Zoe Strimpel.

As a member of the Chosen People, I have always marvelled while watching vintage Woody Allen at how boldly and amusingly he skewers Jewish neuroses, largely through his own nervous, selfloathing yet self-obsessed, desperately horny personae.

Born in 1935, Allen, along with his generation of American Jews, was traumatised by the knowledge of what was going on in Europe while they were selling lemonade in the Bronx. So in Annie Hall, when comedian Alvy Singer, played by Allen, tells his best friend Rob as they’re walking down the street: ‘‘I distinctly heard it. He muttered under his breath, ‘Jew’’’, I have always laughed. This, like much in early Allen, was a portrait both funny and familiar.

From this point of view, however, Allen’s latest film Cafe Society, is both disappointing and cringe-making. Trite and reheated on any number of levels, it also, unforgivably, gets the Jewish thing all wrong. Instead of that brand of historically-inflected unease captured so amusingly in Annie Hall, Cafe Society just takes a pick ‘n’ mix of Jewish cliches – some saccharine, some just offensive – and throws them back at us. As this crude roll-call of cliches unfurled before my eyes, I could only bury my head everdeeper in a large box of sweet’n’ salty popcorn.

Watching this film in metropolitan America would be one thing. Jewish culture, high and low, is part of the American story, and almost every even faintly urbane American actually knows some Jewish people. We don’t have to worry that a skinny nervous Woody Allen character schvitzing and kvetching in toohigh trousers will define their perception.

In Britain and countries like New Zealand, however, the picture is different. Being Jewish here in any way that doesn’t involve hats or wigs tends to arouse curiosity, prompting all sorts of tiresome, if usually fairly innocent, comments starting with the phrase: ‘‘But I thought, Jews’’. As a historian friend of mine, raised in Worcester, put it to me the other