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Babi Christina Englehardt and Stacey Nelkin, two women who had affairs with Woody Allen
when they were teenagers. A scene from Manhattan, that depicts Allen in an affair with a teenager.
Actress Mariel Hemingway alleges that Allen tried to seduce her when she was 16. |
I've been
watching "Allen v. Farrow," one of the very best documentaries I've
ever seen. It's a beautifully produced, meticulous exploration of the break-up
of the romantic and professional partnership of Golden-Globe-winning actress,
author, and humanitarian Mia Farrow and writer-director-actor Woody Allen.
While in a committed professional and
personal relationship with Farrow, a relationship that had lasted over a decade,
Allen simultaneously had an affair with Farrow's daughter, and the sibling of
his own three children, Soon Yi Previn, whom he had known, and served as a
father figure toward, since she was ten.
On the basis of the testimony of doormen,
who had seen Previn enter Allen's apartment alone since she was in high school,
and a cleaning woman, who found used condoms and semen-stained sheets after one
such visit, it is alleged that Allen's affair with Previn began when she was in
high school, and he was in his fifties. Eventually, Farrow found pornographic
photos of Previn in Allen's apartment.
Later, Dylan Farrow, Allen's daughter, who
was seven at the time, accused Allen of molesting her. Professional therapists had
been, for some time, counseling Allen about his improper behavior toward Dylan,
behavior that had not previously risen to the level of sexual touching, but included
intense, obsessive contact. Before adopting Dylan, Allen had, it is alleged, expressed
a desire to adopt a pretty blonde girl. Dylan was, indeed, a pretty blonde
girl.
The documentary treats this story with
the seriousness it deserves. There are real victims here, and the documentary
respects that. It's riveting, heartbreaking, and illuminating as any Greek or
Shakespearean tragedy.
Episode two of the four-part documentary
features journalist and author Richard Morgan. Morgan has read the entire Woody
Allen collection at Princeton University. Morgan was appalled. Based on this
collection, Morgan concluded that Allen is obsessed with misogynist sexual
fantasies of teenage girls. Morgan makes his case in a June 4, 2018 Washington
Post article entitled, "I
Read Decades of Woody Allen's Private Notes. He's Obsessed with Teenage Girls.
His 56-Box Archive Is Filled with Misogynist and Lecherous Musings."
Morgan writes:
Sometimes
Allen is in his work, but even when he isn't, his characters are often obvious
stand-ins. In a story that takes place wholly in the mind of a man named Moses
Rifkin, he writes: "Unlike the Jewish girl — the shiksa is not
guilt-ridden — not a complainer — she is abandoned, fun-loving, and above all
promiscuous. The shiksa will perform any sex act." In "Rainy Day,"
Roland Polland, a fictional film director, confesses to a young female college
student, "I took no risks because the bitch goddess of success opened her
legs in my brain." But that's Roland Polland. Not Woody Allen. The "c'est
moi" is always crossed out. He is Alvy Singer. He is Moses Rifkin. He is
Isaac Davis. He is Sandy Bates. He is Zelig.
Allen's penchant for "shiksas"
is the subject of much commentary. One October 20, 2009 piece from the Tablet, "Gentlemen
Prefer Blondes: Why Jewish producers kept Jewish women off stage and screen"
by Liel Leibovitz reports
A
friend of mine—I'll call her S.—has much to be proud of. She's an accomplished
actress, a terrific mother, and a loving wife. Yet the one thing she's best
known for doesn't involve her at all: when she was a teenager, she had a brief
but tumultuous affair with Woody Allen, a man many years her senior, a tryst
that ended up serving as the raw material for Allen's Manhattan. When the
writer and director recreated the relationship on film, however, he did not
choose someone who looked like S.—a Jewish beauty with dark, curly hair—but
opted instead for Mariel Hemingway, so much of a stereotypical all-American
girl that her blue eyes and blond hair came across even in the black-and-white
film.
While
S. is too prudent to comment on this switcheroo, one does wonder what may have
motivated the transformation: why turn a bright-eyed brunette into a
fair-haired ingenue?
This,
of course, is not a new question, nor is it limited to S.'s experience. Since
the dawn of American entertainment, Jewish women were largely rendered
invisible, absent everywhere from burlesque to Hollywood to prime-time
television. Instead, they watched as their sons and brothers and husbands
became successful producers, directors, and impresarios, powerful men who then
chose to populate their works with a parade of sexy, sultry shiksas who looked
nothing like their female kin.
The "S" Leibovitz refers to is
Stacey Nelkin, who had an affair with Allen when she was 17. But she wasn't the
only teenager effing Allen. There was also the very blonde Babi Christina
Engelhardt, who took up with Allen when she was 16, and a survivor of multiple
rapes. Engelhardt
says,
"I
had been taunted, tormented as a 'Nazi child' in the Jewish neighborhood I grew
up in: Matawan, New Jersey. [The family moved to a rural area of the state when
she was a teenager.] My father ran around in lederhosen. I had doors slammed in
my face." Her parents were both postwar emigres, her father — by his
account — a 14-year-old ditch-digging conscript into Hitler's army serving near
the French border before the end of the war. "Woody's the uber-Jew, and I'm
the uber-German," she says. While the pair never discussed their
difference, she contends it hovered, at least on her end: "There was a
chip on my shoulder about wanting to please those who cast me aside. I wasn't
confrontational because I thought, 'Nobody likes Germans.' "
Ethnic tribes stereotype their other of
choice. For many Jews, "shiksas" as the ethnic other. "Shiksa,"
as sexual in a way that Jewish women were not. Leon
Weliczker Wells wrote
The
farmers, who, even considering their low living stand ards, couldn't support an
entire family, sent their daughters to town to become servants in the Jewish
households. I never knew a Jewish girl to be a servant in a Polish household,
but the reverse was the norm. The gentile maid was referred to in negative
terms as the "shiksa" (Hebrew for "a vermin like a cockroach").
There was a repertoire ofjokes about these girls. For example, there was the
joke about how Jewish mothers made sure that the servants were "clean,"
because their sons' first sexual experience was usually with this girl. At that
time, our society expected a male to fulfill his sexual needs; Jewish daughters
were for bearing children.
Philip Roth was another famous American
Jew who wrote about shiksas.
But
the shikses, ah, the shikses are something else again […] I am so awed that I
am in a state of desire beyond a hard-on. My circumcised little dong is simply
shriveled up with veneration. Maybe it's dread. How do they get so gorgeous, so
healthy, so blonde? My contempt for what they believe in is more than neutralized
by my adoration of the way they look, the way they move and laugh and speak.
The concept of the Jewish woman as too
pure, and the shiksa there to be despoiled, is not limited to nineteenth
century Polish shtetls. In fact it is reflected in some of the most successful
American purveyors of proto porn.
Perhaps
the first exponents of this tradition were the Minsky Brothers, the influential
proprietors of a popular New York City burlesque empire in the first decades of
the last century. "If you were a burlesque stripper, you had to be a
blonde or a redhead, never a brunette," Rachel Shteir, author of
Striptease: The Untold History of the Girlie Show told me. The brothers, she
added, had a readymade explanation for their proclivities: Jewish women, they
argued, were simply too pure to lust after. "They would say, 'we're not
stealing your mothers and sisters and aunts and putting them on stage and
taking away their honor,'" Shteir said. "They would say that they
were only putting the shiksas on stage. As heinous as it is, that was their
reasoning."
In the movie "Manhattan,"
Allen depicts his character in a relationship with a teenager, played by Mariel
Hemingway. Hemingway reported in a subsequent memoir that Allen tried to seduce
her when she was 16 years old, and promised, as part of that seduction, to take
her to Paris. Hemingway wrote this in 2002. In the HBO doc, in a previously
unseen film, young Dylan Farrow, in a film recorded shortly after the alleged
assault, said that Woody Allen, while sexually molesting her, promised her that
after he was done, he would take her to Paris. Looks bad.
I think Woody Allen is a bad guy. I don't
think his ethnicity has any relationship to his being a bad guy. There are
plenty of non-Jewish bad guys.
That Jews, like non-Jews, stereotype
others is well documented. Poles have long been stereotyped by Jews, as amply
document in Bieganski.
Of course Poles stereotype Jews as well. What is troubling is the double
standard. One groups' stereotyping is regarded as anathema, and the other group's
stereotyping is handed a free pass.
