Woody on Rye

Woody on Rye Brandeis Series in American Jewish History, Culture, and Life Jonathan D. Sarna, Editor•Sylvia Barack Fishman, Associate Editor For a complete list of books that are available in the series, visit www.upne.com Vincent Brook and Amy Neustein, editor Marat Grinberg, editors Tempest in the Temple: Jewish Woody on Rye: Jewishness in the Films Communities and Child Sex Scandals and Plays of Woody Allen Jack Wertheimer, editor Mark Cohen Learning and Community: Jewish Overweight Sensation: The Life and Supplementary Schools in the Twenty- Comedy of Allan Sherman first Century David E. Kaufman Carole S. Kessner Jewhooing the Sixties: American Marie Syrkin: Values Beyond the Self Celebrity and Jewish Identity — Sandy Leonard Saxe and Barry Chazan Koufax, Lenny Bruce, Bob Dylan, and Ten Days of Birthright Israel: Barbra Streisand A Journey in Young Adult Identity Jack Wertheimer, editor Jack Wertheimer, editor The New Jewish Leaders: Reshaping Imagining the American Jewish the American Jewish Landscape Community Eitan P. Fishbane and Murray Zimiles Jonathan D. Sarna, editors Gilded Lions and Jeweled Horses: The Jewish Renaissance and Revival Synagogue to the Carousel in America Marianne R. Sanua Jonathan B. Krasner Be of Good Courage: The American The Benderly Boys and American Jewish Committee, 1945–2006 Jewish Education Hollace Ava Weiner and Kenneth D. Derek Rubin, editor Roseman, editors Promised Lands: New Jewish American Lone Stars of David: The Jews ofTexas Fiction on Longing and Belonging Jack Wertheimer, editor Susan G. Solomon Jewish Education in an Age of Choice Louis I. Kahn’s Jewish Architecture: Edward S. Shapiro Mikveh Israel and the Midcentury Crown Heights: Blacks, Jews, and the American Synagogue 1991 Brooklyn Riot Edited by Vincent Brook and Marat Grinberg Brandeis University Press•Waltham, Massachusetts Jewishness in the Films and Plays of Woody Allen Brandeis University Press An imprint of University Press of New England www.upne.com © 2014 Brandeis University All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Designed and typeset by Mindy Basinger Hill Typeset in Arno Pro University Press of New England is a member of the Green Press Initiative. The paper used in this book meets their minimum requirement for recycled paper. For permission to reproduce any of the material in this book, contact Permissions, University Press of New England, One Court Street, Suite 250, Lebanon NH 03766; or visit www.upne.com. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Woody on rye : Jewishness in the films and plays of Woody Allen / edited by Vincent Brook and Marat Grinberg. pages cm. — (Brandeis series in American Jewish history, culture, and life) ISBN 978–1–61168–479–7 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978–1–61168–480–3 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978–1–61168–481–0 (ebook) 1. Allen, Woody—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Jews in popular culture—United States. 3. Popular culture—Religious aspects—Judaism. I. Brook, Vincent, 1946– editor of compilation. II. Grinberg, Marat, 1977– editor of compilation. PN1998.3. A45W76 2013 791.43092—dc23 2013017426 5 4 3 2 1 Contents Introduction•Vincent Brook and Marat Grinberg ix Overview The Gospel According to Woody: FromAnnie Hall through To Rome with Love• Vincent Brook 3 Comparative Analysis The Birth of a Hebrew Tragedy:Cassandra’s Dream as a Morality Play in the Context of Crimes and Misdemeanors and Match Point• Marat Grinberg 37 A Jew Leaves New York: Woody Allen’s Gloomy British Angst• Curtis Maloley 58 Schlemiel Theory Woody Allen’s Schlemiel: From Humble Beginnings to an Abrupt End• Menachem Feuer 79 “Woody the Gentile”: Christian-Jewish Interplay in Allen’s Films from What’s New Pussycat? to Midnight in Paris• Joshua Louis Moss 100 “Now You See Him, Now You Don’t”: Woody Allen’s Vanishing Act in Scoop• Peter J. Bailey 122 Women’s Issues Woody’s Women: Jewish Domesticity and the Unredeemed Ghost of Hanukkah to Come• Giovanna P. Del Negro 143 Reconstructing Woody: Representations of Religious Jewish Women in Deconstructing Harry• Shaina Hammerman 171 “Toot, Toot, Tootsie! (Goodbye)”: Disposable Women in the Films of Woody Allen• Elliot Shapiro 190 Cultural Studies Digesting Woody: Food and Foodways in the Movies of Woody Allen• Nathan Abrams 215 Schlemiel on Broadway: Woody Allen’s Jewish Identity in His Stage Plays from Don’t Drink the Water to Honeymoon Motel• James Fisher 235 Woody Allen: Filmography 259 Woody Allen: Play List 261 List of Contributors 263 Index 267 Woody Allen Retires [along with the Pope]. Two World Religions Now Leaderless! •Jewish Journal, 2013 Purim issue headline1 Vincent Brook and Marat Grinberg Introduction “You don’t have to be Jewish to appreciate Woody Allen, but it helps.” Thus quipped Foster Hirsch in the “Jewish Connection” chapter of his 1981 study of Allen’s films,Love, Sex, Death, and the Meaning of Life.2 As the title of this book proposes, Hirsch’s one-liner — if expanded to the Jewishness of Allen’s oeuvre and extended to the present — still holds. Cu- riously, however, few scholars have taken up the “Jewish question” in the three decades since Hirsch first broached it, even fewer since the major fissure in Allen’s career caused by the Mia Farrow/Soon-Yi Previn scandal of 1992/93. Jeffrey Rubin-Dorsky’s article “Woody Allen after the Fall: Literary Gold from Amoral Alchemy” (2003), which touches on Jewish issues and whose title foregrounds the scandal’s significance, is a notable exception.3 Yet Rubin-Dorsky’s analysis ends with Deconstructing Harry (1997), thus leaving Jewishness in Allen’s overall body of work, especially his more recent efforts, still largely unexplored. Hirsch himself, in subsequent updates of Love, Sex, Death, and the Mean- ing of Life in 1990 and 2001, has left his original “Jewish Connection” chapter unchanged. Mashey Bernstein’s 1996 essay “My Worst Fears Realized: Woody Allen and the Holocaust,” in an exhaustive list of Holocaust refer- ences in Allen’s films, similarly stops at 1992’sShadows and Fog.4 Ruth B. Johnston’s “Joke Work: The Construction of Postmodern Jewish Identity in Contemporary Theory and American Film” (2003) retreats toAnnie Hall (1977) as the fulcrum for her psychoanalytic study of Allen’s Jewish-in- flected humor.5 Charles L. P. Silet’s 2006 anthology, The Films of Woody Allen: Critical Essays, contains three entries (out of twenty-four) dealing with Allen’s Jewishness: Sanford Pinsker’s “Woody Allen’s Lovable Anxious x Brook & Grinberg•Introduction Schlemiels,” Mark Bleiweiss’s “Self-Deprecation and the Jewish Humor of Woody Allen,” and Iris Bruce’s “Mysterious Illnesses of Human Commod- ities in Woody Allen and Franz Kafka:Zelig .” Yet all three fail to expand the discussion into the postscandal period; indeed, no mention is made of the scandal in the entire anthology, much less of its possible impact on Allen’s work.6 Even the latest entry in the fray, a 2012 issue of Post Script devoted exclusively to Allen’s post-1990 output, has only one Jewish-themed article — Toni-Lynn Frederick’s “Eleventh Jew: Humor and the Holocaust in Woody Allen’s Anything Else” — that tiptoes into the post-2000 period.7 The curious reluctance to more fully examine Jewishness in Allen’s “complete works” is highlighted in Vittorio Hösle’sWoody Allen: An Essay on the Nature of the Comical (2007). In an eighty-seven-page disquisition that manages to tie Allen to Aristophanes, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Bergson, Cervantes, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy, among others, Hösle waits for the final paragraph to submit that “Allen’s comic universe” owes something to his “Jewish form of intellectuality.”8 This puts serious investigation of Jewishness in Allen’s pre- and postscandal output about where it was in 1993. In addition to Hirsch’s chapter and the aforementioned essays, this includes the following: Gerald Mast’s “Woody Allen: The Neurotic Jew as American Clown” (1987); Richard Feldstein’s “Displaced Feminine Representation in Woody Allen’s Cinema” (1989); Richard Freadman’s “Love among the Stereotypes, or Why Woody’s Women Leave” (1993); Sam B. Girgus’s “Philip Roth and Woody Allen: Freud and the Humor of the Repressed” (1993); the lengthy Allen section in David Desser and Lester Friedman’s American-Jewish Filmmakers (1993); and Thomas Kinne’s German dissertation Elemente jüdischer Tradition im Werk Woody Allens (Traditional Jewish elements in Woody Allen’s work; also 1993). The lack of a more all-inclusive discussion of Jewishness in Allen’s work has not gone unnoticed. Danielle Berrin, in a review of a 2011 PBS documen- tary on Allen’s career, found it curious that for all the “Jewish men involved with the project [director Robert Weide, executive producer Bret Ratner, and financier Fisher Williams], there is little in the film that deals with Allen’s Jewish identity. And given that it’s a recurrent theme in his work, both in subtle and not-so-subtle ways, the disregard feels like a gap.”9 One gap, in particular, that pleads to be filled, from a postscandal perspective Brook & Grinberg•Introduction xi especially, is Allen’s “treatment” of women — Jewish and non-Jewish, on- screen and off. One section ofWoody on Rye is thus devoted to women’s issues in Allen’s body of work. And on the “women’s question,” as on the Jewish question, Hirsch provides a lead-in. “What, again?” a friend questioned his updated coverage of Allen’s films in 2001. “Why do you want to write about that pathetic creep?” another friend complained, while a third “made an unprintable comment.” All three anti-Allenites were women,

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