Four ‘Eminent Jews' Walk Into a Book

New York Times

19-04-2025

Every book deserves to be judged on its own terms: Did the author accomplish what he or she set out to do? By this standard, David Denby succeeds marvelously in 'Eminent Jews,' his portrait of four icons who defined American culture in the second half of the 20th century: the humorist Mel Brooks, the writer Norman Mailer, the feminist Betty Friedan and the composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein.
By his own account, Denby set out to write 'a celebratory book, a happy book.' Here, the Upper West Side is the center of the world, and resorts fill the Catskills with bubbling Yiddishkeit. Well-dressed people read books, debate ideas and listen to Mahler symphonies. Everyone smokes and nobody gets canceled.
By the time E. Digby Baltzell's 'The Protestant Establishment' was published in 1964, his subject was being overtaken by those only a generation or two removed from the New World shtetl of Orchard Street. 'America poured into them, and they, as Jews, poured into America, a happy intermingling made possible by freedoms that Jews had never known before,' Denby writes.
The biographies frequently intersect. Mailer and Brooks both started out in Brooklyn and came of age in the U.S. Army during World War II, forever to be marked by what they saw. No longer confined to the 'Jewish Harvard' that had been the City College of New York, Mailer and Bernstein headed to Cambridge, Mass., for the real deal, there to be inculcated into the largely WASP culture they would help displace. Mailer confronted Friedan's ideas at a contentious 1971 public debate.
Contrary to the stereotype of the abstemious Jew, the book contains much hard drinking (Mailer's, but also Friedan's). There was enough sexual angst to keep a brigade of psychoanalysts and gossipmongers busy; Denby is especially strong when sensitively delineating Bernstein's tortured homosexual longings.
America in the postwar years enjoyed no shortage of influential Jews: Philip Roth, whose 1969 paean to onanism, 'Portnoy's Complaint,' dispelled the lingering sexual mores of the Eisenhower years; Bella Abzug, the New York radical who prefigured the progressivism of contemporary figures; Richard Feynman, the Nobel laureate who revolutionized physics. To say nothing of Bob Dylan. The desire to draft my own team ('the Hebraic Heroes'?) may well be evidence that Denby's foundational premise has merit.
Throughout, he makes a convincing case that his subjects exercised a 'moral strenuousness' that accounts for the longevity of their works and ideas. 'The combination of asserted freedom and ethical purpose unites these four as examples of a new kind of American Jew,' Denby writes. Their lives are intense and noisy, crowded with achievements and failures, with nary a nebbish in sight.
A longtime writer for The New Yorker, Denby, an obviously talented raconteur, perfects the ironic erudition that has long characterized that magazine's style. And so Friedan partakes 'in a Hamptons specialty: the Big Liberal Party that raises money for a cause,' while Mailer's forays to college campuses 'turned into profane revels, curses lobbed back and forth like water bombs.'
But Denby pulls punches. In his preface, he acknowledges the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel by Hamas, as well as the global recrudescence of antisemitism that followed. Otherwise, though, he insistently dwells in an irenic past. Determined to write a happy book, Denby has come dangerously close to writing an oblivious one by barely nodding to how fraught Jewishness has recently become. We needed more than his 'note of mourning' to temper the joy that follows.
This was very clearly a conscious choice, one I understand in a moment when a writer has every incentive to lie low, to say nothing that could engender controversy or cause offense. Only, one does then risk saying nothing at all.
Some of the omissions are glaring. Denby barely brings himself to acknowledge Mailer's 'The Castle in the Forest,' a novel that reimagines Hitler's childhood. 'I won't go there,' Denby writes. It is, indeed, an uncomfortable book — which is precisely why it deserves consideration, especially when zealots on the political fringes hauntingly embrace ancient hatreds.
I would have welcomed at least a mention of the recriminations surrounding a posthumous 2022 Mailer essay collection. Though the sourcing was thin, the subsequent debate about Mailer's legacy was not irrelevant. Denby's cheerful loquacity surely springs from genuine enthusiasm, but 'Eminent Jews' would have benefited from more willingness to dwell in what Walt Whitman called 'the dark patches.'
Denby does cover Bradley Cooper's turn as Bernstein in the 2023 biopic 'Maestro,' but he leaves out the debate over Cooper's use of a prosthetic nose. What a fascinating conversation to be having in the 21st century — and what a shame to ignore it altogether.
I get it, discussing this sort of thing would have made 'Eminent Jews' a less happy book. But it would have also been a more courageous one.