Eminent Jews: Bernstein, Brooks, Friedan, Mailer
by David Denby, Henry Holt and Co., 2025.
In his classic book Eminent Victorians, Lytton Strachey knocked four Victorian heroes – Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Thomas Arnold and General Gordon – off their pedestals. Strachey, a member of the Bloomsbury group of painters, writers and intellectuals, achieved fame for his pioneering revisionist effort. Virginia Woolf deemed it “a masterpiece of prose.”
In his sparkling new book Eminent Jews, David Denby also chronicles four figures, but he does not engage in a revisionist effort to debunk them. Instead, he celebrates Mel Brooks, Betty Friedan, Norman Mailer and Leonard Bernstein as representatives of a golden age in America, when prosperity for Jews increased and antisemitism mostly dwindled into insignificance. Denby, who is the former film critic for New Yorker magazine, chronicles the lives of his subjects, offering a valentine to post-World War Two America.
Denby is careful to note at the outset that “a note of mourning must be sounded” for the recent return of old hatreds in America. “American Jews,” he writes, “know that antisemitism is a foul underground stream that bursts into sight now and then.”
Specifically, Denby alludes to the events of October 7, 2023, when Hamas carried out a barbaric murder of civilians in southern Israel. Denby condemns the leftist college students who have “denounced Israel as a `settler-colonial’ state and have demanded what amounts to the end of the Jewish homeland.” But he also observes that “No American Jew can be happy when anti-Semitism surfaces among white Christian nationalists attracted to Donald Trump and the MAGA-dominant Republican Party, or when Kanye West’s anti-Semitic idiocies reach millions on social media…”
Denby expresses the hope that perhaps something useful can be gleaned from the sheer brio of the lives of Brooks, Friedan, Mailer and Bernstein. They repudiated the kind of reticence that typified many American Jews before World War II, a moment when Hollywood moguls avoided criticizing Nazi Germany for fear of creating blowback in America itself.
The very opposite of this defensive, even crouching, stance was represented by the brash Mel Brooks. Born in Brooklyn in 1926 into an immigrant family, he became one of America’s greatest comics. In The Producers, he pushes the boundaries of good taste, depicting two producers who hatch a scheme to stage a play called Springtime for Hitler. A more moving production by Brooks, I think, is his 1983 film To Be or Not to Be, which is set in Nazi-occupied Poland. It features a theater troupe, ending with Brooks outwitting the Nazis and conducting dozens of Polish Jews to safety in Great Britain.
Beneath the antic humor of Brooks’ work is something more serious. Denby suggests that Brooks has devoted much of his craft to attacking Hitler by ridiculing him, much as Charlie Chaplin had attempted to do in The Great Dictator (which was released in 1940): “The Jew killers have to be brought into Jewish entertainment again; they have to be kept alive in order to be humiliated by mockery. Reviving and ridiculing these tormentors is one way of cheering up the Jew, even if it makes the Jews squirm at times.”
Norman Mailer also made people squirm but for very different reasons. Mailer, born in 1923, grew up in Crown Heights, New York. He attended Harvard where he became an engineering major before serving in the 112th Cavalry in the Pacific during World War II. He wrote an overnight bestseller about his experiences there in The Naked and the Dead. It features two Jews, Roth and Goldstein, the former snobby and morose, the latter a tough guy, who possesses the attributes Mailer covets. “The Brooklyn Jewish boy,” Denby writes, “was no longer abashed, no longer inadequate, and certainly no longer quiet.”
Mailer was not without his critics. The novelist Cynthia Ozick, in a 1970 essay called “Toward a New Yiddish,” maintained that Jews in America needed to begin with the particulars of his or her tribe: blow through the small opening of the shofar and it will resound widely. Mailer, by contrast, in trying to write for all Americans, “was blowing through the wrong end of the shofar.”
Mailer ultimately made his mark as a cultural critic in a slew of famous essays for magazines like Esquire, including “Superman Goes to the Supermarket.” But perhaps Saul Bellow, a Canadian Jew who was the greater writer, might have merited a chapter in Denby’s book. Like Mailer, he eschewed the label of “Jewish writer” but unlike Mailer most of his work featured Jewish characters. No one sent up the agony of the New York intellectuals more astutely than Bellow.
Denby ends his work with a tribute to Leonard Bernstein whose personal life was recently explored in the excellent biopic Maestro. The film begins on an exuberant note, depicting the famous phone call in November 1943 that Bernstein received from the New York Philharmonic; guest conductor Bruno Walter had the flu and would Bernstein replace him. “A warm reception for 25-year-old conductor,” the New York Times announced in its review of the concert.
He arrived just in time, since classical music was starting to fade as a part of American popular culture, in Denby’s telling. “The old hierarchies, in which loving classical was not only an ethical and aesthetic attainment but a sign of social status, matter less and less, and, in the sixties, after the Beatles, the Stones, and Bob Dylan, the hierarchies collapsed altogether.”
Bernstein injected classical music with vitality and elan, much to the horror, at least initially, of the New York music critics. He credits Bernstein with reviving interest in Sibelius, Carl Nielsen, Dmitri Shostakovich, and above all, Gustav Mahler. It was Mahler who most intrigued Bernstein. Mahler declared, “I am thrice homeless, as a native of Bohemia in Austria, as an Austrian among Germans, and as a Jew throughout the world, Everywhere an intruder, never welcomed.” Bernstein made Mahler a central figure in the classical canon, not only in America but also in Europe.
In particular, Bernstein became a beloved figure in Vienna, where he frequently conducted the Vienna Philharmonic. According to Denby, “he helped restore to Europeans a part of the Jewish contribution to Austrian-German culture and life, and perhaps also a range of emotions, including access to the bitter ironies of self-knowledge that had been eliminated from consciousness during the Nazi period.” At the same time, Bernstein was a warm friend of Israel, visiting it for the first time in 1947 and conducting the Israel Philharmonic in the midst of the War of Independence on November 20, 1948 in Beersheva. Thereafter Bernstein helped forge the Israel Philharmonic into a world-class ensemble.
A world famous celebrity, Bernstein provided a new model for the conductor, far from the stern European autocrat embodied by the likes of Arturo Toscanini or Fritz Reiner. Today’s great conductors such as the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra’s Jonathon Heyward are very much in the Bernstein mold.
Bernstein also sought, as far as possible, to spread the classical gospel, but here he faced formidable hurdles. He stopped performing new music other than his own and focused on the European masterworks. “He was one of the world’s great conductors, revered everywhere,” Denby writes, “but in his work on the podium alone he could not solve what had gone wrong in the direction of music itself.”
In lauding what he sees as the rebirth of Jewish culture in America, Denby’s is necessarily a glance backward. In the Atlantic, Franklin Foer recently diagnosed the efflorescence of anti-Semitism on the left and right as meaning “the Golden Age of American Jews is ending.” Denby has provided a worthy tribute to that era.
