Eminent Jews: Bernstein, Brooks, Friedan, Mailer

by David Denby

Overview

Leonard Bernstein, Mel Brooks, Betty Friedan, and Norman Mailer. Brilliant, brash, yet soulful, they were 100 percent Jewish and 100 percent American. They upended the restrained culture of their forebears and changed American life. They worked in different fields, and, apart from clinking glasses at parties now and then, they hardly knew one another. But they shared a historical moment and a common temperament. For all four, their Jewish heritage was electrified by American liberty. The results were explosive.

As prosperity for Jews increased and antisemitism began to fade after World War II, these four creative giants stormed through the latter half of the twentieth century, altering the way people around the world listened to music, defined what was vulgar, comprehended the relations of men and women, and understood the American soul. They were not saints; they were turbulent and self-dissatisfied intellectuals who fearlessly wielded their own newly won freedom to charge up American culture.

Celebratory yet candid, at times fiercely critical, David Denby presents these four figures as egotistical and generous—larger-than-life, all of them, yet vulnerable, even heartbreaking, in their ambition, ferocity, and pride.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9798228521605
Publisher:	Tantor
Publication date:	07/22/2025
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 5.70(h) x (d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

David Denby is the New York Times bestselling author of Great Books. His other books include American Sucker and Lit Up. He was a film critic for New York magazine and the New Yorker, where he is now a staff writer. His essays have appeared in the New Republic and the Atlantic. He lives in New York City with his wife, novelist Susan Rieger.

Josh Bloomberg, an Earphones Award–winning narrator, is a trained professional actor with extensive audiobook experience as a director and narrator. Having worked with some of the biggest publishers in the audiobook industry, he is used to performing at high standards. He speaks English, French, and Hebrew fluently and is a member of the Audio Publishers Association. He also records his voice for commercial spots and other types of voice-over. In his spare time, he loves making homemade almond milk.

Editorial Reviews

David Denby succeeds marvelously in Eminent Jews, his portrait of four icons who defined American culture in the second half of the 20th century. . . . Throughout, he makes a convincing case that his subjects exercised a 'moral strenuousness' that accounts for the longevity of their works and ideas. . . . A longtime writer for The New Yorker, Denby, an obviously talented raconteur, perfects the ironic erudition that has long characterized that magazine’s style.”

—Alexander Nazaryan, The New York Times Book Review

“With Eminent Jews, David Denby has written a fantastic book about four remarkably talented and consequential figures of American arts and letters. The book is as brilliant and witty as its subjects.”

—Aaron Sorkin

“David Denby manages to capture his subjects in a remarkable way, all the while grounding them in their personal and public circumstance. By this feat he has enabled us, perhaps, to enjoy and understand them as they actually were.”

—Bradley Cooper

“Denby is funny and spot-on. . . . He has written a book of dazzling verve, which captures as well as anyone ever has the matchless vigor of his four subjects.”

—David Mikics, Tablet

“An exuberant, beautiful, wise celebration of American Jewish life in the twentieth century, and, let's use the word, eminent cultural history. His deeply psychological portraits of his four subjects will be regarded as the definitive ones.”

—Franklin Foer, author of The Last Politician

“A marvel. I cannot recall the last time I devoured a book as I did this one. . . . The writing is sensational: witty, persuasive, lyrical, passionate. The reader laughs, grimaces, tears up, is alternately delighted and disgusted, by the antics and sometimes unmet ambitions of these four oversized, manic Jews. . . . As a cultural history of postwar America, Eminent Jews stands alone.”

—David Nasaw, author of Andrew Carnegie

“The four subjects profiled by David Denby—all of them brilliant, daring, energetic, and headstrong—blew right past traditional boundaries and expanded the cultural landscape in literature, music, sexual parity, and even good taste. Eminent Jews is a joy to read.”

—John Berendt, author of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil

“The depth and delight with which David Denby reveals these four extraordinary lives would have been enough to make for four rich and satisfying biographies. But the decision to combine these four lives into one book was inspired, turning Eminent Jews into a profound examination of what the freedom of America meant for Jewish creativity and what Jewish creativity meant for America.”

—Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, author of Plato at the Googleplex

“A candid, detailed analysis . . . It is a bittersweet reminder of the years when social justice and inclusion expanded and Jews walked unapologetically onto the public stage. . . . Sip it slowly, and live or relive this golden age—an era giddy with hope, a time of light.”

—Gloria Levitas, Moment

“With his entertaining and captivating storytelling, David Denby lays bare how Brooks, Friedan, Mailer, and Bernstein transformed America. This is a joyful book to read—Denby's writing makes everyone sparkle, warts and all, and captures better than any other recent author how particular 'eminent' Jews shaped mid-twentieth century American culture. With great panache and raw honesty, Denby reminds us of the promise of America for Jews, and how Jews, like all immigrant groups, reshaped this country as they engaged it.”

—Rebecca Kobrin, Knapp Professor of American Jewish History, Columbia University

“What a wonderful book, at once deeply serious and wildly entertaining. Denby’s Jews are brilliant, obnoxious, hilarious, heroic, wrestling with life like Jacob with the angel. And, above all, they are proud; no more of that historic cowering. As the author writes, 'If their activities marked the end of tribal shame, it did not mark the end of conscience.' We need this book very badly right now.”

—Joe Klein, author of Primary Colors

“Like Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians, which is still popular more than a century after its publication, Eminent Jews is destined to be a classic. Denby’s discerning wit, critic’s eye and nuanced grasp of the cultural history of the second half of the 20th century is unparalleled. So is his sense of what it means to be an accomplished Jew in America.”

—Jonathan Alter, author of American Reckoning: Inside Trump’s Trial—and My Own

From the Publisher

★ 2025-01-18
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.

Kirkus Reviews