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STUART SCHOFFMAN: They Don�t Like You
Stuart Schoffman
As I glumly watched John Kerry concede the election, I felt suddenly impelled to make what West Bank settlers (albeit in a vastly different context) call "an appropriate Zionist response." I stood tall, switched off the TV, and hiked off to the Jerusalem Cin�math�que to see a film aptly entitled "Anything Else," last year�s offering from Woody Allen.
I frankly knew nothing about it beyond the jaded summary in the Cin�math�que brochure: "In his umpteenth film, Woody Allen once again looks at the dissatisfied personal and professional life of a New York intellectual." Perfect, I thought. Even if it was pretty bad -- a fair bet, given Allen�s recent string of clunkers -- it would satisfy my need to display card-carrying solidarity with the elitist, liberal, urban, "un-American" -- metaphorically "Jewish," in the Lenny Bruce sense -- blue-state culture that had just been whacked by Bush. (That the Republicans are now cheerfully "red" only testifies to the paucity of irony in 21st-century America.)
I came away surprised. Maybe it was my vulnerable mood, but I found "Anything Else" the funniest, most affecting -- and explicitly, achingly Jewish -- Woody Allen movie in a long time. Yes, it�s a minor film, arguably a pallid pastiche of Allen�s masterful "Annie Hall" and "Manhattan," with the character of Jerry Falk, a 21-year-old lovesick (and Jewish) comedy writer (Jason Biggs), standing in for the youngish Woody of 30 years ago; but mercifully it�s Jerry and not Allen (who turns 69 in December) lusting for the nubile and neurotic Amanda (Christina Ricci), a would-be actress who loves Bogart and Billie Holliday and dropped out of Brandeis, following an affair with a professor. Here Woody, at long last, acts his age, portraying David Dobel, writer and high-school teacher, Jerry�s philosophical mentor, and certifiable Jewish paranoid.
Watching the two men stroll pensively through Allen�s idyllic-as-ever Central Park, I was whisked back to mid-70s New York, where I was barely older than Jerry and with similar ambitions; back to a sweeter, rosier moment in history when Nixon was gone and America finally free of Vietnam, and Israel was a delicious place to visit, and all seemed possible. But "Anything Else" is a film of and for our own time, and though 9/11 and Iraq are not mentioned, their specter haunts the screen. Allen has always been both funny man and pessimist, but now his free-floating weltschmerz is distilled into Dobel�s deep fear of fascism and anti-Semitism in a dark new world.
"Annie Hall�s" Alvy Singer was Jewishly paranoid too -- imagining himself a hasid in Grammy Hall�s eyes, hearing the question "Did you eat" (posed by "Tom Christie") as "Jew eat?" -- but here what Dobel claims to overhear in a restaurant is the ominous canard "Jews start all wars," a line that comes up a second time when Jerry scoffs at the older man�s obsessions. "What you don�t know, won�t hurt you, it�ll kill you," Dobel drums into Jerry, who prefers (at first) to be oblivious to Amanda�s infidelities, and can�t fathom why Dobel, an atheist, is so fixated on the Jewish question. Dobel stocks up on survivalist paraphernalia -- a floating flashlight, water-purification tablets -- and buys Jerry a gun.
The meek-seeming Dobel inevitably explodes in violence, a traumatized Jew run amok -- which might be read, I suppose, as Allen�s rebuff of Zionist "never-again"-ism. But I also think it�s telling that Allen, whom many Jews have written off as a leftist self-hater and Israel-basher who is part of the problem, is so manifestly concerned about Jewish prospects in America. Many Jews who bellyache -- with ample justification -- about the genteel anti-Semitism and cynical anti-Zionism of the politically correct left-wing intelligentsia are prone to ignore the long-term perils augured by the now-redoubled hammerlock of Christian conservatives in Congress, the White House and, all too likely, the Supreme Court.
The branding of the Catholic, crypto-Jewish John Kerry as a feckless, effete outsider is well within the American grain. As the eminent historian Richard Hofstadter observed years ago in his classic "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life," "the subordination of men of ideas to men of emotional power or manipulative skill" is a longstanding hallmark of American evangelical Christianity. Anyone who�s read Ron Suskind�s mid-October New York Times Magazine cover story, "Without a Doubt" -- a devastating deconstruction of Bush�s radically messianic mindset -- ought to be chilled by the outburst of Bush media adviser Mark McKinnon: "You�re outnumbered 2 to 1 by folks in the big, wide middle of America," he told Suskind. "They have faith in him. And when you attack him for his malaprops... it�s good for us. Because you know what those folks don�t like? They don�t like you!"
None of my Allenesque anxieties make any sense at all, of course, to such red-blooded Jews as Ra�anan Gissin, Ariel Sharon�s tireless spokesman. "Bush is free as a bird," Gissin was quoted as crowing after the election. "He is only accountable to history and God, which is a good thing for us, because both history and God are on our side." My advice to those who think likewise is to ponder "The Plot Against America," the brilliant, unnerving new Philip Roth novel that imagines the election of Nazi sympathizer Charles Lindbergh to the presidency in 1940, and the ensuing anti-Jewish measures imposed by the American government. In the end, New Deal democracy wins out -- but it is precisely the clear intention of Bush to undo Roosevelt�s progressive legacy that should keep Jews awake at night.
Alongside Roth and Woody Allen stands a third American Jewish genius and soothsayer, namely Bob Dylan. The protean Midwesterner -- his native Minnesota also went for Kerry -- was "taught and brought up there the laws to abide/ And that the land that I live in has God on its side." His closing couplet, from 1963: "The words fill my head and fall to the floor/ If God�s on our side, he�ll stop the next war." One can always hope -- and should probably also pray.
November 29, 2004
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