EMINENT JEWS

Homage to gifted disruptors.

New Yorker staff writer Denby celebrates the “cultural achievement of postwar American Jews” by profiling four prominent figures: Mel Brooks (b. 1926), Betty Friedan (1921-2006), Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990), and Norman Mailer (1923-2007). “Unruly Jews,” as he calls them, they had in common “a bounding unapologetic egotism marked, at the same time, by a generous temperament and a stern sense of obligation.” They had in common, as well, being the subjects of cartoonist David Levine, whose unmistakable caricatures illustrate the book. Denby feels a connection to his subjects both because of his own Jewish background and because of what they represent—a “powerful shadow existence…the full development of lives I have not lived, cannot live.” Drawing on memoirs, biographies, interviews, archival sources, and histories, Denby creates vivid portraits of his feisty quartet. He captures Brooks’ raunchy humor, Friedan’s uncompromising intensity, Mailer’s wildness, and Bernstein’s prodigious cultural, intellectual, and sensual appetites. At a time when antisemitism was waning, they didn’t try to hide their identity as Jews, but to redefine it. Mailer, for one, escaped the image of the “‘nice Jewish boy’ by inventing the bad Jewish boy.” Friedan folded in the “ethical passions” she inherited from Jewish traditions with “the traditions of left-wing protest in the thirties (anti-fascist and pro-labor), much of it created by Jews.” Each was zealous, ambitious, and bold. “In different ways,” Denby writes, “they liberated the Jewish body, releasing the unconscious of the Jewish middle class, ending the constrictions and avoidances that the immigrants and their children, so eager to succeed in America, imposed on themselves.” Although they were hardly alone among a generation of laudable Jewish intellectuals and entertainers, Denby makes a persuasive case for their singular eminence.

Richly detailed and thoroughly entertaining.