When Erin Foster was converting to Judaism in 2019, she sat in front of the beit din, a council of rabbis who were assembled to pepper her with questions to test her knowledge of Judaism. “I thought it was pronounced baked in,” she told me over coffee in Manhattan this week. She recalled one of the rabbis asking her, “Are you ready to be hated?” and frankly, she thought the rabbi was being a little dramatic. “I was like, Come on, lady, no one hates Jews anymore. You’re just very sensitive to it. I grew up in LA, all my friends were Jewish!”
“The rabbi said, ‘Just wait.’ ”
When I met her this week in Tribeca, Foster was wearing a gray turtleneck, jeans, and a sweater from her brand, Favorite Daughter, which she created with her sister Sara. She was in town—from LA, where she still lives—to promote both the clothing line and another thing she created: Nobody Wants This, the rom-com juggernaut that returned to Netflix for its second season this week. It’s about a blonde sex podcaster who falls in love with a rabbi, and is loosely based on Foster’s own story: She fell in love with the music executive Simon Tikhman at 35, then converted to Judaism to marry him.
Foster, now 43, both writes the show and co-produces it with her sister. Her phone was blowing up while we were chatting—a Hollywood Reporter cover about season 2 was dropping the next day—but she was relaxed, and motorized. She ordered an almond milk latte before pausing to pick up a call from Justine Lupe, who plays Morgan, a version of her own sister. “Hello, my actress.”
