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# What Grammy Hall would call "a real Jew"
- URL: https://www.jewsrock.org/what-grammy-hall-would-call-a-real-jew/
- Published: 2005-11-04T12:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-20T22:08:33.000Z
- Author: JewsRock
- Tags: Blog

*by Izzy Grinspan*

Annie Hall presents a serious conflict for the Jewish girl. On the one hand, it’s nearly impossible to identify with Annie, not just because she’s so non-Jewish but because of the way she’s written. Annie is a cipher, the classic unknowable Other, both in terms of her ethnicity and in her role as the object of Alvy’s desire. So you watch the movie, and you become totally convinced that you’re Alvy, or Woody, or whoever—neurotic, trapped in your own brain, doomed to sneeze the coke off the table. It’s a nice, warm feeling: you and Alvy/Woody are comrades in charming Jewish awkwardness. He understands you! You guys could be friends! But of course you couldn’t be friends, because in the male/female, Jewish/Christian dialectic, you’re not really in the same box as Alvy. You’re actually Allison, Alvy’s first wife, the one he reduces to a liberal Jewess stereotype the moment he meets her. So does that mean that you need to find an Andrew Hall, some inscrutable guy whose family eats ham on Sundays while discussing the swap meet? But isn’t that Christopher Walken’s character? And isn’t he, like all Christopher Walken characters, creepy and unhinged?   
  
Of course, Annie Hall presents absolutely none of these problems for the Jewish boy. Which is why, while I’m sitting in my bedroom trying to figure out if I’m supposed to be attracted to Christopher Walken, [Hartley Goldstein](http://www.hartleygoldstein.com/?ref=jewsrock.org) is out on the town, playing songs from his new album (titled, tragically, “Songs in the Key of Zoloft”) on the Lower East Side every Sunday for the next month. Gothamist likes his “A Love Song for Annie Hall,” and not just because it was produced by the guy who did the Clap Your Hands Say Yeah EP. In yesterday’s [interview](http://www.gothamist.com/archives/2005/09/28/the%5Fgothamist%5Fband%5Finterview%5Fhartley%5Fgoldstein.php?ref=jewsrock.org#more), they quizzed him about his Jewish name, his favorite parts of New York, and his sense of humor. Here’s what he has to say about the uses of the latter in NYC:  
  
“When you are surrounded by demanding people, and you are under 6 feet tall, you learn how to use humor to your advantage pretty quickly.”  
 So true! If by “humor” you mean “elbows.” In any case, Hartley has a very promising beard—hipster meets Hasid, like a Devandra Bernstein—and so he’ll surely go on to do great things.