David Gerlernter's comparison of Woody Allen to Natan Sharansky manages to elevate Allen and denigrate Sharansky.

Whether you agree with his politics or not, Sharansky is a towering figure. Read Fear No Evil, his memoir of life in the gulag, if you don't believe me. Woody Allen, on the other hand, not so much.

Gerlernter is reacting to Allen's statement to Der Spiegel here, in which Allen says he doesn't make films about history--specifically 9/11--because it's not "profound enough" for him.

The history of the world is like: he kills me, I kill him. Only with different cosmetics and different castings: so in 2001 some fanatics killed some Americans, and now some Americans are killing some Iraqis. And in my childhood, some Nazis killed Jews. And now, some Jewish people and some Palestinians are killing each other. Political questions, if you go back thousands of years, are ephemeral, not important. History is the same thing over and over again.

Stupid? Absolutely. But who outside of his interlocutor was waiting for Woody's word on the subject of 9/11?

I suspect Woody was so juiced at the idea that the great minds at Der Spiegel were calling him a European filmmaker that he overdid it. He could have said something about how history is not his metier. A perfectly reasonable position. If he were really honest he might have said: "You know what happens when I try to tackle profound? Interiors is what happens."

Gerlernter's point was that the two "Jewish intellectuals" represent radically different worldviews that are fighting for purchase on the American mind and how we Americans view the war against terror. But it's overkill, really. Woody Allen is the Dominick Dunne of intellectuals--a namedropper: "I was thrown out of college for cheating on the metaphysics exam; I looked into the soul of the boy sitting next to me." That's about as profound as Allen gets.