Nick Jonas plays Jamie, an ascending author who is sick of dating Jewish women, in the Broadway version of Jason Robert Brown’s The Last Five Years Photo by Matthew Murphy

By Samuel Eli Shepherd April 9, 2025

In Jason Robert Brown’s 2001 musical The Last Five Years, now playing on Broadway, the main character is ecstatic to date anyone other than a Jewish woman.

“If you had a tattoo, that wouldn’t matter. If you had a shaved head, that would be cool,” sings Jamie, a novelist, after his first date with Cathy, an actress.

“If you came from Spain or Japan or the back of a van, just as long as you’re not from Hebrew school,” he continues. “I’d say, ‘Now I’m getting somewhere, I’m finally breaking through.’ Hey, hey, Shiksa Goddess, I have been waiting for someone like you.”

Forwarding the News

Thoughtful, balanced reporting from the Forward and around the web, bringing you updated news and analysis each day.

Terms(Required)

I agree to the Forward's Terms of Service and Privacy Policy

Email(Required)

“Shiksa Goddess” is the second song in the show, and it is also Jamie’s first time singing onstage. In it, a wide-eyed, 23-year-old Jamie glorifies Cathy after his first date while distancing himself as much as possible from his Jewish upbringing.

The song shows Jamie’s desire to explore the world as a young writer. It also illustrates his egotism. Jamie falls in love with Cathy because of who she isn’t — one of the many girls from his insular childhood — and because she can be his muse.

Nick Jonas, now playing Jamie on Broadway, takes on a slouch and a pair of glasses to play the Jewish character. “My people have suffered for thousands of years and I don’t give a shit,” sings Jonas, who is not Jewish. The line is usually awkward, but seeing a non-Jewish actor perform it on a Broadway stage makes it feel especially off-putting.

In 2025, Jamie’s song about falling in love with a “Shiksa Goddess” comes across as more demeaning than suave and self-deprecating. Even considering Jamie’s flawed character traits, the song — and the term shiksa — plays into harmful, outdated stereotypes.

From Irish stereotypes to Jewish ones

The Last Five Years tells the story of Jamie Wellerstein, a rising author, and Cathy Hiatt, a struggling actress, over the course of their failed five-year relationship. Jamie’s story is told in chronological order, whereas Cathy’s story is told in reverse. The characters only sing together during their wedding vows in the middle, and when they say their goodbyes/hellos at the end.

The musical is loosely based on Jason Robert Brown’s first marriage. “Shiksa Goddess,” Jamie’s opening number, wasn’t even supposed to be in the original version of the show.

Brown had initially written a song called “I Could Be In Love With Someone Like You” instead, in which Jamie sings about having a “yen for an Irish lass.” But Cathy’s Irish background allegedly resembled the details of his first marriage a little too closely, so Brown removed all references to Cathy being Irish from the show.

Brown, who is Jewish, wrote “Shiksa Goddess” to replace it, and the song has been in every production of The Last Five Years since it premiered off-Broadway in 2001. The lyrics make no jokes about Irish culture, but they are rife with damaging stereotypes about Jewish women.

In one verse, Jamie starts listing Jewish women he has dated in the past as if they are Pokémon. “I’ve been waiting through Heather Greenblatt, Annie Mincus, Karen Pincus and Lisa Katz,” he rap-sings. “I’ve had Shabbas dinner on Friday nights,” he continues, “with every Shapiro in Washington Heights.”

Aside from the obviously stereotypically Ashkenazi Jewish names — I went through 10 years of Hebrew school and never met anyone named Karen Pincus — the women are all presented as goalposts for Jamie to zoom through on his path to success.

This writing could be excused as an insight into Jamie’s dismissive attitude toward women, foreshadowing an event later on, but Brown never gives the Jewish women a chance to sing for themselves.

The shameful history of ‘shiksas’

The titular term in “Shiksa Goddess” is a derisive word for a non-Jewish woman that derives from the Hebrew root letters, “Shagatz.”

“The word associated with that is ‘untouchable, Halachically,’” said David Braun, director of Yiddish language studies at the YIVO Institute.

In the Bible, Shagatz was often the root letters of a verb associated with carcasses and non-kosher animals. “The verb means, stay away from it, be disgusted by it, it shall be revolting onto you,” Braun explained.

The term eventually made its way into the Yiddish language, where it became a noun used to describe unmarried, non-Jewish women.

“There was a pejorative tone for it,” said Rukhl Shaechter, editor of the Yiddish edition of the Forward. “When Jews in Eastern Europe used the word shiks-eh, it was usually a peasant girl, uneducated, maybe illiterate.”

When Jews came to America, shiks-eh became shiksa, and it was still used as an insult to describe someone who wasn’t Jewish, or in some Orthodox communities, someone who wasn’t Jewish enough.

But like many Yiddish words brought to America, shiksa eventually took on another, new connotation in the New World. No longer something to be revolted by, the “Yinglish” version of shiksa became a new ideal of assimilation.

“Suddenly a shiksa started becoming a woman who is upper class, educated, beautiful,” Shaechter said. “And what better way to Americanize a Jewish man than to marry an upper-class, non-Jewish woman, a WASP?”

The newer, sexier shiksa became a staple of 20th-century Jewish American pop culture. Philip Roth novels and Woody Allen films glorified the idea of a beautiful, healthy non-Jewish woman who falls in love with a nerdy and neurotic Jewish man.

More recently, the hit Netflix sitcom Nobody Wants This, about an attractive rabbi falling in love with a non-Jewish woman, addressed the term directly. In the series, which was originally supposed to be called Shiksa, the Jewish family’s closed-mindedness to Adam Brody’s Noah dating a non-Jewish woman drives the plot’s conflict. In one scene, Noah tries to convince his partner that the term is no longer offensive.

But Shaechter said that shiksa, even when used with positive intent, comes with demeaning cultural baggage. She compared the term to the Yiddish word schmuck, which most Americans use as a lighthearted synonym for being foolish or naive. In the original Yiddish, however, schmuck means penis, and is considered a grave insult.

“I think people do that a lot with Yiddish words, because they think it’s funny, because it’s Yiddish,” said Shaechter, referring to how Jewish Americans often pepper Yiddish terms in their speech. “But it has something attached to it that you may not realize could be hurtful.”

Can ‘Shiksa Goddess’ be redeemed?

Evan Tait, a theater teacher in Portland, Oregon, recently directed a community production of The Last Five Years, where he worked with a consultant to nail down the story’s Jewish themes. He said that “Shiksa Goddess,” if handled correctly, can be a window into Jamie’s psyche.

“I think the song can easily be a Mel Brooksian romp through the land of stereotype,” Tait told me over email. “But I think with the right director, it can show the imperfections Jamie has and foreshadow to the audience that it’s all an act.”

Tait said the song provides key insight into Jamie’s promiscuity — the flattening of Jewish women demonstrates his egotism, which foreshadows his own temptations later on. “He wants to be the single guy like he was in ‘Shiksa,’ where he is able to go through woman after woman and damn the consequences, and that’s not the times we are in now,” Tait said.

Performers have changed lyrics in “Shiksa Goddess” before. When Jewish actress Caissie Levy performed “Shiksa Goddess” at a Broadway MisCast concert in 2018, she changed the last line of the lyric “If you have a powerful connection to your firearm collection,” from “…draw a bead and shoot” to “…well actually, that one’s a deal-breaker.” The crowd applauded the change.

There is also a transphobic line that has been reworked for Broadway. In the original cast recording, when Jamie lists all things that wouldn’t matter about Cathy, he includes, “If you once were in jail or you once were a man.” When I saw the new version, Jonas instead sings, “If you once were in jail, I’m not upset.”

But fixing the inherent sliminess of “Shiksa Goddess” would require more than just a few lyric swaps. In the song, Brown reclaims an offensive term dating back to biblical times and tries to repackage it as something exotic and aspirational. In doing so, he overcompensates by having Jamie take down Jewish women and Jewish history with him — something that comes across as more culturally suicidal than charming — while also objectifying Cathy.

On Broadway, I saw a white former Disney star play a nerdy Jewish man while denigrating Jewish history and making jokes about Zabar’s. I also saw Adrienne Warren, who is Black and plays Cathy with heartfelt vocal prowess, described again and again as a foreign “shiksa” who will bring shame upon Jamie’s family. All this left a sour taste in my mouth that distracted from otherwise poignant, passionate performances — even as Warren’s radiant Cathy outshone Jonas’ more muted, stereotypical portrayal.

Theater aficionados deserve better, more rounded representation of women and Jewish characters than what Brown offers in “Shiksa Goddess.” Maybe “Gentile Goddess” or “non-Jewish women goddess” would be less offensive song titles. But even better would be a song where Jamie defines Cathy by who she is, not by the peoplehood he is trying to flee.

Whether a Jew or a Jonas brother is playing Jamie, it is time for The Last Five Years to break up with “Shiksa Goddess” once and for all.

The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.

Now more than ever, American Jews need independent news they can trust, with reporting driven by truth, not ideology. We serve you, not any ideological agenda.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.

Readers like you make it all possible. We’re in the middle of our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we have a very ambitious goal of $127,000 by April 21.

This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism you rely on. Make a Passover gift today!

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Make a Passover Gift Today!

$90 $180

$360

Other amount