COMMENTARY : JEWISHNESS GOES BACK IN CLOSET ON THE SCREEN

“When you’re in love the whole world is Jewish.” That’s a favorite funny aphorism of mine--mostly because of its obvious self-mockery. Erase from sight the cultural mainstream, it says, and, like magic, adversity will vanish.

But lately, the Hollywood Kosher Nostra--you know, all those moguls in the celluloid trade--seem to be spouting an opposite line, one that betrays Jews like me: “When you’re in love the whole world is WASP.”

It becomes obvious now because a cluster of movies dealing with Far Rockaway and Brighton Beach and other such beloved New York ghettos are grabbing attention. What’s strange--or perhaps not so strange--is that some of these Jewish arbiters seem bent on clearing away traces of our common cultural background. By the time they’re finished, the movies often look like outtakes from “The Brady Bunch.”

In my dreams I see a gaggle of producers, screenwriters and directors. They’re hopping from foot to foot and wailing: “Who, me Jewish? Where did anyone get such an idea?”

Very few pictures portray leading-role Jews affirmatively--even those that advertise the same. And we’re not talking here about Molly Goldberg stereotypes, just your average urban assimilated Abe who eats lox and bagels Sunday morning.

Two films, “Heartburn” and “Brighton Beach Memoirs,” bend over backwards to avoid the specifics of ethnic identity. In both, the cultural tone is sanitized to conform with WASP sensibility. Tell-tale Semitic signs are picked off like so much lint.

Question:

Is this an attempt to hide some sort of self-hatred, insidiously rooted in centuries of anti-Semitism? Do these movie folk, persuaded that the Great WASP Public can identify only with its own image, seek to satisfy that supposed need? Do Jewish film makers and executives simply enjoy impersonating the Gentiles who rule the world?

Maybe all of the above?

In the case of “Heartburn,” Nora Ephron’s dyspeptic account of the breakup of her marriage with Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein (it was widely celebrated throughout the New York media), casting proved the most curious breach.

Mandy Patinkin, a reasonable first choice for the Bernstein-like role, didn’t work out. So director Mike Nichols (yes, he’s Jewish) brought in Jack Nicholson (no, he’s not Jewish) to play the heroine-writer’s philandering journalist-husband. The conversion of Bernstein to superWASP seemed a deliberate choice.

(And, yes, of course, non-Jewish actors can play Jewish but . . . let’s face it, sometimes it’s a real str eeeeee tch.)

Even with Meryl Streep conscientiously projecting the harried, unglamorous Ephron aura and dropping subtle hints of her New York-nervous-Jewish obsessional system, any chance of fidelity to the book was lost, also deliberately, I think.

Throughout her autobiographical best-seller, Ephron dotes on kreplach soup homilies and talks about being branded by a TV station “as too New York, a euphemism for too Jewish” to be hired as a host. Yet all such references are filtered out in the film.

Another autobiographical case of blatant de-Jewishification appears in Neil Simon’s “Brighton Beach Memoirs.” As several movie critics have already noted, casting Blythe Danner--who looks Protestant Gothic--as the prototypal balabusta was tantamount to having his matzo balls and eating them too. The poor actress had to turn up her statements into questions, true to the stetl- by-the-sea idiom. But all she could do was show us the discomfort and unnaturalness of her effort.

There’s more. Several times she bad-mouths the romantically inclined man next door to her sister (played by Judith Ivey, who also comes off as “a whitebread Jew”), referring to him and his family as “them.” But goyim is the specific pejorative I remember my grandmother using in similar living room rows about the dating game.

And she was the same smugly insular-protective-frightened-domineering matriarch as the Danner character might have been, had Simon--who adapted his Tony-award winning play for the screen--not methodically stripped away the Yiddishisms and braved a little realism.

Many Jewish writers who court Hollywood, however (especially this purveyor of commercialism), don’t want to show their grandmothers as bigots. No good liberal would tolerate that and most Jews in the arts and letters--barring a neoconservative Norman Podhoretz--are liberals.

(They share nothing, though, with such disenfranchised minorities as Mexicans, who are seemingly allowed to name “them” as gringo , and blacks, who call the white world honky . If you’re a “have” it’s particularly hateful to inveigh against the “have nots.”)

Woody Allen, unto himself, manages better than the industry people at showing his Jewish side. But “Radio Days,” his journey to nostalgia, focuses less on the kind of ethnic idiosyncrasies that Philip Roth probed so searingly (in “Portnoy’s Complaint,” for instance) than on his childhood show-biz mania.

While Allen may not be strictly kosher he doesn’t play hookey from Hebrew School. His hilarious vignette of the typically grudging kid sent off to learn by rote the symbols and pronunciations of the Talmud is one that every semi-practicing Jew in America can relate to. Hardly anything is funnier than the scene with a pontificating rabbi (Ken Mars) to whom young Woody recites the Lone Ranger’s line to Tonto: “You speak the truth, my faithful Indian companion.”

And the Marxist neighbors’ subversion of Woody’s uncle on the High Holidays is another instance of Allen remembering a certain nose-thumbing tomfoolery that went on.

At any rate, he doesn’t practice censorship. That trick remains for Simon, whose two-dimensional characters bear little resemblance to real people of any kind and whose “Memoirs,” in particular, have been relieved of their Jewish effects.

“Annie Hall,” for instance, takes devastating aim at such hallmark foibles as Jewish paranoia and death-obsession. When Alvy Singer (Allen) walks down a Manhattan street with his friend and confesses that he heard someone ask “Jew eat?” to which the person answered, “Jew?”--he pierces the core of collective pathological suspiciousness.

And sitting at the dinner table with Diane Keaton’s fiercely Americana family, he fantasizes himself as a Yeshiva bocher or Lubavitcher with black hat and payis ; here he is the very object of WASP ridicule, the comic quintessence of the ethnic outsider.

But at this point in his film-making career, Allen was on the brink of breaking into a Gentile world and reflected with typical fidelity that juncture. “Annie Hall,” which seemed to represent his real-life transition pains, came after divorce from actress Louise Lasser, his Jewish connection. From here, he had escaped Long Island and all its ethnicity. Keaton was his first shiksa sweetheart and in “Hannah and Her Sisters,” his heaven is a harem of WASP goddesses that includes Mia Farrow and Barbara Hershey.

In fact, the romantic miracle of Allen contradicts everything that Hollywood has always meant vis-a-vis leading men. Here is a little, homely nebbish whose love relationships, though comically tinged, travel first-class from life to screen and back again.

Yet when Allen tries to take a serious look at entangled family configurations and grimly neurotic love affairs, as he did in “Interiors,” his characters’ socio-ethnic composition reeks with Anglo purity. Somehow, Jewishness is a humor contaminant to him. If it’s Jewish, it’s funny, therefore palatable. Only WASPS brood with poetic refinement and suffer the kind of emotional deficits that lead to suicide. Jews are left to laugh at themselves. At least, that’s his operative pigeonhole.

Once in a while Hollywood delivers the genuine article: A movie that deals directly with the Jewish underdog but omits the distancing caricature. “The Way We Were” is one such example of daring, right down to its startlingly comprehensive theme: culture conflict.

And pairing Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford in it was a brilliant stroke. No other box-office stars represent so well all that is alluringly Jewish and WASP, respectively, as these two.

Streisand, a bookish liberal of a non-beauty who leads pro-communist rallies of the ‘50s with eloquent zeal, is not just a poor, thwarted outsider working her way through college; she’s also a dreamer--for lack of gratifying reality in her life. Redford embodies the dream: golden-boy handsome, suave, popular, a talented writer to whom everything comes easy.

She finds herself drawn to him, naturally--even though she holds him and his “beautiful people” crowd in contempt for their indifference to any social and political ideals. Post-college and pre-McCarthy era, they meet again and this time marry--”Here we are,” she says, “a loud, New York Jewish girl and her gorgeous goyishe guy in Hollywood.”

Somehow, scriptwriters throw away the prohibitions when it comes to Streisand. It’s OK to be Jewish-real in her case. And that’s one of the bonuses of this picture.

Still, not much is threatened here. The Streisand character is noble--in fact, her deep instinct for political crusades and her commitment to integrity break up the marriage. He’s a laissez-faire many-generations-American who goes along with the system she decries; the split is inevitable. But the emphasis is not good versus bad. Rather, it’s a case of attraction of opposites. Each wants what the other has. To be Jewish, then, is not only all right, it’s admirable.

But there must be a reason why a movie like this happens so rarely. Perhaps Jews are loath to admit their minority roots; it would constitute a step down in prestige and possibly an open window to anti-Semitism. The answer to closet Jewry may lie somewhere in the realm of self-protection.

The track record of some other minorities, by contrast, seems slightly better. Meanwhile, Hollywood sticks to its options and keeps the camera from pointing in the wrong direction. A few exceptions may trickle down. But, by and large, acceptable Jews are either those who have arrived at a state of total assimilation or they are harmless clowns who just make us laugh.