A fake Woody Allen antisemitism rant fooled thousands of people online.

By PJ Grisar, The Forward

Published May 26, 2026

Those still wondering “what would Woody Allen say about today’s antisemitism” were treated to what looked like an answer last week in the form of a viral monologue bemoaning the price of coffee in a roast of Ivy-educated anti-Zionism.

The only issue: It seems to be entirely fake.

The post, according to X, where the post first gained traction, was initially posted in Spanish by a pro-Israel writer named Simy Benarroch and was originally the work of a previous Russian writer named Rami Yudovin.

As hoaxes go, this one seemed credible at first glance. It’s hard not to read it in Allen’s nasal voice. It has his cadence, his references to philosophers and the inclusion of an intrusive female relative that are his hallmarks, leading many who didn’t believe this to be genuine to conclude a prompt was fed through an AI mimic. (It’s not the first time something like this has happened.)

But there are tells for those looking. See the fourth paragraph, in which Allen encounters protesters outside a synagogue: “I was walking through Brooklyn thinking about death.”

From a ripe young age, Allen has perseverated on the end, but walking through Brooklyn? Now? That far from the Upper East Side? I’m skeptical.

This could all, of course, be a rhetorical flourish. The types of woke stereotypes the author plays with, i.e.: “someone with a scarf [presumably a keffiyah], who looks like he writes poems about his own beard, explains to you — with help from Heidegger and Nietzsche — why the existence of Jews is a form of aggression and a threat to humanity,” have a home in his native borough.

The thrust of this argument, that pro-Palestinian protesters use the language of the academy to justify the oldest hatred is hardly novel. They are in fact facile to the point of tracking with Allen’s own “witch hunt” comments about #MeToo (for which he said he should be the poster boy; he achieved this in a sense, but not in the way he meant.)

But if this is any type of Allen, it’s one of his characters, not the man himself.

“My grandmother, by the way, lived through actual Nazis,” the author writes, of hearing a protester indulging in Holocaust inversion. “She hid in a basement in Poland with a man who coughed so hard the Germans could have found them just from the bronchial racket.”

Allen’s grandparents were in the U.S. during World War II, but nice line.

John Podhoretz slammed this forgery, remarking how the real auteur has been “shamefully silent since October 7.”

This is an odd kind of indictment, aside from not being strictly true.

Who, exactly, would Allen reach in his activism for Jews? Should he shift to advocacy, he would likely find the exact same audience that shared the fake and found themselves nodding reverently along.

Perhaps this bodes well for Allen’s continued influence on the segment of the population still dying to hear his insights. Woody Allen may be 90, cancelled and taking a break from making movies, but Woody A.I.len can live forever.

PJ Grisar is a Forward culture reporter. He can be reached at [email protected] and @pjgrisar on Twitter.

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