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A bespectacled, Jewish hypochondriac with literary pretensions and a creepy fascination with his stepson’s girlfriend — Guess who?
What’s with Baum?
By Woody Allen
Post Hill Press, 192 pages, $29
The last Woody Allen film I saw was Blue Jasmine, which won three Academy Awards including Best Actress for Cate Blanchett and Best Screenplay for Allen. The film was released in 2013, six months before Allen’s then 28-year-old daughter, Dylan Farrow, came forward with allegations in an open letter in The New York Times, that Allen had sexually assaulted her when she was a child. This was her first time speaking publicly about a claim that her mother, Mia Farrow, had been making since 1992, after she discovered Allen had been in a sexual relationship with her daughter, Soon Yi. It was in 1992, when Allen’s 21st film, Husbands and Wives, was released in theaters that we, the public, were given a choice: Choose art and go see the film or choose morality and stop watching Woody Allen.
I, still in college, chose art. So did the public; that film sold more tickets than any of his previous films. I’m not going to beat myself up about it now, as I had been groomed by the corrosive 90s culture to pay little attention to the way women were treated by men. A few cultural gems to put you back in the moment: American Pie; Monica Lewinsky; O.J. Simpson; Girls Gone Wild; Britney Spears; Anita Hill.
I congratulated myself at the time, happy I had chosen art, because Husbands and Wives is a masterpiece of storytelling — so what if Farrow is spectacularly humiliated, as she, innocently playing Judy, the wife of the writer, Gabe Roth (played by Allen), has no idea what in reality he has done? Juliette Lewis, or Rain, is a dark-eyed, hair-twisting ingénue in Gabe’s writing class at Columbia. We learn about his feelings for her, and his wife, when he speaks to the audience in a faux-doc style that allows the central characters to share feelings and perspectives on their lives.
By 2014, when Dylan Farrow pled with the public to believe her, eight years after Allen married his wife’s daughter, whom he had helped to raise, I was long done with all that. I chose morality and I chose to believe the victim. I was done with Allen and I was done being groomed by him from the now ubiquitous presence of Mariel Hemingway, or Tracy, as Allen’s 17-year-old onscreen girlfriend in Manhattan, to Rain, with whom Gabe takes great pains to show that the more than three decades between them is normal, as she had many relationships with the “middle aged set.” But in 2014 my decision was an easy choice, right? Woody Allen hasn’t made a movie that I cared to see since that time. (The latest is 2023’s Coup de Chance, a French language film because, bien sur, the French still love him.)
Enter Woody Allen’s debut novel, What’s with Baum?, which one has to read the same way one might now watch a semi-autobiographical Allen feature film: with skepticism, curiosity about the artist’s intent, and a constant longing for subtext. It’s significant to note that this novel by one of America’s most famous directors was not acquired by a mainstream trade publisher but by Post Hill Press. Allen’s 2020 memoir, A Propos of Nothing, was also published out of the mainstream. After workers at Hachette walked out in protest of its impending publication and when Ronan Farrow, Allen’s estranged biological son and bestselling author and journalist, left the publisher in response, the small press, Skyhorse, published it. This acquisition placed Allen alongside such literary luminaries as Melania Trump, RFK Jr., and Blake Bailey, whose biography of Philip Roth was cancelled by W.W. Norton following sexual assault allegations against its author.
Here’s the novel: Asher Baum is a writer in his 50s and he looks familiar: He’s a hypochondriac with a “Semitic” nose; his “Foster Grant black-rimmed glasses [give] him a scholarly air.” “If he were a movie actor,” Allen writes, “he would have played shrinks, teachers, scientists or writers.” He lives in the country with his wife, Connie, even though he hates the country (where to walk after dinner?) and loves Barney Greengrass, which does not exist in the country.
The novel opens with the conceit that Baum has begun to talk to himself, perhaps due to early onset dementia, a device reminiscent of the documentary style that allowed Allen to showcase his inner anxieties and break down the division between public and private in his characters. Technically, it’s also convenient to concretize feelings with words in a screenplay, as everything the viewer needs to know must be said out loud or shown visually. One of the only things that a novel as a genre has got over film is the characters’ interiority, and Allen has made the distinct choice not to use this. So why a novel? I asked myself this often while reading this pleasant debut that, had I not known who the author was, I would have found terribly derivative of Woody Allen. Which is to say, it’s been done before and so much better.
The novel putts along with Asher Baum talking to himself and we learn he has never met his potential as a writer. His wife, his third, whose son Thane has just published a novel to tremendous (if completely unrealistic) acclaim, has cooled to him. Asher believes this might be because of his failure to find success, though it also might be because of the way Baum lusts after other women, with a side of longing for his true love, his first wife, the blonde shiksa, Taylor, who returns to him in the form of Thane’s girlfriend, Sam. Whatever the case, Connie loves Thane and cares for him more than she loves and cares for Baum and while that has always been annoying to Baum, it is now unsustainable, particularly when Thane has gotten all these accolades that should be Baum’s. When Sam takes a ride with Asher into the city, the plot unravels episodically with added moments of predation, racism and misogyny, meant to be skewered or celebrated, one cannot tell. In other words, it’s creepy as hell. But it’s Woody Allen, so we’re used to it. We even, dare I say, long for it.
The thing is, this guy Baum, who references Buster Keaton, Liz Taylor and Montgomery Clift, declares his love for Cole Porter and Gershwin, writes on Olivetti typewriters and hovers over phonographs is supposed to be in his 50s. And these are all the well-known obsessions of Woody Allen, who is 89. Allen might see himself as forever in his 50s, (hey, I am forever 13) but Baum is not. And so, the novel begins to lose its authority.
When the plot thickens (ever so slightly, with lumps) the novelistic devices get messier. There’s a slippery perspective that starts close on Baum then pans out, and there’s an amateurish repetition of exposition in dialogue, another screenwriting tic. The perspective on one occasion defies logic, shifting momentarily to Connie describing her own feelings, which Baum has never tried to understand. And then there are purportedly huge moments — such as when Baum runs into that spectacular ex, Taylor, while he’s with Sam, her doppelganger — which barely leaves a mark on his consciousness or the prose.
What’s with Baum? We don’t know him because Allen has placed him at such a distance. But he wants to be known! And appreciated. He wants to feel up the “Asian” (Japanese or Chinese, her ethnicity flips at random) journalist. But with novels, the reader needs a reason to turn the page, to know what you’re reading to discover, and Baum as he exists in the woods with Connie, fearing ticks, and all his other Allenesque preoccupations isn’t reason enough. Aside from his two ex-wives and his handsome rich brother, we are also told Baum wrote a play in his youth, “A domestic drama…conflicts, psychological vulnerabilities, foibles and failures abounded alongside the lustful desires and adulterous confidences all up there on the stage for everyone to see.” Sound familiar? And yet this is the most novelistic Allen gets — we as readers are forced to do the analysis; we don’t get anything more. And here’s the other thing we don’t get: laughs. There is nothing funny about a warmed-over Woody Allen schtick, not on the page anyway.
So why a novel? Why did Woody Allen write this in this form? The notions are cinematic. Just after the climax (suffice it to say that Allen’s love of Chekhov is in evidence as the Act I gun does of course go off), Allen writes, “In a film this would be a fade-out…Go to black and then fade up weeks later.” What’s with Baum? ends like this. We never get back to what it would be if this were a novel, which, hello? it is.
The ending, which brings the reader out of the story, reminded me again of Husbands and Wives. Mia Farrow’s Judy is meek and mousy and yet through her passive aggression manages to get everything she wants. Fine. Sidney Pollack’s Jack drags his hot aerobics instructor girlfriend, also named Sam, out of a party by her hair and we are on his side. Fine. And Gabe Roth has succeeded in normalizing a relationship with Rain. Fine. For her birthday, at a party at her parents’ well-appointed Upper East Side apartment, Gabe has brought her a delicate jewelry box that, when it’s opened and the ballerina spins, plays Kurt Weill’s “It Never Was You.” (Judy Garland sang this in her final film. If you want to hear her sing it, go ahead — it will undo you.)
The song’s title foretells the film’s finale: A thunderstorm, an open window, a kiss. And then, the hook! Gabe tells Rain they can’t be in a relationship, what with her, a student, and so young! Rain is of course disappointed, but she understands. It never was you, you see. And we believe Gabe, we do, because we have always believed Woody Allen, even if we can see it now so clearly for what it is. But then, in the denouement, breaking that fourth wall, Allen tells the camera that he’s working on a new novel, which he explains is less confessional, more political. And then, astonishingly, Allen turns to the camera, looks the viewer in the eye and says, “Can I go? Is this over?”
And, with that, it was.
When I went to purchase What’s With Baum?, the bookseller wouldn’t look at me. “I’m reviewing this,” I said, by way of explanation, and she breathed out, relieved. It’s a political act to read this novel. It is not the 90s. I am no longer a college girl sitting around a seminar table hoping to one day be a writer, my professor also trying to kiss me (no stormy night, no music box, but I still have a pile of signed books, all his). Is it fair to bring up the movies? I think so — those films were brilliant and complicated and funny and they captured a time, long-gone now. A novel can also do all of those things. This one, Woody Allen’s debut, relies on what we’ve already read and seen and witnessed. But you won’t learn anything you don’t already know.
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The call of this Hanukkah moment remains simple and urgent: Light candles everywhere. Even when we’re under attack.
The massacre in Sydney has left Jews around the world shaken and grieving. This act is far more than a heinous crime: It is a regression to darker times, when Jewish visibility itself carried mortal risk.
The commandment of Hanukkah is not simply to light candles, but to light them publicly – pirsumei nisa, the publicizing of the miracle. The point is not private consolation, but shared visibility. Jewish survival, the tradition teaches, is not meant to occur behind closed doors, but in full view.
Historically, however, it rarely did. In exile, Jews learned caution. The Talmud records how, in times of danger, the candles are to be moved indoors – lit discreetly, shielded from hostile eyes. This was not a theological revision but a concession to reality: When the public sphere is unsafe, Jewish life retreats into the private domain. For most of our history, this was our reality.
Modern democracies promised something different. Jews would no longer have to choose between safety and visibility. We could light openly again – on windowsills, in public squares, in front of city halls – because the surrounding society would protect us not merely by law, but by norm. Antisemitism would not just be illegal, it would be unthinkable.
The Sydney massacre, alongside countless incidents in societies Jews have long trusted, forces us to ask whether that promise is still being kept.
Jewish safety in the diaspora does not rest primarily on police presence or intelligence services – necessary though they are. It rests on something more fragile and more fundamental: a public culture in which Jews are not merely tolerated but embraced; in which antisemitism is not merely condemned after the fact but rejected instinctively and unequivocally as a violation of the moral order.
When Jews are attacked for being Jews, and the response is muted, conditional, or delayed, the message is unmistakable. Jews may still live here, but only quietly.
That is why the response to Sydney must not be withdrawal, but the exact opposite. We cannot and will not retreat into hiding our light. The call of this moment is simple and urgent: Light candles everywhere.
Jewish communities and organizations must orchestrate public Hanukkah candle lightings in the central squares of democratic cities across Europe, across the English-speaking world, wherever Jews live under the protection of free societies. Not hidden ceremonies. Not fenced-off gatherings on the margins. But civic events, hosted openly and proudly, with the participation of local and national leaders – and of fellow non-Jewish citizens.
This is not unprecedented. Every year, a Hanukkah menorah is lit at the White House. The symbolism is powerful precisely because it is mundane: Jewish light belongs at the heart of the civic space, not as an exception, not as an act of charity, but as a matter of course. That model should now be replicated widely.
Israeli diplomatic missions, together with local Jewish organizations, should work actively with municipalities and governments to make these public lightings happen – not merely as acts of Jewish resilience, but as declarations of democratic commitment. Because this is not only a Jewish question.
A society in which Jews feel compelled to hide their symbols is a society already retreating from its own values. Antisemitism is never a stand-alone phenomenon; it is the canary in the democratic coal mine. Where Jews are unsafe, pluralism is already fraying.
Lighting candles in public squares will not undo the horror of Sydney. But it will answer it – not with fear, and not with silence, but with a refusal to normalize xenophobia, antisemitism, and Jewish invisibility.
The ancient question of Hanukkah – where we light – has returned as a modern moral test of democratic societies and leaders worldwide. Where Jewish light is extinguished, democracy itself is cast into shadow. If it can still be lit openly, with the full backing of the societies Jews call home, then the promise of democratic life remains alive.
Our light must not hide. Not now. Never again.
The post The call of this Hanukkah moment remains simple and urgent: Light candles everywhere. Even when we’re under attack. appeared first on The Forward.
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Australia shooting terrifies Jews worldwide — and strengthens the case for Israel
If the shooters who targeted Jews on a beach in Australia while they were celebrating Hanukkah thought their cowardly act would turn the world against Israel, they were exactly wrong: Randomly killing people at a holiday festival in Sydney makes the case for Israel.
The world wants Jews to disown Israel over Gaza, but bad actors keep proving why Jews worldwide feel such an intense need to have a Jewish state.
Think about it. The vast majority of Jews who settled in Israel went there because they felt they had nowhere else to go. To call the modern state “the ingathering of exiles” softpedals reality and tells only half the story. The ingathering was a result of an outpouring of hate and violence.
Attacking Jews is the best way to rationalize Zionism.
Judaism’s holidays are often (humorously) summarized as, “They tried to kill us, they failed, let’s eat.” Zionism is simply, “They tried to kill us, they failed, let’s move.”
Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism, didn’t have a religious or even a tribal bone in his body. He would have been happy to stay in Vienna writing light plays and eating sacher torte. But bearing witness to the rise of antisemitism, he saw the Land of Israel as the European Jew’s best option.
The Eastern European pogroms, the Holocaust, the massacre of Jews in Iraq in 1941 — seven years before the State of Israel was founded — the attacks on Jews throughout the Middle East after Israel’s founding, the oppression of Jews in the former Soviet Union — these were what sent Jews to Israel.
How many Australians are thinking the same way this dark morning?
There’s a lot to worry about in Israel. It is, statistically, more dangerous to be Jewish there than anywhere else in the world. But most Jews would rather take their chances on a state created to protect them, instead of one that just keeps promising it will – especially when the government turns a blind eye to antisemitic incitement and refuses to crack down on violent protests, as Australia has.
“For over a year we have seen racist mobs impeding on the rights and freedoms of ordinary Australians. We have been locked out of parts of our cities because the police could not ensure our safety. Students have been told to stay away from campuses. We have been locked down in synagogues,” Alex Ryvchin, the co-CEO of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, wrote a year ago, after the firebombing attack on a Melbourne synagogue.
Since then a childcare centre in Sydney’s east was set alight by vandals, cars were firebombed, two Australian nurses threatened to kill Jewish patients, to name a few antisemitic incidents. There were 1,654 antisemitic incidents logged in Australia from October 2024 to September 2025 — in a country with about 117,000 Jews.
“The most dangerous thing about terrorism is the over-reaction to it,” the philosopher Yuval Noah Harari said. He was talking about the invasion of Iraq after 9/11, the crackdown on civil liberties and legitimate protest. But surely it’s equally dangerous to underreact to terrorism and terrorist rhetoric.
Israel’s destruction of Gaza following the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023 led to worldwide protests, which is understandable, if not central to why tensions have escalated.
But condemning civilian casualties and calling for Palestinian self-determination — something many Jews support — too often crosses into calls for destroying Israel, demonizing Israelis and their Jews. That’s how Jews heard the phrase “globalize the intifada” — as a justification for the indiscriminate violence against civilians.
When they took issue with protesters cosplaying as Hamas and justifying the Oct. 7 massacre, that’s what they meant. And look at what happened in Bondi Beach, they weren’t wrong. Violence leads to violence, and so does support for violence.
Chabad, which hosted the Hanukkah celebration in Sydney, has always leaned toward a more open door policy with less apparent security than other Jewish institutions. But one of the reasons it has been so effective at outreach has also made it an easy target.
As a result of the Bondi shooting, Chabad will likely increase security, as will synagogues around the world. Jewish institutions will think hard about publicly advertising their events. Law enforcement and public officials will, thankfully, step up protection, at least for a while. These are all the predictable result of an attack that, given the unchecked antisemitic rhetoric and weak responses to previous antisemitic incidents, was all but inevitable.
It’s not inevitable that Australian Jews would now move to Israel, no more than it would have been for Pittsburgh’s Jewish community to uproot itself and move to Tel Aviv after the 2018 Tree of Life massacre. That didn’t happen, because ultimately the risk still doesn’t justify it.
But these shootings, and the constant drip of violent rhetoric, vandalism and confrontation raise a question: If you want to kill Jews in Israel, and you kill them outside Israel, where, exactly, are we supposed to go?
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These are the victims of the Bondi Beach Hanukkah celebration shooting in Sydney
(JTA) — A local rabbi, a Holocaust survivor and a 12-year-old girl are among those killed during the shooting attack Sunday on a Hanukkah celebration in Sydney, Australia.
Here’s what we know about the 11 people murdered in the attack, which took place at a popular beachside playground where more than 1,000 people had congregated to celebrate the first night of the holiday, as well as about those injured.
This story will be updated.
Eli Schlanger, rabbi and father of five
Schlanger was the Chabad emissary in charge of Chabad of Bondi, which had organized the event. He had grown up in England but moved to Sydney 18 years ago, where he was raising his five children with his wife Chaya. Their youngest was born just two months ago.
In addition to leading community events through Chabad of Bondi, Schlanger worked with Jewish prisoners in Australian prisons. “He flew all around the state, to go visit different people in jail, literally at his own expense,” Mendy Litzman, a Sydney Jew who responded as a medic to the attack, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Last year, amid a surge in antisemitic incidents in Australia, Schlanger posted a video of himself dancing and celebrating Hanukkah, promoting lighting menorahs as “the best response to antisemitism.”
The best response to antisemitism. Happy Chanukah! pic.twitter.com/33RSGYzhUY
— Rabbi Eli Schlanger (@SchlangerEli) December 17, 2024
Two months before his murder, he published an open letter to Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese urging him to rescind his “act of betrayal” of the Jewish people. The letter was published on Facebook the same day, Sept. 21, that Albanese announced he would unilaterally recognize an independent Palestinian state.
Alex Kleytman, Holocaust survivor originally from Ukraine
Kleytman had come to the Bondi Beach Hanukkah celebration annually for years, his wife Larisa told The Australian. She said he was protecting her when he was shot. The couple, married for six decades, has two children and 11 grandchildren.
The Australia reported that Kleytman was a Holocaust survivor who had passed World War II living with his family in Siberia.
12-year-old girl
Alex Ryvchin, co-CEO of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, told CNN that a friend “lost his 12-year-old daughter, who succumbed to her wounds in hospital.” The girl’s name was not immediately released.
Dozens of people were injured
- Yossi Lazaroff, the Chabad rabbi at Texas A&M University, said his son had been shot while running the event for Chabad of Bondi. “Please say Psalms 20 & 21 for my son, Rabbi Leibel Lazaroff, יהודה לייב בן מאניא who was shot in a terrorist attack at a Chanukah event he was running for Chabad of Bondi in Sydney, Australia,” he tweeted.
- Yaakov “Yanky” Super, 24, was on duty for Hatzalah at the event when he was shot in the back, Litzman said. “He started screaming on his radio that he needs back up, he was shot. I heard it and I responded to the scene. I was the closest backup. I was one of the first medical people on the scene,” Litzman said. He added, “We just went into action and saved a lot of lives, including one of our own.”
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