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This post reminds me a bit of Sartre and his defense of jews and some of the issues inherent to the identity of jews.
Sartre had all his life been ugly and short. He was keenly aware of this and it became a part of his identity and philosophy. He saw in himself a marginalized person because of this. And he saw in that marginalization a commonality with other marginalized people. A sort of proto-bioleninism. The most prominent of these were jews.
Sartre wrote an entire book on anti-semitism and jews. Only to later state that he did in fact not know a single thing about jews and judaism, but was instead just describing and defending himself. But the defense stuck. The book has been tirelessly praised by jewish scholars as capturing the essence of being jewish, and is often quoted by leftists as refutation of anti-semitism. Full of the typical scathing psychoanalytic remarks on the psychological and philosophical deficiencies that would drive one towards a dislike of jews.
How could a man who knew nothing about jews defend them so accurately and valiantly? In what turned out to just be a sort of reverse Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, there were one too many things that added up. Despite being fiction it hit a little too close to home.
A part of jewish identity is being marginalized. A part of jewish identity is being on the outside. And in the sense that Sartre elucidated, jewish identity is being weak, neurodivergent, depressed and ugly. As horrid as it might sound. You can say that these are not true and point to beautiful well adjusted jewish people and I would agree. But to that end I would argue that these people, in Sartre's definition of jews, are less jewish than the ugly ones.
BAP seems to want to step outside this bear trap of jewish identity. He wants to be beautiful, strong, happy and healthy. A celebration of idealistic normalcy where there is no revenge of the nerds because there are no nerds. In that sense it's not just a rejection of Sartre's jewish identity but the typical American secular jewish identity.
To that end I think he, along with any aspirational dreams regarding the state of Israel, run into the problem of just becoming Nazis. Not in some abstract sense but a literal one. All of this stuff has been written out before. Be eugenic, be happy, healthy and strong, be a people to be proud of. Strive for something greater. And in an inverse of Sartre, they need to turn away from jewishness for the same reason Sartre was drawn towards it.
Bah. Woody Allen is not somehow the ideal Jew. He is a stereotype which was popular (and like most stereotypes, not without truth) for a while, that's all. None of that is essential to Jewish identity.
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