WOODY ALLEN joked in “Annie Hall” that after he was thrown out of New York University for cheating on a metaphysics final, his mother, a “high-strung woman, locked herself in the bathroom and took an overdose of mah-jongg tiles.”

This illustrates not just the lengths to which a distraught Jewish mother might go to inflict guilt, but how much a staple mah-jongg was (and is) in Jewish-American life  up there with flanken, seltzer and schmaltz (at least in my family).

It is curious that this ancient Chinese table game, the invention of which is attributed to Confucius in 500 B.C. (yet the origin is really uncertain), would be such a smash among American Jews that it evolved into a Jewish game.

The craze, which began in the 1920s, was a novel form of entertainment for a new leisure class and paralleled a middle-class taste for Asian-style interior decoration as well as a “Jewish interest in Chinese food,” says Melissa Martens, the curator of “Project Mah Jongg,” an extensive exhibit opening at the Museum of Jewish Heritage on May 4 and continuing through December.