden children, Navajo code talkers, persecuted homosexuals, Japanese Americans, and Austrian and German Jews who built new lives in the Dominican Republic.
Alongside these narratives, the authors included family recipes preserved across generations. Where none survived or existed, Shaya crafted recipes using ingredients available to the book’s subjects during the war.
The opening chapter highlights a story particularly close to Shaya’s heart. In 2019, during a visit to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., Shaya was shown a tattered, 100-year-old, handwritten recipe collection from the Fenves family of Yugoslavia. Saved during the war by the family’s cook, Maris, the Hungarian-language notebook was eventually donated to the museum by survivor Steven Fenves.
Determined to bring those dishes back to life, Shaya worked with Fenves to translate the recipes, filling in missing elements like precise steps, exact measurements and oven temperatures.
“I really became a part of their family,” said Shaya, whose collaboration on what became known as the Rescued Recipes project has raised nearly $1 million for the Holocaust Museum to digitize historical documents and artifacts. “The family wouldn’t be here if Steven and his sister didn’t survive Auschwitz,” said Shaya.
Featured recipes from this chapter reflect the Hungarian culinary traditions of Fenves’s hometown of Subotica, including körözött (a spiced cheese spread) and authentic Hungarian goulash.
Other chapters explore how people sustained themselves despite meager resources. In the profile of Polish Jewish partisan Shalom Yoran — who subsisted largely on potatoes while hiding in the woods — Shaya developed recipes centered on the staple tuber, including Polish herring and potato salad, potato dinner rolls and potato, and pine nut doughnuts with blackberry caramel.
“Shalom’s wife, Varda, shared his story with us,” Shaya explained. “The partisans lived in a hole in the ground in the Polish forest through winters that reached minus-20 degrees, and they did that for four years. Potatoes were a huge part of their survival.”
For Sarah Pelz, executive editor at Harvest, the book’s publisher and the granddaughter of a partisan, the concept of the book resonated deeply, especially in the wake of the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attacks inside Israel. “The throughline here is the power of food and memory — the power of food to bring us together at a table, and to remind us who we are and where we come from,” she said in an interview.
“Alon’s message is powerful and necessary right now,” she continued. “He hopes that people will read this book, will cook from it, and that it will bring people together at the table, people of diverse backgrounds, people of diverse perspectives, that it will not just help to enlighten readers, to history and to what happened, but also help bring people together.”
In gathering these accounts across the globe, Shaya and Hersh faced a race against time, as most interviewees were well into their 90s or older. John Kinsel, one of the last living Navajo code talkers, was 107 years old when the authors visited him on the Navajo Nation reservation. His chapter details the vital role Native American Marines played by using their complex language to transmit secret Allied messages in the Pacific theater. The book features recipes inspired by Navajo traditions, including blue corn mush and stuffed pumpkin with stewed lamb.
Throughout the project, Shaya couldn’t help but draw parallels between past atrocities and modern struggles.
“One of the lessons that struck home the most for me is that people will persecute you for what you believe in and gather together and create laws to persecute you,” he said. “We saw it in what happened with immigration in the 1940s, and we see it with what’s happening in America today.”
He was also struck by the role of propaganda, promulgated then by Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s chief propagandist, and today by bad actors on social media, in spreading hate and disinformation.
Some of the stories, like the meal prepared by nuns in a convent for a group of persecuted homosexual prisoners, seem almost cinematic in nature.
“I have definitely thought about turning these stories into a miniseries or a movie,” said Shaya. “Nobody has shown interest in it yet, but it is something that I think the more ways these stories can be shared, the better.”
Born in Israel and raised in Philadelphia, Shaya has become one of the country’s leading interpreters of Israeli and Middle Eastern cooking, with a distinctly Southern sensibility. His 2018 cookbook, “Shaya: An Odyssey of Food, My Journey Back to Israel,” blends memoir with recipes.
Shaya was committed to the latest book despite huge demands on his time. The chef and his wife, Emily, have two children, aged five and two. His Pomegranate Hospitality operates three restaurants, Saba and Safta’s Table in New Orleans, where he lives, and Safta in Denver. (Saba means grandfather and Safta means grandmother in Hebrew.) He is also involved in a variety of philanthropic work.
“The work I put into this book fills my heart and makes me feel good, like I’m doing something that builds me up and can have an impact,” said Shaya.
Shaya views the book as an educational tool.
“This book might engage a 13-year-old who really loves the chocolate cake recipe,” Shaya reflected. “If he or she hears the history behind that chocolate cake and delves into the history behind it, they learn that Austrian and German Jews took refuge in the Dominican Republic and wanted to keep their culinary traditions alive and need to use the local resources. That’s how a traditional Sacher torte-inspired tres leches cake came to be. Or a plantain latke, or matzo ball soup with avocado, lime and yucca.
“If those stories can come together and have that kind of impact on one 13-year-old in the world,” he added, “I will feel complete.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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‘That’s a lie’: Israeli journalists clash with Irish football association ahead of tense rematch
(JTA) — Israel and Ireland’s UEFA Nations League rematch on Sunday ratcheted up tensions between the two teams, in a sports drama where emotions over the Gaza war have fueled theatrics as intense as the match itself.
During the 1-1 draw played in Serbia, Ireland’s captain declined, as in the last match, a pregame handshake with his Israeli counterpart, Irish players bowed their heads during the playing of the Israeli national anthem and the team donned black armbands to signal their disapproval of Israel’s actions in Gaza.
Israeli players also wore black armbands displaying “7/10,” in recognition of the anniversary of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack.
Tensions also spilled off the pitch.
Staffers for the Irish team abruptly cut short a Saturday press conference with Irish head coach Heimir Hallgrímsson after a tense back-and-forth between Israeli journalists and Ireland’s press officer, Kieran Crowley.
While both Hallgrímsson and Israeli coach Ran Ben-Shimon, in his separate meeting with the media, insisted their focus remained on the game itself, Ireland’s press conference took a turn when an Israeli journalist asked Hallgrímsson for his thoughts on the flydubai hijacking last week.
“What do you say about the people that you support? Their ideology is based on murder,” the reporter asked. “Just this week, one of them tried to kill 170 Israeli passengers, including 27 innocent children and thousands of others.”
Crowley interrupted, saying, “We are not doing any questions like this today. We are doing football questions.”
Another Israeli reporter then asked Hallgrímsson about his team calling Israeli players “monkeys” during the Sept. 27 match. Crowley again interrupted, saying, “That is completely untrue. … That’s a lie. You’ve just broadcast a lie.”
The press conference was then cut off, as the reporter argued with a staffer who confiscated the microphone. UEFA barred the two Israeli reporters from the postgame media gathering on Sunday.
The incident came after months of controversy leading up to the Sept. 27 match between the two sides, which Ireland faced intense pressure to boycott. Ireland has a long history of pro-Palestinian policies and anti-Israeli sentiment.
There were additional signs of tension on the field, with Ireland’s head of athletic performance, Damien Doyle, alleging that an Israeli player spat at him as the teams left the field at the end of the first half. Israel’s football association denied the accusation.
After the match, Hallgrímsson called on UEFA to ensure the two teams do not face each other in the future.
“That’s not ours to decide, that’s UEFA,” he said. “I wouldn’t want or wish any national team to go through what we have gone through these two weeks. UEFA needs to step in and do something.”
Hallgrímsson also indicated that he had made a “mistake” by sharing his stance on the war in Gaza. In the lead-up to the matches, he had told reporters, “We’re not playing with genocide, we’re playing against genocide. We’re playing against Israel, we’re not playing with Israel.”
On Sunday, Hallgrímsson added that “my feelings and my opinions should be set aside when I am spokesman for an organisation.”
Sunday’s game included Irish player Finn Azaz, whose mother has Israeli heritage, as a substitute.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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How Jim Bakker sent a rabbi’s son to 52 churches
Jim Bakker convinced me to go to church.
Bakker died Monday at 86. For a stretch in the 1980s he and his wife, Tammy Faye, were on television every day, praying, singing and weeping, her in waterproof mascara, in front of as many as 13 million people. Then came the sex scandal, the hush money and the fraud trial.
And yet, he became my gateway into Christianity.
I’m an Orthodox rabbi’s son who grew up in the Bible Belt, which made me a spiritual window-shopper. My bedroom window looked out across the street at Cokesbury Methodist Church. Every Sunday morning, I watched the families climb out of their minivans in khakis and pastels, smiling like people who had never once wondered whether turning on a light switch counted as work on Shabbat.
We didn’t have cable. Regular TV in our house was already a negotiation, and a channel devoted to Jesus wasn’t even up for discussion.
Then I went off to college, moved out on my own, and one of my first acts of rebellion was ordering basic cable. I flipped on the Cartoon Network, a channel that showed animated classics around the clock, and wondered if this was what the Messianic age felt like.
On Sunday mornings, on channel after channel, I stumbled across pastors preaching to their congregations. What hooked me wasn’t the theology; the sermons seemed more like self-help seminars. It was the production. Where I came from, worship was a closed-door affair, in Hebrew, for members only. Here it was a show, with a band and cameras.
The format Bakker perfected inspired others: the tears, the house band, the host who knew exactly where the camera was. I couldn’t look away.
Heaven, with a gift shop
Bakker was born in Michigan in 1940 into a Pentecostal family, and he met Tammy Faye at Bible college. They married in 1961, after three dates, which, as a rabbi’s son who spent years in the dating trenches, I find both reckless and enviable. They drifted into television through Pat Robertson’s network, where they hosted a children’s show, and in 1976 they started their own ministry: PTL, short for Praise the Lord. At its peak, PTL drew as many as 13 million viewers a day and took in more than $100 million a year. Critics said PTL stood for “Pass the Loot.”
On 2,500 acres in Fort Mill, South Carolina, the Bakkers built Heritage USA, a Christian theme park with a hotel, water slides, skating and Bible study. They sold shares in it and offered lifetime vacations there to donors.
I’ll confess: I was jealous. Christians had a place you went to bring your family closer to God, with a gift shop and cotton candy. We had the Catskills and a very long buffet. I took this about as well as a kid whose neighbors have a swimming pool.
Then it all fell apart. In 1987 came the revelation of Bakker’s encounter with a church secretary, Jessica Hahn, and the $265,000 paid to keep it quiet. Fellow preachers lined up to condemn him, Jerry Falwell took over the ministry, and a federal inquiry followed. He was convicted of fraud in 1989 and sentenced to 45 years. He served five. Tammy Faye divorced him while he was in prison.
Bakker left prison in 1994, chastened. In a 1996 book called I Was Wrong, he wrote that Jesus had nothing good to say about money, a lesson he learned, as so many of us do, only after losing the water park. In 2003 he resurfaced in Branson, Missouri, hosting a new show from a café and selling viewers buckets of emergency food for the end of days.
The Jew on the Jumbotron
Soon, I had a plan of my own. I would spend a year going to 52 churches over 52 Sundays. Jewish tradition teaches that it’s verboten to go to church, especially during services. I planned to go as a journalistic endeavor and write a book about the experience.
Yet, I was still riddled with the guilt of my ancestors, so I went to my synagogue’s rabbi and asked his permission. To my surprise, he granted it on two conditions: I had to wear my press badge, so worshippers knew I was there to take notes and not to take part in prayer. The second condition was that I had to wear a yarmulke. People needed to know I was Jewish, the rabbi said. As if being short, bespectacled and named Benyamin Cohen didn’t already give that away.
Jim Bakker had put church on television. I was going to find out what happened when you stepped through the screen.
My wife, Elizabeth, a Christian minister’s daughter who had converted to Judaism, was still dripping wet from the mikvah and not exactly thrilled that her husband was going to spend a year in churches. She pointed out that I was about to become the first Orthodox Jew in history to qualify for a church loyalty card.
I started in the deep end, at New Birth Missionary Baptist Church, one of the country’s largest megachurches, home to 15,000 people on a typical Sunday. The sanctuary looked like a sports arena. A camera operator found me in the pews. Within seconds my shayna punim was 20-feet tall on Jesus’ Jumbotron for all to see. I had been there for all of five minutes and I was already outed as the Jew.
“Oh God,” I thought. “What if my dad could see me now?”
Watching church was Bakker’s big idea. At New Birth, the cameras roamed the pews and the congregation cheered at itself on the big screens. After years of watching church from my couch, I was the one in the shot.
I’d spent my childhood sure the grass was greener at the proverbial church across the street. It wasn’t. It was just better lit. Once the cameras and the choirs were gone, what I found were people trying, like me, to figure out how to believe, and some of them were doing it better than I was.
Hanging out with Jesus made me a better Jew, a sentence I never expected to write, and one my father never expected to hear.
The other Bakker
There was another Bakker I felt I knew.
I was born the same year as Jay Bakker, the son of Jim and Tammy Faye. He was 12 when his father was indicted. By 18, he’d co-founded Revolution, which eventually opened a branch in Atlanta, my hometown. The New York Times once described churches like it as meeting in “warehouses, bars, skate parks, punk clubs,” which is, to put it plainly, not where my synagogue held services.
In 2006, the Sundance Channel made a six-part series about him called One Punk Under God, and I was hooked. The camera was back on the Bakker family business, only now it followed the son, who seemed to be building the opposite of his parents’ church.
I felt a kinship with Jay that I couldn’t have explained then. We were both preachers’ kids, which meant your father’s job was also your religion, so you couldn’t be mad at one without it messing with the other. He titled his memoir Son of a Preacher Man, which is also what I called a chapter in mine.
His choices were harder than mine. My father never lost his congregation to a federal grand jury. While Jim Bakker went to Branson to sell apocalypse buckets and political prophecy, Jay went toward a gentler, more inclusive faith.
As I learned throughout my journey, a church built for television is only as strong as its ratings. The Jewish service I understand best would make terrible TV. On Yom Kippur we fast for 25 hours and act somberly. In the prayers, we confess in the plural, a whole congregation beating its chests together: we have sinned, not I.
Jim Bakker got me into church, and church sent me back to synagogue. Praise the Lord, as they used to say on his show. And, as we say in mine, amen.
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