In her article ‘Twice an Outsider: On Being Jewish and a Woman’ (a title that sums up a great deal of Jewish feminist thinking that arose in the 1980s), Vivian Gornick recalls watching one of Woody Allen's movies in the early 1970s. She doesn't know which one – perhaps Bananas, perhaps Sleeper, almost certainly one of the slapstick, clowny, funny ones – but clearly remembers experiencing the revelation that she was disgusted by the cultural work of Jewish men like Milton Berle, Saul Bellow and Woody Allen. They were, she writes, ‘trashing women. Using women to savage the withholding world. Using us. Their mothers, their sisters, their wives. To them, we weren't friends or comrades. We weren't even Jews or gentiles. We were just girls’ (1989: 31). Gornick, who is exactly Allen's age and grew up in the Bronx, observes that, while his character in Annie Hall is obsessed with getting laid, ‘It's not a Jewish girl he's trying to get into bed…. The Jewish girl is Brooklyn. Annie Hall is Manhattan’ (ibid.). Alvy Singer's sexual success with a gentile beauty – a shiksa, which is a pejorative term for a non-Jewish woman – ‘means everything’ (ibid.), for him as Allen's proxy and so for the movie. We are thus directed spatio-temporally to turn away from the Jewish women in Annie Hall and discouraged from engaging positively and identifying with them when they do appear on screen.

These are words that have come out of my mouth:

Almost all of them belonged originally to Pearl Williams (1914–1991) and appear on her live comedy record, A Trip Around the World Is Not a Cruise. This album was recorded in 1961, when Williams was in her late forties, and lasts about forty minutes in total: just under twenty minutes per side. The first side features one of her ‘midnight’ shows at a club in New York; the second was recorded during her ‘late late’ set, presumably on the same night. Accompanying herself on the piano, and with a liberal sprinkling of Yiddish, Williams jokes about oral sex, vibrators, adultery, promiscuity, prostitution, ethnicity and class. She is working deep ‘blue’, throwing in a few belted song parodies and some vaguely liturgical Jewish popular classics. When it was released the following year, Williams's LP (an acronym for a ‘long playing’ album) had a warning on the cover that read ‘For adults only’ (see Figure 15.1), meaning that it was not considered suitable for radio airplay and that it was usually kept behind the counter in record stores. You had to ask for it. My grandfather had a copy and it was regularly played at my parents’ house parties in the 1960s and 1970s.