Lost Eminence

In Eminent Jews, David Denby offers portraits of four icons of twentieth-century American culture—Mel Brooks, Betty Friedan, Norman Mailer, and Leonard Bernstein—a project that feels both timeless and oddly anachronistic. “America poured into them, and they, as Jews, poured into America,” Denby writes, “a happy intermingling made possible by freedoms that Jews had never known before.” The book promises “a composite picture of the ideology and practice of postwar Jewish cultural achievement” but delivers something more modest: four chronological biographies loosely tied together by a critic’s gentle nostalgia. (The title’s knowing nod to Lytton Strachey’s acidulous Eminent Victorians isn’t anything more than that.)

Why these four? It’s never entirely clear. Probably Denby had already written about Brooks, Mailer, and Bernstein for The New Yorker, and he needed a woman. The truth is, other than being born between 1918 and 1926, these Jews don’t have much in common. Brooks and Bernstein were (mostly) mensches; Friedan and Mailer seem like nightmares. All except Brooks grew up middle class, with parents who escaped the immigrant proletariat a generation early, but they shared little else aside from popular success.

But let’s begin, as Denby does, with Mel Brooks. Denby clearly adores Brooks—who doesn’t?—but the biographical dross he adds is neither juicy nor illuminating (“From all accounts [Anne Bancroft] and Mel fought a lot and laughed a great deal,” he writes). Brooks has told his story so many times, sat for so many podcasts and articles and retrospectives—there’s only so many times one can hear about his Brooklyn upbringing, his apprenticeship under Sid Caesar, his partnership with Carl Reiner. More disappointingly, Denby, who is a good critic, falls flat here. Straining to explain the joke, he invariably kills the joke.

The Spanish Inquisition number from The History of The World: Part I is a riot, even if Brooks’s lyrics aren’t much:

The Inquisition (What a show!)
The Inquisition (Here we go!)
We know you’re wishing that we go away
But the Inquisition’s here and it’s here to stay
(The Inquisition, oh boy!
The Inquisition, what a joy!
The Inquisition, oy, oy!)

But comparing this with Kafka’s In the Penal Colony does neither critic nor comic any favors. Denby writes:

I know, I know: Kafka’s grim humor (composed, dry, distanced) couldn’t possibly be further from Mel’s Broadway burlesque (noisy, musical, ebullient). How can a furiously neurotic Czech Jew . . . be linked to the deafening American entertainer. . . . When I asked Mel, he said that he hadn’t read that particular Kafka story. But no matter. Jewish minds sometimes think alike. In both cases, torture is presented with agonizing irony as the way to knowledge.

This one-way conversation between Denby and Brooks is its own agony.

With Betty Friedan, Denby suffers from a different problem: He doesn’t much like her. “She wrote and spoke without a lyrical strain or a transcendent impulse—or more than an occasional flash of humor,” he tells us. Friedan’s father owned a successful jewelry store in Peoria but was denied membership at the local country club because he was Jewish, and Betty was rejected from a high school sorority for the same reason. These experiences, Denby argues, left Friedan highly attuned to the plight of the marginalized. Maybe.

This vague “outsider” argument isn’t interesting: It’s been made, in some form or another, about practically every famous Jew in history, and Friedan’s own troubled marriage was clearly the more immediate impetus for the second-wave feminism of The Feminine Mystique. By shoehorning Friedan into a Jewish framework, Denby makes her sound more like a synagogue vice president than a compelling cultural figure. (“She loved her trips to Israel,” he writes, quoting Friedan’s daughter. “She liked being connected there.”)

Denby situates Friedan within the context of a disproportionately Jewish second-wave feminism, but this only serves to exacerbate the question: Why her? Why not the more glamorous Gloria Steinem? The more beloved Bella Abzug? He avoids a close reading of her most famous text. “The Feminine Mystique is garrulous and unrelenting,” he writes, characterizing it as “an encompassing review of anti-female ideology.” “The humorlessness was a kind of incapacity,” he observes, blaming Friedan’s “overzealous moralism” for her ill-considered chapter about suburbia as a “Comfortable Concentration Camp.” The only unambiguous virtue of the book, it seems, is that it “remains satisfying to read as a portrait of a culture we thought had vanished.” If that’s the case, I’d rather reread World of Our Fathers.

It’s only with Norman Mailer, Denby’s third subject, that he regains his critical voice. If his attempt to retrofit a man who publicly stabbed his wife into bourgeois American Jewish respectability falls flat (“a man who needed someone to love him as much as his mother did”), Denby nevertheless makes a strong case for Mailer’s Jewish soul.

As a novelist, Mailer came back again and again to Jewish themes—and repeatedly failed. Denby writes:

Mailer’s uneasy half-suppression of the Jewish nature of his settings and characters may have been part of the reason the two novels after The Naked and the Dead stalled out. His characters have no particular flavor, no native self-expression.

Denby catalogs Mailer’s myriad half-written novels with Jews at the center, including a “novel about a Jewish couple working in Europe administering the Marshall Plan” and another in which “an American Jewish doctor and German doctor . . . clash over contending philosophies.”

But Mailer’s most enduring work—his brilliant nonfiction—does include a prominent Jewish character: Mailer himself. With “Superman Comes to the Supermarket,” his account of JFK’s coronation at the 1960 Democratic Convention, he revolutionized political reporting and helped usher in the New Journalism. The essay “was a New York Jew’s amused rendering of the square but threatening Christian world of power,” Denby writes. It was “the first of many such accounts, rueful, knowing, and unanswerable.” This approach would define his masterpieces Miami and the Siege of Chicago and The Armies of the Night, in which Mailer’s outsider-but-insider perspective became an essential lens for interpreting American power.

Denby may find his critical footing with Mailer, but it’s with Leonard Bernstein that he really shines. For him, Bernstein is sui generis, “a phenomenon mysteriously planted in America by God.” Denby depicts him as the American rebbe of classical music and makes a convincing case that the operetta Candide, which Bernstein spent nearly half his life revising, was the conductor’s true masterwork, a “jumble-shop of styles” that transformed Voltaire’s European satire into something uniquely American.

He’s particularly evocative when it comes to Bernstein’s lifelong commitment to the State of Israel—which, unlike the conductor’s messy personal life, remained remarkably uncomplicated:

In the wake of the Six-Day War of 1967, he drove into Jerusalem in an open car, as if he had conquered the Arab armies himself, singing Jewish and Arabic songs, joking with wounded Israeli army vets. One of them, born in America, gleefully jumped out of his wheelchair—at least for a moment—to greet Bernstein. Lenny conducted Mahler’s gigantic Symphony No. 2 (Resurrection) with the Israel Philharmonic on Mount Scopus, which was part of the “newly unified” city of Jerusalem. . . . He did it for himself, too—not just to assert, over and over, his Jewish identity, but . . . to take music out of the ritualized bourgeois setting of the concert hall—to bring it closer to earth and sky, to make it literally elemental, nearer to organic life and death in the land where Judaism began.

This attentive, almost jealous prose is exhilarating—we can feel Bernstein’s Jewish fervor here.

But Denby allows himself this enthusiasm only in retrospect and only by proxy. The living, breathing reality of American Jewish life in 2025 is much more uncomfortable. “The events of October 7, 2023, and the war that followed it, made Jews everywhere feel miserable and unsafe,” Denby writes in the book’s introduction, before going on to blame MAGA, Kanye West, leftist students, and Bibi Netanyahu for the morass American Jews find themselves in:

In response to Israel’s campaign in Gaza, restaurants, businesses, synagogues, and cultural centers in the United States have seen bomb threats; some have been vandalized or covered with anti-Semitic graffiti; anti-Zionist college students, often ignorant of the Israelis and the Palestinians, have harassed and insulted their Jewish classmates.

There is no real point of view here, just the implicit fear of stepping on the wrong tripwire.

The passive voice—who, precisely, was responding to Israel’s Gaza campaign by vandalizing shuls?—with all that hemming and hawing, makes you long for Bernstein’s unflinching pride. The subtext is that while Denby’s subjects found the arc of history bending toward them, today’s Jews aren’t quite so favored. But rather than engage with what’s changed, Denby merely suggests that his Eminent Jews wouldn’t do so well in today’s cultural climate. Here he is discussing Blazing Saddles:

The issue is not “taste” so much as it is our sensitivity to all kinds of hurt. Wouldn’t the inspired Madeline Kahn number be shelved as a rude assault on women? When I asked Mel if Blazing Saddles could be done today, he wouldn’t answer. But the answer is probably no, it couldn’t be done.

Does Denby rage at the neo-Puritans who would deny us Lili von Shtüpp singing “I’m Tired” as she vamped around a cowboy saloon? Not really. Instead, he meekly notes that similar constraints would have affected his other subjects. Of Bernstein’s West Side Story, he writes, “A later composer like Lin-Manuel Miranda may speak more authentically for Puerto Ricans.” Mailer’s book about the Ali–Foreman fight was “written with a ready candor about race that would likely be impossible today.” Of Bernstein’s friend and mentor Aaron Copland, Denby writes that El Salón México, his “high powered romp” through Mexican folk materials, “would now be denounced as appropriation, but eighty years ago most people did not worry about such things—it was vitality that mattered.”

Does vitality no longer matter? The American Jewish cultural tradition, if we can call it that, was built by standing just outside the majority culture to observe it clearly. America was the canvas for Denby’s Eminent Jews—not narrow autobiographical concerns. It’s hard to rescue a legacy when you won’t fully acknowledge the terms under which it’s being attacked.

Today, Mailer is maligned as the ultimate toxic White man, Friedan can’t be mentioned without condemning her homophobia, and Bernstein is celebrated more for his homosexuality than for his Jewishness (a new West Side Story documentary focuses on the “four gay men” who created the musical, conveniently ignoring that all four were Jews).

And yet, this is a pleasant book. Denby’s biographical portraits float in a sweet haze, divorced from the past twenty years of American Jewish life. It’s not his fault that what would have felt like a celebration not so long ago today reads as an elegy.

At least for me, Eminent Jews evoked a powerful nostalgia—not for the lost Golden Age of Denby’s subjects but for Denby’s own halcyon era, in which film critics could afford Classic Seven apartments on the Upper West Side (as he told us in his underrated memoir, American Sucker) and American Jewish intellectual life was coterminous with American high culture. It’s a book that feels out of place and time—a cultural postcard from the 1990s, time-traveled from a middle-aged Jewish boomer’s bookshelf.

Back then, a young man who religiously read The New Yorker cover to cover each week might have wandered into the Barnes & Noble on Eighty-Second and Broadway and seen Eminent Jews displayed prominently among the new releases. Maybe our young man came from a famous writer’s talk at the Ninety-Second Street Y, not yet boycotted by New York’s cultural elite, or from visiting friends up at Columbia, when the university was still a sanctuary and not yet a battleground.

Our young man probably wouldn’t have given Eminent Jews a second thought. American Jews were still everywhere reflected in the culture, and he might be forgiven for assuming the world would ever be so.