Growing up in a Reform-meets-atheist household where my H&H bagel-slicing skills were deemed far more important than learning my Torah portion for a bat mitzvah that I didn’t want in the first place and my parents didn’t want to pay for, I gleaned most of my knowledge of Jewish faith and tradition not in temple, but in front of the television.
The first TV rabbi that I can remember seeing appeared—like so many good things—in Sex and the City; I watched, rapt, as Charlotte York attempted to convert to Judaisim out of love for her bald, bullish, very Jewish boyfriend Harry Goldenblatt, only to have her local rabbi reject her three times (which is apparently a real thing?) before grudgingly inviting her over for Shabbos dinner with his family. By Season 1 of And Just Like That… two decades later, Charlotte York-Goldenblatt had become a full-on Jewish mother with Hari Nef as her family’s rabbi. (Quite the upgrade!)
Watching Nef—a Jewish actress who first broke out playing a Weimar Germany-era trans woman on Transparent—perform a joyful, extremely chic “they mitzvah” for Charlotte’s nonbinary child Rock felt like the ultimate sign that we, as a faith, had evolved past staid, Fiddler on the Roof-coded depictions of Jewish spiritual leaders onscreen and into a more vibes-based rabbinical era.
There have, of course, been a few hotties along the way: Mandy Patinkin as a dripping wet yeshiva student in Yentl; Ben Stiller as Rabbi Jake Schram in 2000’s Keeping the Faith. But now, a few years after Kathryn Hahn played the beautiful, good-hearted, fuckboy-dating Rabbi Raquel on Transparent (inspiring me to don a modest dress and a tallit one Halloween), we have Adam Brody starring as a rabbi on the new Netflix rom-com series Nobody Wants This. Seeing The O.C.’s Seth Cohen—one of television’s first truly infatuation-worthy, non-assimilated Nice Jewish Boys—take on perhaps the most exalted role in the Jewish spiritual world makes me feel a) quite old and b) glad to see the rabbi enter cool, down-to-earth, romantic-lead territory.
