American Apparel isn’t just about ad campaigns featuring half naked models in stretchy spandex – apparently, they’re also into Judaism. And Woody Allen is not amused.

The clothing company recently ran a series of billboard and Internet ads with an image taken from Woody Allen’s Annie Hall, with Allen dressed in Hasidic garb, his glasses barely poking out amid full beard and black hat. The picture is accompanied by a phrase in Yiddish that translates to “the holy rebbe.”A Hasidic Rabbi on a Billboard?: Woody Allen gives Rabbi Schneerson a run for his money

Woody Allen, who supposedly does not endorse commercial products in the US as a principle, claims he never agreed to take part in an American Apparel campaign and is taking the conflict to court. The Huffington Post reports that Allen has found the whole experience so “egregious and damaging” that he feels he deserves $10 million.

The bigger question is, what’s with all the Judaism, American Apparel? The Rebbe Allen billboards are just one facet of a series of Jewish allusions. The company’s website currently features a series of Yiddish lessons and a sexy photo shoot featuring none other than Hymie “Zaida” Charney, grandfather of American Apparel CEO Dov Charney. Gosh, that’s awfully Jewcy – maybe we should all go buy some spandex leggings!

Hey, everyone needs a hobby: Woody Allen also plays the clarinet

For fans of Woody Allen, the elephant has been in the room for fifteen years now. We remember it's there, right? That Allen took up with his quasi-stepdaughter, Soon-Yi Previn when he was 56, she 22? That he had nude photographs of her? That Mia Farrow accused him of molesting their adopted daughter (a judge found the charges "inconclusive")? Sigh. We -- especially those of us who are, despite it all, fans -- remember.

And yet, for someone whose mature films were once so autobiographical, this notorious, unavoidable aspect of Allen's personal life has seemed absent from his artistic production. On the contrary, many of the films of the last decade and a half (and there has been roughly one each year) have been fluff, like the caper Small Time Crooks, the musical Everyone Says I Love You, the mob farce Bullets Over Broadway -- and those were the good ones. This has led many critics to conclude that Allen's introspective phase is over. The old man is going through the motions.

A closer look at Allen's late films, however, belies that claim. In fact, Allen's new film, Cassandra's Dream, is but the latest in public confessions of moral failure and deep ethical ambivalence. It's in code, but if we look closely at this series of Allen's films -- and this article will have spoilers for Match Point, Cassandra's Dream, Crimes and Misdemeanors, and Scoop -- we can see they are exactly about "the elephant in the room."

The first, and best, of the late films is 1989's Crimes and Misdemeanors. (Notice that, if Farrow's accusations were at all true, this was exactly when Allen became inappropriately interested in the minors living in his home.) That film introduced the central question of the late work: whether there's anyone minding the moral store, whether criminals ever get their comeuppance. Crimes and Misdemeanors also explicitly blends tragedy and comedy, a formal choice that reflects its ethical content. For flawed people, does life end tragically (as it ought to) or comically (as it oughtn't, but often does)?

Don't worry, Sam: You've got a friend who can loan you some eyesIn Crimes, the contrast is stark. Martin Landau, in perhaps the most brilliant performance of a brilliant career, plays Judah Rosenthal, who contracts to kill his wife  mistress (murder is the quintessential immoral act in the late films), and gets away with it. At first he is wrought with guilt, but eventually, the guilt passes. Meanwhile, Woody Allen's character, a good man, loses everything, and the film's moral conscience, a rabbi played by Sam Waterston, goes blind.

In the film's climactic scene, Rosenthal tells his story, in third person. He’s guilt-ridden and believes God is monitering him. “Little sparks of his religious background which he'd rejected are suddenly stirred up,” he says. He’s driven almost to confess. “And then one morning, he awakens. The sun is shining, his family is around him and mysteriously, the crisis has lifted... he's Scot-free. His life is completely back to normal.’’

Knowing now what we didn't know in 1989, it's not a huge stretch to see Allen reflecting on his own situation in these words. Did he commit a crime? Or just a misdemeanor? Who knows. Maybe all he did was fantasize about a much younger woman who was effectively, if not legally, his stepdaughter. But perhaps there were pangs of guilt already. And yet, as Alan Alda's smarmy character says in the film, "comedy is tragedy plus time." Time passes, and Oedipus gets over it. The tragic, ethical sense of what ought to be gives way to a comic, aesthetic play of what just is.

Flash forward to 2005's Match Point, widely regarded as Allen's return to form, and featuring Jonathan Rhys-Meyers as Chris, a tennis pro who, by chance, falls in with a wealthy playboy and ends up marrying his sister Chloe -- all the while lusting after the playboy's fiancee Nola, played by Scarlett Johansson. Eventually, Nola and Chris have an affair, Nola becomes pregnant, and refuses to have an abortion. Chris is trapped: he depends on Chloe's family for his job, his life, his dreams of making it in the world. And so he ends up killing Nola (and a neighbor) in cold blood.

Case in point: Pigeons plus time equals creative pun Chris is almost caught when he fails to destroy a piece of evidence -- a gold ring that bounces on a railing like a tennis ball bouncing on the net. But luckily for him, the ring gets picked up by a drug addict, substantiating rather than undermining his alibi. He escapes. It's a comedy. Cue jazz music and white-on-black credits.

As in Crimes and Misdemeanors, the bad guy gets away with it, though this time the emphasis is less on his cool lack of conscience than on his dumb luck.

The same themes are repeated in Cassandra's Dream. In it, Ewan McGregor and Colin Farrell play two working class English brothers, Ian a striver like Match Point's Chris, and Terry, down on his luck. Their wealthy uncle promises them all the money they need -- if they kill a business associate who's about to testify against him. Eventually, the brothers do the deed. But then Terry spirals downward, consumed with guilt, while Ian represses the guilt and gets on with fulfilling his ambitions.

That haircut is a crime AND a misdemeanor: Farrell and McGregor Finally, when Terry is about to crack, Ian plots to kill him before he confesses. But at the last moment, Ian repents, and instead of poisoning Terry, merely punches him. In the ensuing fight, Terry accidentally kills Ian, and then kills himself out of remorse. It's a tragedy. Cue brooding Philip Glass music and white-on-black credits.

Cassandra's Dream is perhaps even darker than Match Point, which was even darker than Crimes and Misdemeanors. In Crimes, the comedy unfolded despite the murderer's remorse. In Match Point, remorse is irrelevant. In Cassandra, it's downright harmful: the tragedy is precipitated precisely because of Terry's last-minute pang of conscience. If he'd been more cruel, there would have been a happy ending.

The lesson is clear: comedy is tragedy plus time -- unless you brood about it.

In this light, even some of Allen's lesser works begin to take on a new light. For example, Scoop's murderous villain is only discovered by a comic mix of supernaturalism and shtick (and Allen's character pathetically dies as he tries to save the heroine). Melinda and Melinda revisits the comedy/tragedy dichotomy, suggesting that luck determines the outcome much more than our own actions. And so on.

So, the elephant is in the room, and in the frame. By now, "Woody and Soon-Yi" have become a fixture on the New York cultural scene; we're no longer shocked. But whether there was misconduct early on, or only unseemliness, Allen has not overlooked the obvious, which is that he is a 72-year-old married to a 30-year-old who wasn't quite his stepdaughter but almost sort of was. Allen is unpunished, but perhaps unforgiven as well, at least by himself.

Let me out!: The elephant plots its escape On the surface, Allen's agonizing agnosticism is squarely at odds with traditional Jewish conceptions of justice, Allen's obvious foil. This is the "religious background which he'd rejected." But Allen hasn't rejected its most salient feature, which is not the pat answer that God sees everything, but the wrestling with the problems of justice and evil in the first place. Judaism is a religion of Job, not just Sunday School, and Allen's extended meditations on the presence or absence of moral order are the essence of the Jewish ethical conscience.

We all know that God does not punish the wicked -- at least not in ways we can see. And yet, we who were raised in the Jewish tradition still experience Jewish guilt, itself both comic and tragic. Is there really no moral order in the world? Is remorse an ally or an adversary? Will there be an accounting at the end, or is religion for suckers? Is it better to remember the past, or let it go?

Allen has now worked out at least three different permutations of these questions in his late films, each one with a different sense of pathos, a different perspective on the mystery. Of course, all this is speculation. Maybe there's really no big deal about the Allen/Previn marriage. Maybe Allen couldn't care less. Or maybe that's what he's trying to figure out.

Consuming too many empty tabloid calories and not enough high-culture fiber? Let us help you get back on a balanced diet. This week our high-brow stories are kind of heavy, so we’ve prescribed an espresso shot of celebrity gossip with which to wash down the big ideas.

Go high: In the New York Review of Books, British academic Tony Judt, who’s caused a boatload of controversy with his criticism of Israel, warns that focusing too much on the Holocaust will desensitize people to its very real horrors. Playing on Hannah Arendt’s idea of the “banality of evil,” he worries about the “banality of overuse.”

Go low: When guests at a Miami Orthodox wedding saw the rapper/producer Pharrel watching the revelry from a distance, they invited him to join in. TMZ has pictures.

Go high: The New Jerusalem, a play that just opened, dramatizes the life of Spinoza. The Village Voice calls it “Inherit the Wind with a chilling extra touch of proto-Nazism.”

Go low: If you visit the pool at the JCC in Manhattan, you just might spot Jerry Stiller wandering around sans pants.

Go high: Have you ever noticed that Woody Allen uses the same typeface in nearly all of his films? Here's why.

Go low: Demi and Ashton have been missing Shabbat services lately! Might they be giving up on Kabbalah?

Previously: Britney Spears vs. Joseph Epstein

Ever read "The Whore of Mensa"?  He could direct eight more Hollywood Endings and still be worthwhile for that short story. Woody Allen's got a new collection of prose out, and Scott Eyman says it's great:

In an ideal world, it might be interesting to see what Mr. Allen could do with a slightly more current view of Jewish intellectuals, or even a less fanciful framework. Let’s face it, the names, not to mention the ideas, of Paul Wolfowitz and Gertrude Himmelfarb are ripe for satire.

It's all fun and games when the guy pronouncing it Vagner is sitting across from you on Louis XIV furniture (Hat tip: Andrew)

Bad posture, beer breath, the Sprockets catsuit—turns out you can sport despair most any way you like. Perhaps, per genre, you are Waspy and gaunt, wear lots of black, read Thomas Bernhard, shun camaraderie and social events, and, most important, appear to know something about the world the rest of us don’t. Or you’re Jewish. And possibly fat.

Thing is, if you’re Jewish, you’re getting the short end of the stickArt courtesy of Dave Choe. The moody Jew always seems less Sid Vicious, more Larry David; less Robert Smith, more Lou Reed. (Nothing wrong with Lou Reed, though if I had to pick a rocker to sleep with, Vicious is a shoo-in.) These guys, the sexy ones, don’t choose despair, but experience it as a byproduct of being alive. But guys like Larry David and Woody Allen seem to covet despair like a drug. There’s even a certain pride there, like: Tada! I can leech the pleasure from most anything!

To wit, a story: I recently had a facial, a pillaging-of-the-skin experience for which I paid $150. Let it be said I don’t know how to wear makeup, I pronate in high heels, and that aside from the Semitic albatross called big hair, I’m not really the girly type. So when I say I got a facial, it is with the rider that this was bound to be unpleasant. And, in turn, thrilling.

At the spa, it was like this: The staff is obsequious and I hate every one of them. The girl at the desk tells me I look exhausted, then gives me a mesh duffel with flip-flops and an eggshell muumuu. She escorts me to a lounge, which is nice, except for the women in flops and muumuus. I head for a platter of snacks. I spy poppyseed crackers, whose shrapnel will likely end up in my teeth. I eat, like, twenty.

And, oh good, here comes the facialist.

We go to her room. She tells me to unpack the mesh and hang the muumuu; she says I can put my clothes on a chair, that I should lie face-up under a sheet and she’ll be right back. I find these instructions oblique. Am I supposed to get naked? I’m having a facial, why would I get naked? Am I supposed to wear the muumuu under the sheet? But she said hang the muumuu. I realize she’s going to return any second and that I’m still clothed except for my boots because in no scenario does it make sense to wear my boots. But what about socks? I can hear her about to come in, so I grab my cell phone and make like someone called while I was getting ready, hence the delay, sorry, sorry, only once she leaves, I’ve gotten no closer to knowing what to do. Finally I ditch everything but the underwear and get under the sheet hoping she’ll never know what decisions I’ve made. If she ends up between my legs, I guess something will have gone awry.

The facial gets underway. I am told I don’t know how to care for my skin. I am told I cannot continue to act like a child. I am familiar with this refrain, coming, as it does, from my mother and therapist alike.
The facialist massages my arms. I get gooseflesh and worry she’s gonna think I’m aroused. Then she addresses her talents to a region below the ankle. If there are sock bunnies cleaved to the balls of my feet, I will hang myself. The longer she kneads my heels and calves—yep, my calves, good thing I haven’t shaved in two days—the more miserable I get.

Is this fun so far? This is the opposite of fun. But maybe it’s funny. I certainly hope it’s funny because if there’s humor to be wrung from every occasion we’re able to drain of pleasure owing to neuroses, grandiloquent self-abasement, and excess body hair, it’s the silver lining in an otherwise debilitating ethic.

Think big. It’s no secret that Woody Allen—paradigm of Jewish angst—originally titled Annie Hall “Anhedonia.,” which means an inability to enjoy life. Allen’s shlubby, neurotic conduct in the movie seems to question whether the pathology is congenital to Jews, or adopted. Does Allen open a compact of blow just so he can sneeze all over it and despair, or does he sneeze because he’s constitutionally incapable of enjoying the experience that is snorting blow? Affect, instinct?

Depends who you ask. Certainly a hankering for misery butts heads with one of the Socratic dialogues, the Meno, in which Socrates disembowels Meno’s idea that some people desire bad things. His logic goes like this: People who desire bad things know they will be miserable as a result? Yes. And miserable people are unhappy? Yes. Does anyone want to be unhappy? No. Ergo, no one wants bad things. The loony assumption here is, of course, that no one wants to be unhappy. I love this dialogue because it’s fun to watch Socrates dispatch—with élan—the possibility that people are fucked up.

I took this question to my shrink, who, unlike Socrates, is pretty well acquainted with the fuck-ups. Whence a desire for anhedonia, I asked her. Why covet a condition that can only result in misery? Her answer: preemptive despair. Preemptive despair! Since things never work outfor the Jews—historically, there’s some truth to this—we’ve learned to steel ourselves against misery by being miserable from the start.

I found this hilarious. It’s just so Jewish. So convoluted. And it collapses the instinct/affect binary by suggesting that our affect is instinctual—i.e., if we can’t help but choose unhappiness, we’re dealing with a choiceless choice. One of these double-bind scenarios into which so many of our tragic heroes are thrust. Macbeth and Bovary, Lear, Raskolnikov, the “can’t help but” phenomenon accounts for at least fifty percent of literary tragedy, if not more. By the same token, if you tweak the phenomenon, you get comedy. Of course you do. Character as fate, a comedy of errors, people who are funny precisely because they can’t help but ruin everything. Yoked to the shrink’s theory, you get the atavism of misery—a Jewish narrative that spans centuries—and the narrative it inspires by way of entertainment.

And that’s why it’s no accident your “miserable Jew” archetype ends up being a funny guy for hire. “Killing your dad so you can marry your mom” isn’t exactly stand-up, but it’s good enough for a chuckle. Stick Smith or Morrissey in the presidential suite and he might fall into the jacuzzi, or lament travesties wrought by our idiot government and the agony of having to wake up each day. Jerry Seinfeld, on the other hand, or Jason Alexander, or Jackie Mason (okay, he’s not funny) will upturn everything in the presidential suite until he finds that used condom hewn to the box frame that ruins the special pleasure of staying in the presidential suite. Then he will lament said travesties and the condom, because it augurs devastating solitude for all his days. It’s the condom as prognosticator, as catalyst for anxious rant that ends up being hilarious. And excruciating. Ever notice how painful Curb Your Enthusiasm is? It’s the fulcrum of tragedy and comedy; of course, the difference is so slight.