David Denby's
Eminent Jews
slyly takes its title from Lytton Strachey's 1918 book
Eminent Victorians
, a group biography that took a mostly irreverent look at four prominent personalities of the Victorian era.
But
Eminent Jews
"is a celebratory book, a happy book," the author wrote, albeit released at a very fraught time. It seeks to learn "something useful" from the assertiveness of its four subjects: Mel Brooks, Betty Friedan, Norman Mailer, and Leonard Bernstein.
They were the right people who lived at the right time, a golden era of relative safety and abundant achievement for the American Jews after World War II.
"As antisemitism receded, Jewish reticence faded," Denby wrote. "This book is about the moment of confidence, the breakout period when shame and silence were vanquished. My subjects were neither sequestered as Jews nor silent as Jews; they were 'assimilated' without giving up a certain exuberant brazenness derived from their Russian and Eastern European lineage."
Denby, the bestselling author of
Great Books
and a staff writer at
The New Yorker
, interviewed three of his four subjects. Mailer, especially, fascinated him.
"When I was an undergraduate at Columbia University in the 60s, we used to read his stuff aloud to each other because we were amazed by the boldness of his prose style," Denby reflected. "I always wanted to understand what made him tick."
He came to Friedan, author of the landmark 1963 book
The Feminine Mystique
, well after her seminal book was published. "It was a great relief to me to read it because I'm a non-macho Jewish male and I wanted to be released of those obligations to be tough and strong all the time," Denby said. "My mother was a very powerful woman; [iconic New Yorker film critic] Pauline Kael, my mentor, was a powerful woman. I have no problem with powerful women-- I married two of them."
The golden era of which he writes in the book was characterized by an unprecedented freedom that allowed these four towering personalities "to screw up as well as achieve great things, by means of their own gifts, but also such new media as television, the long-playing record, and mass market paperbacks," he said. "There was a diminution of antisemitism, in part because of the horror over what had happened during World War II and, in part, because of Jewish community groups that advocated respect for Jews."
It was also a time marked by extraordinary affluence. "The Jewish working class was virtually down to single digits after the war," Denby noted. "The number of Jews in elite universities was very high. When I was at Columbia in the early 60s, it was 40% Jewish. There were breakthroughs for Jews in mainstream corporate America, such as department store empires and finance."
What can the stories of Brooks, Friedan, Mailer, and Bernstein teach about persevering?
"Don't be afraid," Denby responds. "These four were not afraid of anything. They busted their heads breaking through walls."
He continued, "There had never been an American conductor of international renown like Bernstein who was also gay and married. There had never been a writer who broke so many rules of journalistic [and personal] decorum as Norman Mailer.
Armies of the Night
, his Pulitzer Prize-winning book about the 1967 march on the Pentagon, is still incomparable. There had never been a feminist before Betty Friedan who commanded such a large audience to demand equal rights and equal jobs for women. And Mel, of course, broke the boundaries of what was considered good taste in his movies. They all brought their intelligence and creativity to bear on expressing themselves."
Donald Liebenson is a Chicago writer who writes for VanityFair.com,
LA Times
,
Chicago Tribune
, and other outlets.
