Woody’s stereotypes are out of date
Jews deserve better than the crude and offensive cliches rolled out in the US director’s latest film, believes
day: ‘‘The thing is, most people in Britain don’t really think about Jews much. Most people don’t know any.’’ I was the first he’d met, for instance.
I’ll never forget my surprise when an extremely beautiful, very middle-class friend, who had recently attained a first in History of Art from Cambridge, found out I was Jewish. ‘‘How can you be Jewish?’’ the normally delicate girl asked. ‘‘You don’t have the...! [then she mimed a gigantic hooked nose]’’.
My atheism and my love of pork prompts as much consternation as my straight little nose. Come on, guys. You should know by now Jews aren’t all a cross between a Goebbels cartoon and Fiddler On The Roof.
So, watching Allen’s latest film, I winced. The stereotypes are all there and I have no doubt that patrons from the Curzon Soho right through to the Newcastle Vue will inwardly nod at the confirmation of what they always vaguely took Jews to be: brash, anxious name droppers, obsessed with bagels and lox, and prone to eruptions in Yiddish.
It’s time that Woody left it alone. It’s old. We are not all dithering, skinny, uncool, selfish germ-phobes.
That combined stereotype, once funny, has long had its day.
The once-pale European Jews who helped create modern Israel in the 1930s traded pianos and pipes for tractors and swimming. They were soon bronzed, toned and more focused on soil than soul. People didn’t know what to make of these Jews born in Israel, the socalled Sabra. They probably still don’t.
Jews have always been subject to virulent stereotyping, with charges ranging from effeteness to a taste for children’s blood to a hysterical greed for money. We don’t need more movies reinforcing half of those. It’s particularly depressing that any caricatures should be peddled by Allen, once the master dissecter not just of the Jewish condition, but of the human condition.
Perhaps in his dotage he now finds it easier and more comfortable to draw on worn old cliches than examine, as he once did in such masterly fashion, the real world around him. Either way, he seems to have lost sight of the fact that Jews deserve representation that reflects the reality that, like any group on earth, we are unique but diverse. In diet, beliefs, and yes, in nose shape. Telegraph Group Cafe Society (M) is out now.