This comedy dating show is bringing dildos to synagogue
‘Love Isn’t Blind,’ the brainchild of comedian Allison Goldberg, is making shidduchs
Allison Goldberg, front, at one of her shows. Photo by Connor Linnerooth
By Mira Fox June 4, 2025
Since the pandemic, and all the social changes it wrought, dating has gotten impossible; apps dominate the market, making it feel nearly impossible to just meet someone in real life. Now it feels rude, or pushy, to say hello to someone at a bar or event. But swiping for hours on Tinder or Hinge or JSwipe can feel like staring into the abyss.
Maybe the answer is to look not to some new technology, but to the wisdom of the ages: getting set up by a matchmaker. Or your mom. Or a wingman. Or all of the above?
Enter Love Isn’t Blind, a live dating show hosted by comedian Allison Goldberg.
Each show, a single woman gets to meet and choose from four men, selected by Goldberg from a pool of applicants. But there’s one caveat: The men can’t speak. (Goldberg has also hosted queer versions of the show.) Instead, Goldberg goes through their phones to analyze what their search history, their Amazon purchases or their Reddit activity says about them. She calls their moms for revealing stories. At the end, the bachelorette gets to pick her date.
Surprisingly, when we spoke over the phone, Goldberg said that she doesn’t see herself in the position of matchmaker — though other people certainly do. Her draw to the job — which is her full-time gig, rotating between nine cities and adding more — is the comedy. Still, she takes her job seriously, and tries to set up real matches, including a couple that’s now getting married.
“I want this to be a show for nice, smart people with jobs and hobbies,” she said. “If you would be on a typical reality dating show, I don’t want you.”
The show is ribald and raucous. Sexual kinks and fetishes take center stage. Goldberg passes out psychedelic mushrooms as a reward for any audience member who manages to set up a couple in the crowd. (The audience wears wristbands denoting their status and a few helpers wearing literal wings also help attendees meet singles throughout the show.)
Perhaps none of this sounds like an obvious fit for a synagogue; imagine waving one of the show’s main props, a somewhat flaccid purple dildo, on the bimah. But the next show, this Saturday, will be at Temple Beth Israel in the Highland Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, and Goldberg will do exactly that. All the contestants — and, more importantly, all their moms — will be Jewish. And most exciting, LA’s youngest senior rabbi, 29-year-old Alex Weisz, will be on the auction block as one of the participants.
If getting to matchmake their sons sounds like every Jewish mom’s dream — well, Goldberg said it is. “The moms are out of control. I always joke I’m not going to roast you — but your mom might,” she told me over the phone. “This is true for all shows, but especially the Jewish moms.”
The comedian has done one synagogue show before, in the Bay Area; 300 people attended. She had been nervous about bringing her sex-and-drug-filled comedy show to a temple, but the rabbi, Zvika Krieger, told her to bring it on. The show was so popular that she began to receive applicants who asked to be on stage for her next Jewish show, hoping to meet their beshert.
The Jewish shows are tailored a bit to their setting, but not by dialing down the risqué factor. Instead, the host digs up her featured bachelors’ bar mitzvah photos and asks them how bad their lactose intolerance is. And of course, their moms always add a twist. Like one who pivoted to marketing her son to the featured bachelorette to trying to get Goldberg herself to go out with him.
Goldberg pointed out that even outside of the synagogue, the “regular” Love Isn’t Blind shows feel pretty Jewish; Goldberg’s own Jewishness comes up in the shows whether she’s talking about childhood photos or threesomes. “My friends joke that, Ally, you are so obviously Jewish that this isn’t different from your other show,” she said. “As soon as I start speaking people are like: Where’d you go to summer camp?”
Before Oct. 7, the comedian said she wouldn’t have done Jewish-specific shows, though plenty of Jews pop up in her regular ones. She’s not religious, and she wants the shows to be inclusive. She’s supportive of interfaith marriages. She doesn’t see herself as a shadchen, trying to ensure Jewish continuity through creating Jewish couples.
But, she felt that, especially after Oct. 7, Jews were seeking more community. And dating was getting particularly hard; on apps, people were writing “no Zionists” on their profiles. Being Jewish just felt loaded. So she wanted to give Jews some good PR — not only to set people up, but to make Jewishness fun again, instead of constantly the centerpiece to discussions about geopolitics and antisemitism.
“I pass out mushrooms and we talk about pegging,” Goldberg said. “The fact that there’s rabbis that want me to bring my fucked-up show to their synagogue, that makes me so happy.”
