Latest news with #EminentJews
New York Times
19-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Four ‘Eminent Jews' Walk Into a Book
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.
Yahoo
07-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Book Review: David Denby profiles 4 'eminent' Jews who profoundly changed post-WWII American culture
When Lytton Strachey set out to write 'Eminent Victorians' in 1918, he sought to enliven the stuffy Victorian conventions of biographical writing by portraying his subjects with warts and all. In his new book 'Eminent Jews,' David Denby pays tribute to that iconic work by choosing a similar-sounding title. This sly homage simultaneously serves as a kind of callback to Denby's own 1996 bestseller, 'Great Books,' about reading the literary canon of the Western world at Columbia University. But unlike his predecessor, Denby, a staff writer at the New Yorker and former film critic there and at New York magazine, seeks to celebrate, not denigrate, his subjects. And what a celebration it is! For his project Denby chose four of the most brilliant and consequential American Jews in the arts and letters after the Second World War — Mel Brooks, Betty Friedan, Norman Mailer and Leonard Bernstein — and analyzed their monumental, zeitgeist-changing achievements from the intimate perspective of a younger American Jew who came of age in a world that they in large part created. Readers might reasonably ask why these four and not so many others whose lives burned brightly in the second half of the 20th century? Denby states his reasons clearly: Brooks transformed popular comedy, turning it into 'a celebration of the body and an assault on death.' Friedan kicked off second-wave feminism, teaching women 'to dismiss humiliation (and) confront anger.' Mailer created new forms of American prose and virtually invented 'the bad Jewish boy.' And Bernstein wrote Broadway shows, popularized classical music and became one of the great conductors of the 20th century. Though his overall tone is triumphal, Denby does not shy away from portraying their dark sides: Brooks' need to dominate any room of writers; Bernstein's sexual dalliances and later in life, his crude public behavior; Mailer's promiscuity and the stabbing of his second wife; and Frieden's mutually abusive marriage and difficulty sharing the spotlight with other feminist leaders. At times, though, the book drags. Denby has clearly done so much research and is so besotted with his subjects that he is loath to leave anything out — though it is not hard to see why. One anecdote is juicier than the next, the literary equivalent of those lavish spreads at the Jewish resorts in the Catskills of yore where Brooks got his start and whose menus Denby lovingly recalls: chilled schav (sorrel soup) with sliced egg, boiled yearling fowl in a pot, and Vienna almond crescent. ___ AP book reviews: Ann Levin, The Associated Press
Associated Press
07-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Associated Press
Book Review: David Denby profiles 4 ‘eminent' Jews who profoundly changed post-WWII American culture
When Lytton Strachey set out to write 'Eminent Victorians' in 1918, he sought to enliven the stuffy Victorian conventions of biographical writing by portraying his subjects with warts and all. In his new book 'Eminent Jews,' David Denby pays tribute to that iconic work by choosing a similar-sounding title. This sly homage simultaneously serves as a kind of callback to Denby's own 1996 bestseller, 'Great Books,' about reading the literary canon of the Western world at Columbia University. But unlike his predecessor, Denby, a staff writer at the New Yorker and former film critic there and at New York magazine, seeks to celebrate, not denigrate, his subjects. And what a celebration it is! For his project Denby chose four of the most brilliant and consequential American Jews in the arts and letters after the Second World War — Mel Brooks, Betty Friedan, Norman Mailer and Leonard Bernstein — and analyzed their monumental, zeitgeist-changing achievements from the intimate perspective of a younger American Jew who came of age in a world that they in large part created. Readers might reasonably ask why these four and not so many others whose lives burned brightly in the second half of the 20th century? Denby states his reasons clearly: Brooks transformed popular comedy, turning it into 'a celebration of the body and an assault on death.' Friedan kicked off second-wave feminism, teaching women 'to dismiss humiliation (and) confront anger.' Mailer created new forms of American prose and virtually invented 'the bad Jewish boy.' And Bernstein wrote Broadway shows, popularized classical music and became one of the great conductors of the 20th century. Though his overall tone is triumphal, Denby does not shy away from portraying their dark sides: Brooks' need to dominate any room of writers; Bernstein's sexual dalliances and later in life, his crude public behavior; Mailer's promiscuity and the stabbing of his second wife; and Frieden's mutually abusive marriage and difficulty sharing the spotlight with other feminist leaders. At times, though, the book drags. Denby has clearly done so much research and is so besotted with his subjects that he is loath to leave anything out — though it is not hard to see why. One anecdote is juicier than the next, the literary equivalent of those lavish spreads at the Jewish resorts in the Catskills of yore where Brooks got his start and whose menus Denby lovingly recalls: chilled schav (sorrel soup) with sliced egg, boiled yearling fowl in a pot, and Vienna almond crescent.
