Degree

BS (Social Sciences & Liberal Arts)

Faculty / School

School of Economics and Social Sciences (SESS)

Department

Department of Social Sciences & Liberal Arts

Date of Award

Spring 2026

Date of Submission

2026-07-25

Advisor

Palvashay Sethi, Lecturer, Department of Social Sciences

Project Type

SSLA Culminating Experience

Access Type

Restricted Access

Keywords

Netflix; algorithmic culture; media representation; Jewish identity; Palestinian  identity;

Abstract

This thesis examines how Netflix extends unequal terms of belonging to two minority identities through a comparative reading of two near-simultaneous Netflix Original comedies: Nobody Wants This (2024), a Jewish-American romance, and Mo (2022), a Palestinian-American immigration dramedy. Both are formally accomplished and authored from within the communities they portray, yet each offers its protagonists a markedly different contract with the mainstream Western screen. I argue that Nobody Wants This functions as cultural reassurance against antisemitism, rendering Jewishness central, desirable, and beloved by default, while Mo frames Muslim and Palestinian identity through conditional acceptance and precarity, granting belonging only under examination. Drawing on Nathan Abrams's New Jew, Evelyn Alsultany's simplified complex representation, an analytic I term refined Islamophobia, Rijke and van Teeffelen's sumud, and Judith Butler's account of grievability, the study proceeds through close textual analysis of selected episodes and, in its final chapter, a platform and infrastructural analysis grounded in publicly available evidence rather than proprietary data. It contends that the asymmetry established at the level of the text does not terminate there but is reproduced and hardened by Netflix's discoverability architecture, so that belonging on the contemporary streaming platform is decided twice, once by the text and once by the infrastructure that carries it, and that both decisions point the same way. Situated across the rupture of October 2023, the thesis brings representation scholarship into contact with platform studies to argue that conditional acceptance in the age of algorithmic culture is no longer principally a question of who is depicted, but of who must be searched for and who is effortlessly found.

Pages

50

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