Eminent Jews : Bernstein, Brooks, Friedan, Mailer

Eminent Jews Bernstein, Brooks, Friedan, Mailer

David Denby, 1943-

Book - 2025

"Leonard Bernstein, Mel Brooks, Betty Friedan, and Norman Mailer. Brilliant, brash, 100 percent Jewish and 100 percent American, they were hell-bent on shaking up the world of their fathers. They worked in different fields, and, apart from clinking glasses at parties now and then, they hardly knew one another. But they shared a commonhistorical moment and a common temperament. For all four, their Jewish heritage was electrified by American liberty. As prosperity for American Jews increased and anti-Semitism began to fade after World War II, these four creative giants stormed through the latter half of the twentieth century, altering the way people listened to music, defined what was vulgar or not, comprehended the relations of men and ...women, and understood the nation's soul. They were not saints; they were Jews, children of immigrants, turbulent and self-dissatisfiedintellectuals who fearlessly wielded their own newly won freedom tofree up American culture. Celebratory yet candid, at times fiercelycritical, David Denby presents these four figures as egotistical and generous-larger-than-life, all of them, both daringly individual and emblematic of their Jewish generation"--

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Subjects
Bernstein, Leonard, > 1918-1990.
Friedan, Betty.
Brooks, Mel, > 1926-
Mailer, Norman.
Jews > United States > Intellectual life > 20th century.
Jews > United States > Biography.
United States > Civilization > Jewish influences.
Biographies.
Genres
Biographies
Published
New York, NY : Henry Holt and Company 2025.
Language
English
Main Author
David Denby, 1943- (author)
Edition
First edition
Physical Description
xiv, 383 pages, 8 unnumbered leaves of unnumbered plates : illustrations ; 24 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN
9781250193407
  • Prologue: At home in America I
  • Mel Brooks and the end of self-pity
  • Betty Friedan and the end of subservience
  • Norman Mailer and the end of shame
  • Leonard Bernstein and the end of apprenticeship
  • Epilogue: At home in America II.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

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. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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