Eminent Jews
By David Denby
Henry Holt and Co., 400 pp.
In 1951, I took an advertising job at a Midwestern ad agency with a newly opened office in New York City. During a slow spell, I was tasked with blacking out a single line on stacks of individual forms for job applicants to fill out—the line that asked for the applicant’s religion. I remember assuming that this change was a response to some new law prohibiting religious discrimination. It wasn’t—legal discrimination against Jews, I learned later, ended only with the passage of the l964 Civil Rights Act. In retrospect, I think it more probable that the agency had decided to drop the religious qualification from its application forms, produced in the Detroit home office, because it was proving an impediment to hiring workers from New York’s large Jewish population. At the time, though, my assumption gave me great comfort. And the next 50 years seemed to confirm my confidence in the decline of antisemitism.
David Denby’s book Eminent Jews brought this memory to my mind because it so enthusiastically celebrates that era of Jewish comfort and prominence in the United States. Written before Donald Trump’s second term, it is a bittersweet reminder of the years when social justice and inclusion expanded and Jews walked unapologetically onto the public stage, claiming a prominent position in the cultural and political life of the nation.
The book owes its title and structure to Lytton Strachey’s 1918 volume Eminent Victorians: Both examine the lives and impact of three men and one woman on their respective cultures. But while Strachey’s book, which focused on such luminaries as Florence Nightingale, was a sly, satiric takedown of Victorian claims to moral superiority, Denby takes a very different tone. His book spotlights four iconic figures—Mel Brooks, Betty Friedan, Norman Mailer and Leonard Bernstein—as leaders in show business, politics, literature and the arts, all areas in which Jews gained significant dominance from 1945 on. As the Trump administration contrives to undo many of these advances, sowing uneasiness in Jewish communities, Denby’s reconstruction of this “golden age” feels all the more important.
Denby has explored these figures before, in books and articles throughout his career (which included a long stint as New Yorker film critic). Here, he sees each of them as “ending” a different aspect of Jewish cultural timidity. He writes exuberantly about Brooks, whose assertion of Jewishness constituted “the end of self-pity”; less confidently about Friedan, the political crusader who spoke out against male dominance of women (“the end of subservience”); yet more uneasily about Mailer, whose pugnacity signaled “the end of shame”; and adoringly of Bernstein, who destroyed the barriers between popular and classical culture (“the end of apprenticeship”).
For those who lived it, this volume is a great trip down memory lane, if one whose prose becomes exhausting at times. Others will find a candid, detailed analysis of events that affected the lives and psychology of Denby’s four protagonists and a great many others. Celebratory and wordy, Eminent Jews focuses on the ways in which these icons confronted and tackled the contradictions between the pull toward assimilation and the need to maintain their identities in the America they loved.
Denby wants to tell you everything about his four proud, difficult, funny, messy, sometimes dangerous and morally compromised people.
The book opens with a long section on Mel Brooks, whose unabashed presentation of himself as a stereotypical Jew—outrageous and unapologetically rude—deftly captures Brooks as I knew him in the early 1950s. My husband and I attended several casual get-togethers where Brooks, Carl Reiner and their entourage of theater folk entertained an audience of friends. To my surprise, Denby’s vivid description of the origin of the famous 2,000-year-old man skit perfectly matched my recollection of the event. It began with Carl Reiner complaining about a show in which a fictional Joseph Stalin was interviewed by celebrities. Denby writes:
“Reiner complained about the show, and then, pausing no more than a beat, he turned to Brooks and said, “Here is a man who was actually at the scene of the crucifixion two thousand years ago.”
Mel (in a thin, tired voice ): Oh boy…..
Carl: You were there? Did you know Jesus?
Mel: Lovely. Thin lad, right? He wore sandals, walked around with twelve other guys. They always came into the store, never bought anything…
At which point everyone cracked up…”
Indeed, we did. Mel could and did riff on anything—Russian novels, film directors, his immigrant family, Shakespeare. As he channeled his generally aggrieved personas, he’d run around the room, jumping on and off the tables. Nothing was sacred.
Denby’s assessment of Betty Friedan is shorter and less compelling, in part because Friedan is a less sympathetic figure. However, he pays tribute to her significance. Friedan, he writes, raised the possibility of rejecting the subservience that characterized male/female relationships, and, by inference, laid the groundwork for more extensive revolutions. Her 1963 work The Feminine Mystique critiqued the American perception of women as helpmates and homemakers, designed to bear and raise children and not suited to work outside the home. Friedan was responding to the dissatisfaction expressed by millions of women who had returned to traditional roles after World War II and were now longing for their lost freedom and independence.
Brash and outspoken, she was socially awkward and much criticized by other feminists for her focus on white middle-class women, her neglect of the worse conditions of Black and working-class white women, her stance against abortion, her negative view of assisted reproduction and her generally traditional attitudes towards homosexuality. With all those caveats, Denby nonetheless sums her up with a quote from Hillary Clinton: “She defined the problem, and then she had the courage to do something about it.”
Writer Norman Mailer, whose work is largely ignored today, seems to me a more questionable choice (though “the end of shame” captures him nicely). His first novel, The Naked and the Dead, electrified readers with its shocking descriptions of dead bodies and bloody scenes of war. He yearned to obliterate the stereotype of the “nice Jewish boy” who grew up to be a quiet, conforming and non-confrontational man.
He emulated the hard-hitting prose style of Ernest Hemingway—direct, colloquial, factual and non-literary—and matched his own prose by physically transforming himself from a slight, sweet Brooklyn adolescent into a pugnacious bulked-up tough guy. Along the way, he totally dispensed with niceness, and sometime in the 1960s, in a drunken rage, stabbed and almost killed his wife.
Mailer’s kids attended the same grade school as mine, and the neighborhood was deeply split: His close friends and family defended him, while others, including me, found his behavior inexcusable. To my mind, Philip Roth might have been a better choice as the iconic Jewish bad boy (and Denby suggests he considered Roth for the role). But it’s Denby’s book.
Finally, we arrive at Leonard Bernstein, whose music had an enormous emotional effect on Denby’s life. His tone as he recounts Bernstein’s history is almost one of disbelief: a man larger than life, physically attractive, a genius of many talents—the profusion of which proved both his greatness and his Achilles heel. He is Denby’s tragic hero, a man who tried desperately to corral and contain the disparate parts of his life and imagination. “Lenny,” as he was known to millions of fans, wrote brilliant classical works and astonishing music for Broadway shows, taught children about music and humanized the image of the maestro. His life and work brought Jewish theater, writers, artists and musicians (responsible for so much ferment and development in the arts) from the background and placed them front and center (“the end of apprenticeship”). Before Bernstein, the historic role of Jews in music, theater, film, art and dance had been known but not widely disseminated. Bernstein was unabashedly Jewish, and his personality, enormous talent and virtuosity allowed him to smash all kinds of barriers and to expose the hidden influences of Yiddish and European theater on the Broadway and concert stages.
In search of the secret of Bernstein’s greatness, Denby describes “a man of unending appetites…addicted to music, words, food, sex, applause…torn between family life and sexual adventures…between conducting and composing, between men and women.” Extraordinarily gifted and generous, Bernstein tried, according to Denby, “to make the parts of his life flow together even if that attempt appalled many people, some of whom sounded almost hurt by his many talents.” His refusal to focus on only one of these was seen as antithetical to true greatness. Bernstein proved them wrong.
Denby praises Candide—probably Bernstein’s best Broadway show—as “a fabulous jumble-shop of styles…a tribute to the music of the European past and the persistence of Europe’s most battered minority.” This passage, too, called up a favorite memory for me: a visit backstage with the later legendary Barbara Cook, who was singing the part of Cunégonde in Candide and told us how frightened she was to sing the beautiful and taxing aria “Glitter and Be Gay.” What I didn’t know, but learned from this book, was that Bernstein had written the aria specifically for Cook, trained her for the demanding performance and spent hours convincing her she could sing it.
There are many such likable details and stories in this book. But because Denby wants to tell you everything about his four proud, difficult, funny, messy, sometimes dangerous and morally compromised people, don’t try to gulp it down in a few hours. Rather, sip it slowly, and live or relive this golden age—an era giddy with hope, a time of light. Enjoy it, although today its light is somewhat dimmed, possibly even on the verge of being snuffed out.
Gloria Levitas is a cultural anthropologist and the author of five books.
Moment Magazine participates in the Amazon Associates program and earns money from qualifying purchases.