Back home, Woody got a letter from Ed Koch. Mr. Koch was mayor of New York, is relentlessly articulate and probing, and will find anti-Semitism even if it is hiding in a cocoon. He is not above finding it where it does not exist, as in his statement a year or so ago that the America First Committee was an anti-Semitic movement.
Anyway, Koch wrote to Woody that "many knowledgeable observers believe anti-Semitism in France and elsewhere in Europe is equal to what it was in 1939. I do too."
Woody replied: "Without getting into it too deeply, let me just say that I do not believe the French are anti-Semitic because I know a number of French Jews who strongly believe they are not."
That's a step improved on saying that he had French Jewish friends. But it hardly handled the question. French Jews who deny national anti-Semitism are hardly difficult to find. Up until Kristallnacht, you could find German Jews who denied national anti-Semitism. Any suggestion that what anti-Semitism there is in France is to be likened to the situation in Nazi Germany would be found preposterous.
But Woody wasn't through. "Try to understand," he wrote Koch, "that when I speak at interviews, I'm there to plug my movie and give fast, impromptu answers to suddenly interjected, complicated questions." But on the question of a boycott of -- movies! -- Allen wrote that a boycott "in certain extreme cases" could be "a justified tactic."
Then Woody apologized for the whole thing. His response "was perhaps too general and based on" his reaction against "clear unfairness to the French."
But was it unfair? We have Woody Allen (a) making an exonerative statement, (b) qualifying it by saying that everybody is that way, (c) reminding us that all he was really interested in was selling his new movie, (d) telling us he knows French Jews who are on his side, and then (e) saying he wished he hadn't said anything on the subject to begin with.
Woody qualifies to act in one of his own movies, as a person caught up in the mumble of his thoughts, like W.