Having recently completed a biography of Woody Allen, David Evanier comments on the filmmaker’s Jewish affinities:
[Woody Allen] is the most identifiable, brazen, and forthright Jewish artist in the world, insistently reminding his viewers about the Holocaust in many of his films. Jewish Hollywood, with many of its moguls refugees from Hitler, had been reluctant to place Jewish actors in leading roles. Maurice Schwartz of the Yiddish Art Theater was cast as the Native American Geronimo; John Garfield and Paul Muni played Italians. But times were changing, with the ascendancy of comics [like] Mort Sahl, Lenny Bruce, Shelley Berman, and Nichols and May. By 1967 films with Jewish content and Jewish stars had emerged. . . . .
[When] I finally visited Allen, . . . [we] talked about Israel, about anti-Semitism (including its masked permutation, anti-Zionism), and about the Holocaust. “It can happen in a minute,” he said. He talked of Lucy Dawidowicz’s The War against the Jews, of Victor Klemperer’s diaries of life in Nazi Germany, of Michael Thomas, a resister to Nazism he’d known, [and] of Rossellini’s Il generale della Rovere.
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