Rabbi who coached Adam Brody for ‘Nobody Wants This’ calls him ‘ignorant Jew’ over Gaza ‘genocide’ comments

JTA – The rabbi who coached Adam Brody for Netflix’s Nobody Wants This has bashed him for saying that Israel committed “genocide” in Gaza. 

Steve Leder, the former senior rabbi of Wilshire Boulevard Temple in Los Angeles, served as a consultant on depictions of Judaism for season 1 of Nobody Wants This, a rom-com in which Brody plays a rabbi who falls for an agnostic non-Jewish podcaster. 

Leder denounced Brody on Wednesday over recent comments in which the Jewish actor for the first time publicly expressed his views on Israel’s actions in Gaza. Brody told GQ magazine, “Put me down as thinking it’s a genocide. Put me down as wanting a free Palestine.” 

Leder said in an Instagram video that Brody’s statements were “truly shocking”, “flippant”, and “disgusting”, asserting his own view that “there is no genocide in Gaza”. 

“You, by your own admission, are a relatively ignorant Jew, and your ignorance really showed the other day,” said Leder. “If you’re going to use a word like genocide, you ought to know what it means.” 

Leder appeared to be referring to Brody’s previous descriptions of his limited Jewish education. Brody has said he is an atheist who “barely got Barmitzvahed and retained nothing from it”, adding that he prepared for the role of rabbi Noah Roklov in Nobody Wants This by attending a Shabbat service and working through books, podcasts, and documentaries about Judaism. 

Brody played high-profile Jewish characters, including Seth Cohen in The O.C. and Seth Morris in Fleishman Is in Trouble, before Nobody Wants This, which returns for a third season on 22 October. 

The show itself has conspicuously avoided the subject of Israel. Nobody Wants This creator Erin Foster – who converted to Judaism in Leder’s synagogue – told The Free Press last year that she made a deliberate choice not to deal with the issue. 

“We never say Israel or Palestine in the show, and that’s intentional because I think it would be a distraction and that this is just not the show to tell that story,” said Foster. 

Brody told GQ that the Gaza war, alongside other national and global crises in recent years, revealed that he and his Hollywood peers were not as “like-minded” as he had previously believed. 

“Between COVID-19, a second Trump term, Israel-Gaza, it’s really brought out some different beliefs that I was ignorant to, and then disheartened by,” he said. 

Israel’s actions in Gaza have divided the entertainment industry – and Jewish stars. While celebrities such as Jerry Seinfeld, Gal Gadot, and Amy Schumer have voiced support for Israel since the Hamas attacks on 7 October, other Jewish actors, including Hannah Einbinder and Wallace Shawn, have said that Israel subsequently committed “genocide”.