David Denby’s ‘Eminent Jews’

Ralph Ellison famously remarked that, whatever your skin color, you couldn’t have an American experience without having a Black experience, and in the mid-20th century, the same was true of America and Jewishness. “You don’t have to be Jewish to enjoy Levy’s Jewish Rye,” a 1967 ad campaign insisted, and you could add to Levy’s rye a long list stretching from Barbra Streisand to the Three Stooges and Philip Roth.

In Eminent Jews, David Denby, who was for many years The New Yorker’s distinguished film critic, harks back to the lost golden age of American Jewry, turning his attention to four Jewish American stars of the postwar era. These four—Mel Brooks, Betty Friedan, Norman Mailer, and Leonard Bernstein—battered, shmoozed, and tore their way into American culture. “America poured into them, and they, as Jews, poured into America,” Denby writes, enjoying “freedoms that Jews had never known before.” The Ivy League numerus clausus had crumbled, and restricted hotels were largely extinct. The old world’s prohibitions didn’t make much sense in the streets of New York, where you could live a fully secular Jewish life encircled by your fellow Jews. Denby is himself a proudly Jewish New Yorker. A little younger than his subjects, he remembers a time when Jews were seen as dynamos of creative energy rather than colonialist oppressors or mouthpieces for righteous world-repairing. He has written a book of dazzling verve, which captures as well as anyone ever has the matchless vigor of his four subjects.

Denby borrows his title from Lytton Strachey’s modernist classic Eminent Victorians. Looking back to his parents’ era, Strachey can be a wicked demystifier, cracking jokes at the expense of Victorian icons like Florence Nightingale. Denby, by contrast, celebrates his four Jews, without hiding their faults. None of Denby’s subjects was immune to the show-stealer’s narcissism. For these Jewish upstarts, egomania supplied a key ingredient of artistic success, though it was also a crippling trait for at least one of them, Friedan.

Brooks, born Melvin Kaminsky on the Lower East Side (and now, at 98, no spring chicken), got his start as a busboy and tummler in the Catskills. The barely adolescent Brooks sometimes donned a heavy coat and, with suitcases in both hands, walked despondently to the end of a diving board. Moaning, “Oy, business is terrible, I can’t go on,” he would plunge into the pool. While enjoying blintzes, borscht, and chopped liver, the midsummer vacationers chortled over the skinny kid who would do anything for a laugh.

Brooks got his real start with the zany crew of writers that Sid Caesar assembled for Your Show of Shows, which included Neil Simon and Woody Allen. Caesar was a hyperactive and brilliantly eccentric performer who sometimes lampooned high-culture items like Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu (which became U Betchu). He could also be an angry, demanding boss. Once, when Brooks complained that he needed some air, Caesar flung open a window and, grabbing Mel’s legs, dangled him over the streets below.

Brooks inherited Caesar’s virtuosic energy, but his brand of comedy was more raw, crass at times, and noticeably grumpy. He loved to throw barbs at the Gentile world. When Carl Reiner and Brooks first tried out the impromptu routine that rocketed them to stardom, “The 2000 Year Old Man,” the first joke they came up with stuck it to the Christians. Sure, Brooks says, he remembers Jesus—“thin lad … wore sandals.” Jesus and his disciples “always came into the store … never bought anything.”

For his first movie, Brooks came up with The Producers, a grand piece of slapdash hilarity that he first wanted to call Springtime for Hitler, before he was informed that no Jewish theater owner would agree to put up a sign for such a film. Like Mo of the Three Stooges, Brooks was a passionate fan of Hitler jokes, which he saw as the Jews’ revenge on their archetypal enemy.

Denby is funny and spot-on in his account of the central works of the Brooks canon, the “2000 Year Old Man” albums, The Producers (the movie and the stage musical), Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, and History of the World, Part 1. Denby succulently describes Madeline Kahn’s parodic turn as Marlene Dietrich in Blazing Saddles:

Stretching out Dietrich’s German drawl, Kahn buggers her consonants and captures the goddess’s uncertain relation to pitch, her voice running out of steam in the held notes. Unfurling her legs, Madeleine Kahn is lewd and mock-lewd at the same time.

Eminent Jews notes that Brooks was deeply influenced by Gogol’s Dead Souls and that “some part of the Russian pessimism melded with his own cruel knowledge of what was funny.” The callousness of Brooks’ comedy differs from the sour, lethal cynicism peddled by Lenny Bruce, the “hunched, scrawny, unwholesome, rat-like” comic with the “poolroom face,” as the writer Leonard Michaels called him. (I never found Bruce’s recordings very funny, but I’ve been told that I had to be there.) Brooks shared the Russians’ exuberance along with their knowledge that bad luck and perversity rule the world. Denby sees Brooks’ comedy as an “assault on death,” and when he appeared on The Tonight Show, he did look like a one-man life force. Brooks hogged Johnny Carson’s stage, gabbling and gamboling with a stupendous comic fury that only Jerry Lewis and Robin Williams ever equaled.

Denby moves from the supremely antic Brooks to Betty Friedan, the humorless, stolid author of The Feminine Mystique (1963). Friedan, a trailblazing second-wave feminist and the founder of NOW, is the only one of Denby’s four who had a political rather than an artistic career; Streisand would have been a more logical choice for the female fourth in his quartet. His treatment of Friedan seems dutiful rather than passionate, and for good reason. Devoted to the cause, she was not a magnetic personality like Denby’s three other Jews.

Friedan’s ambition for women did not go beyond the basics of bourgeois fulfillment. Her plodding Feminine Mystique lacks the high imagination visible in Germaine Greer’s funny, lacerating The Female Eunuch or Shulamith Firestone’s dizzying The Dialectic of Sex.

Friedan’s view of female self-realization was sheerly practical, focusing on jobs and education for women and, eventually, abortion rights—she was a founder of NARAL—but she was a bumbling leader, addicted to kvetching and grandstanding and despised by Greer, Bella Abzug, Gloria Steinem, and others. Friedan ran into trouble when she denounced lesbian feminists, whom she dubbed “the lavender menace.” Women inclined toward child-rearing and homemaking felt sidelined by Friedan’s insistence that they could only be fulfilled outside the home. In The Feminine Mystique, she maladroitly labeled the bourgeois household a “comfortable concentration camp.” At a 1973 debate with Phyllis Schlafly about the Equal Rights Amendment, she called Schlafly an “Aunt Tom,” then exclaimed, “And God, you are a witch. I’d like to burn you at the stake.” The ERA failed to pass, and thus is not part of the Constitution, though the outgoing President Biden and his vice president both mysteriously claimed otherwise.

For years, Friedan notoriously remained in an abusive marriage. She and her husband, Carl, both heavy drinkers, would pummel each other, and once she was seen chasing him with a knife on the beach at Fire Island. He sometimes appeared at work with a scratched face. When Friedan, in 1969, joined a feminist protest against the all-male Oak Room at the Plaza Hotel, she had a black eye.

Denby oddly discounts Friedan’s early alignment with Communism. In her youth, Friedan “was hardly a Communist,” Denby writes, but this is hardly the case. For six years (1947-1952) she worked as a journalist for the United Electrical Workers, a rigidly party-line union, and published in the New Masses. According to her biographer Daniel Horowitz, she applied to join the Communist Party but was told she would be more valuable as a fellow traveler.

Norman Mailer, like Friedan, flirted with radicalism, though his variety was homegrown rather than supplied by the Communist Party. Mailer burst into celebrity with The Naked and the Dead, a flawed novel that Denby rightly admires for its treatment of the exhausted male body in combat.

Mailer’s “The White Negro” (1957), Denby writes, “sets up a spiritual hierarchy of acts, ranked by danger and risk; even now, it has a discomforting effect on anyone who reads it.” Scandalously, Mailer applauds the action of teenage thugs who murder a candy store owner, a rather transparent allusion to Black urban criminals targeting a Jew. Yet Mailer’s polemic, for all its high-wire absurdity, still packs a crazy punch. He was the missing link between the Beats and the New York Intellectuals, a wild man who, having stabbed his second wife—Mailer’s ineradicable sin—was nearly a murderer and therefore equipped to look directly into the dark souls of Lee Harvey Oswald and Gary Gilmore.

Denby gives us one of the best accounts of Mailer’s messy bravado and ardent willingness to test himself. Like Brooks and Bernstein, he was the adored son of a Jewish mother who encouraged his dreams of regal power. The “boastful yet wounded” Mailer, Denby notes, displays in his photos “that familiar gazing-into-the-apocalypse look, with its aura of potent calculation.” Mailer was miraculously generous, sometimes boorish and gross, unfailingly inventive, and always bursting with energy.

“Mailer, I’m quite sure, was not fighting homosexuality,” Denby writes, but much in his work, including the gay sex scenes in the novels Harlot’s Ghost and Tough Guys Don’t Dance, suggests an obsession with homosexuality. His rather dubious idea was that every straight male had to defeat the homosexual within himself. Mailer noted in his journal that “the first orgasm of my life (which was the best) came when I was 13 and wrestling with a boy.” Straight sex was the way to fend off homosexuality. Mailer was a devoted father and at times even a good husband, but he was a frantic womanizer. He told Nicole Baker, Gilmore’s girlfriend, that in his prime, he used to think a good day was one when he had sex with three women.

Mailer said that the last time he masturbated was at age 23, when he was an American soldier, while walking in the woods in Japan. Ever after he saw sex as the chance to learn a hard-won lesson about men and women, a trial of personal strength. “This mania for knowledge is some sort of buried Jewish compulsion,” Denby remarks, “such that no given act, not even sex, can be regarded as sufficient in itself without some gain of understanding. Jews look for self-improvement in the strangest places.”

In a piece of unpublished autobiographical fiction, the Mailer character is marred shortly after birth by a mohel who targets his foreskin like the Assyrian who came down like the wolf on the fold. So, Mailer flabbergastingly identifies the mohel, tamer of Jewish maleness, with the ancient nemesis of the Jews. “He wanted to be a new kind of Jew, unhampered by fear and guilt,” Denby notes. But he couldn’t do it without drawing on age-old Jewish strengths. “When you’re born a Jew ... it’s almost impossible to take anything for granted,” Mailer told an interviewer. “We’re here to do all sorts of outrageous thinking, incisive, fine thinking.”

Denby makes the case for Mailer’s working method, his heroic brand of self-therapy:

He had the most energy, he insisted, when his best and worst instincts were working together. In those situations, he demanded of himself a continuous performance with phallus, fists, sailboats, booze, sustained ass-in-chair writing sessions. ... That kind of acting was, in fact, his own version of sublimation, but sublimation cleansed of the spiritless ‘adjustment’ required in so many fifties psychoanalytic sessions.

Mailer refused to adjust himself, and he paid a price for it, as Denby notes, in damage to himself and others. But the effort was heroic. Loyal as well as defiant, Mailer flew higher than any of his contemporaries.

Mailer produced his share of botches. Denby is merciless on that mess of a film, Maidstone: “They all got boozed and laid—it was a wild enough scene—while Mailer paced around, barrel-chested and shirtless, working everybody up into meaningless rages.” But Denby praises rightly. His Mailer canon includes The Fight, a nonpareil report on the Ali-Foreman Rumble in the Jungle, The Armies of the Night, and the other great political journalism, Oswald’s Tale, The Naked and the Dead and, best of all, Mailer’s electrifying, massive The Executioner’s Song.

In Denby’s quartet, only Bernstein remained strongly attached to traditional Jewish texts. An ardent Zionist, he conducted the Palestine Orchestra during the War of Independence with artillery sounding in the background, and there is a famous photo of Bernstein hoisted up by Israeli soldiers in 1967. Bernstein’s first symphony, Jeremiah (1942), is based on the book of Lamentations, adapted to the destruction of European Jewry. These were his glory days: Within two years, still in his mid-twenties, Bernstein composed Jeremiah, became conductor of the New York Philharmonic, and wrote the music for Jerome Robbins’ ballet Fancy Free, which later became the movie On the Town. (Bernstein’s son, Alexander, once remarked that his father was afraid of nothing and nobody ... except for Jerome Robbins.)

Alex Ross wrote that Bernstein, for a brief time in the ‘50s, “took back the cultural middle ground that Gershwin had colonized in the ’20s and ’30s.” West Side Story (1957) was a cutting-edge amalgam of Latin pop, Tin Pan Alley, jazz, and modern classical (in West Side Story’s “Cool,” Ross notes, “something like a 12-note series is used to propel a bebop fugue”). Though Bernstein continued to write music, he was better known for his conducting and for his music education programs on television—the heart of his “Jewish instructional mania,” Denby writes—which turned endless millions on to classical music.

Of all the figures in Eminent Jews, Denby is the closest to Bernstein. When, at age 17, he saw Lenny conducting Mahler’s Third Symphony, it changed his life: “That last movement opened gates of sensation and feeling that I had never experienced before, at least not outside of dreams.” The Mahlerian turbulence became forever identified with Bernstein’s hyperphysical, passionately coaxing gestures in front of the orchestra. His Mahler seemed always on the edge of crisis. “Marches like heart attacks,” Bernstein wrote in his score of Mahler’s Sixth.

“You’re going to die a lonely, bitter old queen,” Bernstein’s wife, Felicia, once proclaimed over the dinner table, when Bernstein was having an affair with the composer Tom Cothran, a line that, as Denby writes, “sounds like the maledizione from Rigoletto.” Denby gives a depressing sketch of the sometimes sodden and crude late-period Bernstein:

The body electric no longer charmed everyone in sight. Adonis had become Silenus, gut-heavy, sometimes drunk and mean, talking of sex too much, his hands too active, his tongue placed down unwilling throats. When he mixed alcohol and Dexedrine, he would say cruel things to people who had known him for years, embarrassing his children and his friends. He had always needed adulation; now he mainlined it.

Still, Bernstein, even in this degraded shape, remained a colossus, a man of unruly, overflowing emotion, expressing himself through every sweaty, full-bodied leap at the conductor’s podium—and, as Alex Ross puts it, constitutionally “incapable of saying anything but what he really meant.”

Bernstein’s biographer Allen Shawn recalls one of the Young People’s Concerts during which Lenny explained the music of Beethoven, Chopin, and Schumann to a crowd of half-restless, half-mesmerized children. He tells them that whereas earlier music could be simply “gay,” Romantic music was sometimes “crazy with joy.” Romanticism, Bernstein says to the audience of 10-year-olds, was about “telling your deepest feelings right away, without even thinking about whether you should.” What Bernstein said about the German Romantics was true in spades for himself, and for the other eminent Jews in Denby’s portfolio. Superbly unstifled, allergic to deadpan, they continue to inspire.