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.