How have Adam Brody’s “Nobody Wants This” colleagues responded to his pro-Palestine comments?

Key Points

• On Sept. 25, Brody called Israel’s actions in Gaza “a genocide” in an interview with GQ.

• Several people associated with Brody’s Netflix series Nobody Wants This have publicly criticized his comments.

• Series creator Erin Foster said she “disagrees” with Brody but emphasized that it’s “okay” for them to have differing opinions.

Adam Brody has been making headlines for his recent remarks about Palestine — and some of his colleagues are pushing back.

Brody currently stars on the Netflix series Nobody Wants This as Rabbi Noah Roklov, opposite Kristen Bell, who plays agnostic, sex-positive podcaster Joanne Williams. The two form an unlikely romantic bond but have to learn how to navigate their religious and cultural differences.

“Put me down as thinking it’s a genocide. Put me down as wanting a free Palestine,” the actor, who is Jewish, told GQ on Sept. 25. “It’s awful that it’s taken so much death and misery, but it does feel like it’s reaching a breaking point that it should have a while ago. I’m hopeful that another administration can really do some good and correct some of these policies that are helping that situation be as awful as it is.”

Since then, several people associated with Nobody Wants This have publicly disagreed with Brody’s comments. Below, we’ve rounded up what his costars and collaborators have said in response.

Erin Foster

On the Oct. 27 episode of the Not Skinny But Not Fat podcast, Nobody Wants This creator Erin Foster acknowledged that she disagreed with Brody’s comments but emphasized that it was okay for them to disagree.

“You know, it’s complicated,” Foster began after host Amanda Hirsch asked how she felt about Brody’s interview in which he spoke critically of Israeli military actions in Gaza. “I think our work environment, our set is very similar to dinner tables around the world where people are having debate and discussion and disagreeing.”

Foster, who converted to Judaism before marrying music executive Simon Tikhman, said she disagreed with Brody, explaining, “While I love Adam, I also disagree with him,” before adding, “And that’s okay.”

“I think that as the creator of the show, all I can say is that I want our Jewish fans to know that I see you and I hear you and I understand how you feel. And the show has always been and always will be a love letter to Judaism,” Foster continued. “That is why I made this show. It’s because of how beautiful of an experience I’ve had becoming Jewish and being a Jewish person, and sitting here right now at this time in the world where there is almost zero positive representation of Jewish people, I think it’s so important to have that.”

Tovah Feldshuh

Tovah Feldshuh, who plays the mother of Brody’s character, harshly criticized her onscreen son’s comments — though she didn’t name him outright. In an interview published by the New York Post on Oct. 25, Feldshuh said, “To accuse the Jewish people of genocide is wild. It’s right out of Hitler’s playbook. You take the victim and you make the victim the perpetrator.”

“I believe that the perseverance of the existence of the state of Israel is crucial to the well-being of the democratic world and of the free world,” she continued. “Of course, Israel needs the United States, [but] the United States needs Israel, believe you me.”

When asked whether accusations of genocide are worse when made by Jewish people themselves, Feldshuh said that it “makes a difference to the [Jewish] community,” and added later that “we’re in a time where we have the ‘horseshoe effect,’ where socialism and antisemitism are trying to meet.”

However, the Broadway star said that she doesn’t let political disagreements affect how she treats her colleagues. “My job, as Bina but also as Tovah, is to love the people on set at my place of work, to be kind,” she noted.

Rabbi Steve Leder

Rabbi Steve Leder served as a Jewish consultant on the first season of the series, and he had some choice words for Brody as well. In a video posted to Instagram on Sept. 30, Leder went so far as to call Brody a “relatively ignorant Jew.” He also described Brody’s comments as “truly shocking” and criticized his use of the word “genocide” as “flippant” and “disgusting,” while asserting his own opinion that “there is no genocide in Gaza.”

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“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 was apparently referring to previous statements Brody had made about his Jewish upbringing in an interview with The New York Times, in which he noted that he “barely got bar mitzvahed and retained nothing from it,” and described himself as an atheist.

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