For a long time, I’ve been thinking about how to read photographs of schlemiels like Woody Allen, Seth Rogen, Charlie Chaplin, etc. What function do they serve? How do we identify with them? How do they relate to the lives of Americans and Jewish Americans? What categories do we use to read them? But when […]
I wonder if a new trend is developing in the journalistic world in which this or that journalist calls Donald Trump or someone in his administration a schlemiel (see this article – for instance -that calls Sean Spicer a schlemiel character). Mind you – as I’ve said many times on this blog – there are […]
Woody Allen’s Crisis in Six Scenes has prompted me to think a lot about a time that I have not lived through; but, like many Americans, have inherited. His short series has also made it clear to me that Allen is giving the schlemiel a new and important role in the important task of addressing […]
After reading an extremely negative review of Woody Allen’s “Crisis in Six Scenes” in the Daily Beast, I decided that it is necessary for me to set the record straight. In the review, the author, Amy Zimmerman, completely misunderstands the role of the schlemiel that Allen plays: Sidney Muntzinger. Moreover, she projects a negative judgment against […]
In comedy there are no sacred cows. And when it comes to mythology, comedy doesn’t hesitate to smash this or that myth. Jewish comedy is well known for its iconoclasm. And perhaps this has a root in Judaism’s resistance to mythology and idolatry as well as its prohibition of images. It may also have to […]
The movement from blindness to insight is a time honored theme. It has its roots in early Christianity and in the Enlightenment it becomes a guiding principle. The Christian appropriation of blindness is fascinating. In Corinthians 2 (3:14-16), Paul associates blindness with the Jews and sight with the Christians: Therefore, since we have such hope, […]
While someone like Jean Genet – in books like The Miracle of the Rose or The Thief’s Journal – makes the criminal into a highly masculine larger than life (even priestly) man, Woody Allen’s “directorial debut,” Take the Money and Run (1969), presents us with a parody of the masculine criminal and the hard-boiled crime thriller. […]
In America, we have always been told that one can go from rags to riches but we have not been shown the opposite is also true. As a child, I learned both stories and lived with the thin line between the two. Woody Allen’s film, Blue Jasmine, reminded me of this traumatic experience which, for […]
Last night I had the opportunity of seeing Woody Allen’s new film Blue Jasmine. Since I have great interest in the work of Woody Allen and two of the characters he has cast in the film (Andrew Dice Clay and Louis CK), I took an immediate interest in the film and was eager to see […]
In yesterday’s post, I made a brief reading of the recent 44 minute video of Woody Allen “stammering” over the span of his career. The picture I used as a thumbnail for the blog post came from the beginning of Woody Allen’s film Bananas. The reason I chose this image was because it nicely illustrated […]
Schlemiel Theory 