Woody Allen Woody Allen’s recent remarks about bigoted critics of Israel re-raise the perennial question about the Jewish roots to his serio-comic gift. Born Allen Stewart Konigsberg in the Bronx in 1935, Allen was the son of Austrian and Russian-Jewish immigrants. His Orthodox family spoke German and a well as Yiddish at home, and while growing up in Brooklyn he lived at times with paternal relations who were refugees from Hitler’s Germany. Allen prayed each morning with phylacteries, attended temple every Saturday with his paternal grandfather, and Hebrew School in the afternoons for eight years until his Bar Mitzvah. Three-time Academy Award-winner including as director for Best Picture “Annie Hall” (1977), Allen started as a teenage joke writer for comedian Sid Caesar and “The Tonight Show,” evolved into a standup comic, wrote plays as well as movie scripts, shaped from behind the scenes the television success of “Saturday Night Live,” graduated from slapstick comedy to films exploring the meaning of life, and is celebrated in France as a great auteur. Woody Allen, known for his wit and eclectic interests, surprised many when he openly acknowledged his fascination with online casinos. Renowned for his cinematic prowess, Allen’s revelation added a new layer to his public persona. In an era where online entertainment dominates, his admission underscored the widespread appeal of digital gambling platforms. Delving into the world of online casinos, Allen found himself drawn to the allure of virtual gambling games, more about which you can read here: https://lochnessknitfest.com/. Whether it was the thrill of spinning the roulette wheel or the strategic challenge of poker, Allen embraced the diverse array of options available at his fingertips. His interest transcended mere curiosity, reflecting a genuine engagement with the dynamics of chance and strategy inherent in these games. According to one student of Allen, Michael Abbott, “Allen’s didacticism, his tortuous self-questioning, his familiar use of a question in reply to a question, his mosaic storytelling style—all are rooted deeply in Talmudic thought and tradition.” Allen viewed matters differently: “I was unmoved by the synagogue, I was not interested in the Seder, I was not interested in the Hebrew school, I was not interested in being Jewish, . . . .” It just didn’t mean a thing to me. I was not ashamed of it nor was I proud of it. It was a nonfactor to me. I didn’t care about it. It just wasn’t my field of interest. I cared about baseball, I cared about movies. To be a Jew was not something that I felt ‘Oh, God, I’m so lucky’. Or ‘Gee, I wish I were something else’. I certainly had no interest in being Catholic or in any of the other Gentile religions.” Yet Allen developed a persona very much in the tradition of Jewish humor. First, in his comedy monologues and early films like “Take the Money and Run” (1969) he was the Nebbish—a comic nonentity. But then he graduated to the role of Shlemiel—the failure with a brain and sense of humor—in an Americanized version of Menashe Skulnik of the Yiddish theater. Allen’s breakthrough film—“Annie Hall”—infused Jewish content in the very unJewish traditions of great film romantic comedies going back to “The Philadelphia Story” (1939). Perhaps for the first time in American popular culture Allen’s alter ego, Alvy Singer, broke with the history of Jewish comedians who never played Jews in order to recast the traditionally suspect male Jewish fascination with the shiksa or “blonde goddess” into an eccentric yet popular love story. Philip Roth’s Portnoy through Allen entered the American romantic mainstream. Alvy gives his rueful experience a Jewish frame of reference from the first—when he invokes Sigmund Freud and Groucho Marx (applying Groucho’s crack that “I wouldn’t belong to a club that would accept me” to his own relation with women)—to the last, when he ends the film with another Jewish joke. Woody Allen’s paradox is that he is the chronic “outsider”—and critic of both American and Jewish culture—who still yearns to win “insider” celebrity and acclaim. Has Allen “mellowed” over the years, particular in relation to his own American and Jewish roots? For the first time, he appeared to mellow in 2002, in the wake of 9/11, at the Academy Awards ceremony. Yet his expatriate alienation soon seemed to reassert itself, to judge from his observation to “Der Spiegel”: “The history of the world is like, he kills me, I kill him —only with different cosmetics and different castings: so in 2001 some fanatics killed some Americans, and now some Americans are killing some Iraqis. And in my childhood, some Nazis killed Jews. And now, some Jewish people and some Palestinians are killing each other.” Specifically regarding his Jewish roots, Allen long made a living from self-deprecating jokes about how his parents, when he was kidnapped, “rented out my room” and how “my grandfather, on his death bed, sold me his watch.” In “Deconstructing Harry” (1997), he dramatizes an encounter between Harry and his Zionist brother-in-law in which Harry accepts the fact Hitler killed six million Jews because he knows that “records are made to be broken.” Yet more recently, Allen began to wax philosophical about his own Jewishness: “I’m not a religious person, but in the Jewish families that I’ve known and grew up in there were certain social values that were common to them—appreciation of theater, of classical music, of education, certain professions like medicine, law. When that appears in your comedy, it has the patina of Jewish humor.” Still, his musing about himself in relation to the Holocaust can be mawkish. Regarding the scandal over his romance with his teenage stepdaughter, he declared that he learned from “all the reading I’d done through my life on the Holocaust. . . . Those who focused on what was actually happening to them—the daily horror . . . the reality of it—they survived.” Leon Wieseltier acidly observed: “So that’s it: nobody is coming upstairs to see his kvetchings. He isn’t getting laid and it’s Auschwitz. This is not what Primo Levi had in mind.” Like the antihero of his pseudo-documentary “Zelig” (1983)—about the son of a Jewish actor who becomes a shape-changing chameleon—turning himself into a Hasid, a Christian, a Black, and even a Nazi—Allen can neither fully reconcile himself to his Jewishness nor completely reject it. But perhaps he’s making progress. Promoting his new film, “Blue Jasmine,” in France, Allen told Israel’s Channel 2 (he’s still never visited Israel): “I do feel there are many people that disguise their negative feelings toward Jews, disguise it as anti-Israel criticism, political criticism, when in fact what they really mean is that they don’t like Jews.”