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Wall Street Journal

‘Eminent Jews' Review: Pushing the Boundaries

The title 'Eminent Jews' naturally evokes 'Eminent Victorians,' Lytton Strachey's takedown of Victorian culture through crushing biographical essays on Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Thomas Arnold and Charles George Gordon. Unlike the Strachey volume, David Denby's 'Eminent Jews' has been written not to crush but to celebrate Mel Brooks, Betty Friedan, Norman Mailer and Leonard Bernstein. The celebration does not come off. Mr. Denby hopes his book will exhibit 'a composite picture of the ideology and practice of postwar Jewish cultural achievement.' Yet even though Mr. Denby is himself Jewish, his 'Eminent Jews' could as easily be read as promoting antisemitic stereotypes—the book's cover features the prominent, or as I think of them the chosen, noses of its four subjects—emphasizing as it does Jews who specialized in vulgarity (Mel Brooks), intractable leftism (Betty Friedan), relentless self-promotion (Norman Mailer) and flamboyant egotism (Leonard Bernstein). Not, any of this, likely to bring much pleasure in the offices of the Anti-Defamation League. All four of Mr. Denby's subjects were ostjuden, or Eastern European Jews, and thus Ashkenazi. Eastern European Jews, who came to the U.S. in profusion in the last two decades of the 19th and the first two decades of the 20th centuries, were once viewed in contrast to the more determinedly assimilationist German Jews, whom the Eastern European Jews called yekkes—Yiddish for jackets—denoting the formality of the German Jews in never removing their suit jackets. A joke of the time asked, 'What is the difference between a yekke and a virgin? The answer: A yekke remains a yekke.' Mr. Denby devotes roughly 80 pages to each of his four subjects. He begins with Mel Brooks, whose specialty was to go up to the line of bad taste—and cross it. For Mr. Denby, Mr. Brooks 'was a more complicated Jewish clown than the world was ready to acknowledge' and 'a significant figure in Jewish history.' At one point he compares Mr. Brooks to Franz Kafka. Informed of the comparison, one imagines Kafka, not a man given to mirth, would have enjoyed a hardy, falling-off-the-couch laugh.