Steve Leder, who advised the Netflix rom-com's first season on Jewish authenticity, says the actor's recent genocide remark proves he should have stayed quiet.
Adam Brody plays a rabbi for a living. Now a real one is telling him to pipe down.
Steve Leder, who served as the technical adviser on Season 1 of Nobody Wants This, posted a video on Instagram this week calling Brody a "relatively ignorant Jew" over comments the actor made about the war in Gaza. The clip landed days before the Netflix rom-com returns for its third season on October 22.
The trigger was a line from Brody's recent GQ interview. Asked where he stood on the conflict, he didn't dodge. "Put me down as thinking it's a genocide," he said. "Put me down as wanting a free Palestine. 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."
Leder wasn't having it. "Your pronouncement the other day about a genocide in Gaza was truly shocking," he said, addressing Brody directly. "There is no genocide in Gaza, there are genocides happening in other countries." He went further, comparing Brody's phrasing to booking a dinner reservation. "Being so flippant about a word like genocide, 'hey put me down for genocide,' like you're asking for a table for two at Craig's, is disgusting," he said, before adding, "If you know nothing about something, you should say nothing about it."
Worth noting: Leder's framing isn't the final word on the matter. The United Nations, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have all used the word genocide to describe Israel's conduct in Gaza, a classification Israel rejects. Brody didn't cite any of those bodies by name in his GQ comments, but he's hardly alone among them in reaching for the term.
Leder isn't a random Instagram commentator either. He spent 37 years as senior rabbi at Wilshire Boulevard Temple in Los Angeles, a synagogue with deep Hollywood ties going back to Louis B. Mayer and the Warner brothers, and it's where Nobody Wants This creator Erin Foster actually converted to Judaism. He stepped down from the pulpit in 2024 but remains a prominent voice in American Jewish life, the kind who writes books and shows up on national news.
Brody has never pretended to be an expert on his own faith. He's said before that he "barely got bar mitzvahed and retained nothing from it," a line that makes Leder's "ignorant" jab land a little sharper, intentionally or not.
Foster herself hasn't weighed in publicly on Brody's remarks. Leder, in his Instagram comments, said Foster's "personal views are clear" and that she "will not allow this to ruin her excellent work on the show," an apparent reference to her past comments supportive of Israel since October 7, 2023. Foster has previously said the show itself isn't the place to litigate the Israel-Palestine conflict.
None of this is expected to delay the October 22 premiere. Whether it follows Brody into the press tour is the open question now.
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