Two New York Jewish Exiles Kibbitz about Woody Allen

                                           

Alain:

As a Bourgeois New York Leftist Jew "in exile" in Minnesota, Woody Allen’s films express a great deal about me and the life "I could have lived."

I recently revisited Annie Hall. While not as funny as I remembered, there were many themes that were familiar and reminded me of several of his other works. My point of discussion is "The self-image of the Jew." I will be speaking in the grossest generalities, and speaking on behalf of my people in a way that is inexcusable. But I will ask you to excuse me nonetheless. J

What Woody Allen does is represent a certain self-image of the Jew as eternally suffering from their own displacement. It is not the simple "home sickness" of all traditional romanticism. Rather, it is the sense of not ever having had a place to start, to have always already been looking for a home that we have never had. (Maybe Derrida’s notion of an "originary supplement" would fit this description as well?)

Near the beginning of Annie Hall, Allen is telling a friend that a mutual acquaintance is both politically conservative and anti-Semitic, justifying this with the claim that he asks Allen questions like " How is he Jewing?" and "What are you Jewing Later?" "Could Jew pass me the bagel?" Besides the fact that I have had the same bizarre experience in Minnesota numerous times, it speaks to the Jewish belief that they are constantly the object of scorn and ridicule.

Perhaps the academic cliché of "The Jew" (Le Juif) as the signifier par excellence for the excluded, has never been as clearly articulated as it has by Allen. In several of his films he quotes the Groucho Marx line: "I wouldn’t want to belong to any club that would have me as a member." Why does that have a particular meaning for Jews? I would suggest that the centuries of real persecution have created an internal anguish of never being at home in one’s own skin. Either the club is lowering its standards to let me in (in which case it is unworthy and condescending) or I cannot accept that I (or "my people") have "arrived" to such a point that I somehow belong.

This also reminds me of scene from Stardust Memories (not one of his best films) where Allen has this repetitive dream in which he is riding on a train. It is filled with freaks and weirdoes, many of whom look "Semitic." He looks out the window and sees a train on parallel tracks, full of "beautiful" people laughing and having a great time. He starts to flirt with a very attractive, very "goyish" looking woman (which turns out to be Sharon Stone’s first appearance on film). She gestures to him that he should come over and join her train but Allen is trapped. In fact, his train and hers eventually break off, going in opposite directions. He longs to be on the beautiful train but he knows he will forever be stuck with the misfits.

Other than the personal neurosis that is involved in this account, does it not express something fundamental about a certain self-image of the Jew that seems rather dated? Having grown up watching Allen’s films, they certainly resonate with me personally. (While I did not marry Annie Hall (who was from Wisconsin), I did marry a shiksa and moved to the mid-west.) Yet many of the Jews I know that are my age or younger find it completely foreign to their self-understanding? Why? I think it is because most American Jews have finally assimilated to such a degree that they do not feel this sense of alienation. That is not to say that many of them are not religious, or that they are not "proud" of their heritage. Rather, they have taken over and fully incorporated mainstream American values; to make it and participate in the American Dream is to achieve a certain level of economic success, or at least accept that success is defined in this way. Jews have simply given up their cultural distinctness and concern for others and exchanged it for the convenience of consumer culture. (In Hannah and Her Sisters, Allen thinks he is dying and tries to find meaning in his life. He visits various houses of worship and gurus. One day, after visiting a Catholic Church, he comes home with a bag of groceries. As he empties the bag, he takes out his bread, a jar of mayonnaise, and several pieces of Catholic paraphernalia, such as a bible and rosary beads.)

Likud Judaism has largely colonized America post 9/11 and so I wonder if Allen’s schtick has a place anymore? Perhaps because I am still not a member of the club, his brand of Jewish self-effacement still has appeal.

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Alphonse:

This resonates for me in so many directions I don't know where to start.

Zelig

was on television here the other night; one is tempted to see it as a film that was made to be just the straight subtext of all the other films, standing alone without all the paraphernalia of narrative.

I grew up on 89th street and Riverside Dr. where of course I escaped even the slightest consciousness that being Jewish was at all unusual. Everyone was Jewish, whether Jewish or not, on the Upper West Side then. I'm not sure I even heard the word Jewish in childhood - what would be the need? Really it wasn't until I moved to England that I became aware that Woody Allen is really Jewish. It will sound weird except to New Yorkers but his extra special Jewishness never occurred to me - I just didn't see it. But as far as his audience outside NY is concerned, he belongs to an us - and in England journalists still write international Jewry in the newspaper to refer to that us - not to Hollywood, not to America, not even to NY, but to Jews. Our property and our spokesperson. Through this realization about Woody Allen, whom everyone in Bath Spa somehow worked into conversations with me, baffling me for a time (Woody Allen, everyone talks about Woody Allen in Somerset? Who knew?) that I became aware that I am really Jewish, in other peoples eyes. And that this makes me exotic. (In the UK that is. In Paris this is not the case; no one knows, for example, which politicians are Jewish here, but in the UK, everyone knows which politicians are Jewish. A review in a British paper of Joshua Bell in recital managed to mention that he is Jewish. I never even would have wondered. Must have been a disappointment to those trying to compile the Great Goyish Violinists cd.)

But at the same time that my own and Woody Allen's Jewishness were always invisible to me, my NewYorkerness wasn't, and perhaps - and perhaps Woody Allen is even to blame for this - stood in its place. That New Yorker Magazine cover which showed the rest of the US as a thin line at the end of NY really captured something, but missed the actual fear instilled in children of the Upper West Side in the 70s of the rest of the country. I remember my father telling me of his time in the army he spent in Biloxi, Mississippi. The whole idea of Biloxi, Mississippi to me was terrifying. As terrifying as Nazi Germany. A foreign, frightening place I would never willingly go and would expect to be unwelcome. It certainly wasn't 'my country.' Nothing was, except NY.

That homelessness thing you speak of: its curious that Woody Allen riffs on it - on Jewishness per se - specifically as a form of over emotional, romanticized place-belonging, of the ersatz semi-voluntary and yet ineluctable citizenship of NewYorkerness; its hard to untangle what in Allen is revealing or satirizing or commenting on Jewishness (homelessness) and what is commenting on passionate NewYorkerness (an excess of rootedness, an obsession with a fairly small urban locale.) In Husbands and Wives, the Allen character is talking to Farrow, his wife, about wanting to spend time in Europe, live in Paris for a while, and she bursts his balloon with a reminder that he can't survive off the island of Manhattan for more than 24 hours. It's a joke, but only a slight exageration of the New Yorkerness I grew up around - which included a suspicion that we - New Yorkers, but I understand now the modifier was Jews - really couldn't survive elsewhere. The character of that horror fantasy was formed by the film Deliverance. Which took place, as far as I was concerned, simply in "America." Somewhere outside New York City.

(Surely that New Yorkerness is a variation on the theme of universal gentile anti-semitism found in Herzl and analyzed by Arendt. The tangle of 'rootless cosmopolitanism' and the fetishizing and romanticism of the cosmopolis - Berlin and Paris before NY - as specifically a replacement for a homeland, a safe haven of a different order than a national homeland, a beloved physical place with beloved cultural traditions, accents, habits, is pretty knotty.)

My Jewish exoticism is very new to me, but I find the New Yorkerness is natural and grows more visible and detailed to me outside NY; I only recently became aware that there has been a sort of displacement. My New Yorkerness - asked about my nationality or my ethnicity here, I always, unthinking, say 'New Yorker' not 'American' and not 'Jewish' - is obviously both a flight from Americanness and an adaptation of Jewishness, the form of Jewishness instilled in me, attached to an island concieved of as a kind of refuge, a little refugee colony, rather than a patria. I lay the credit or blame for that partly at Woody Allen's door.