David Denby’s Eminent Jews, a collection of engaging profiles of four major mid-twentieth century Jewish American cultural figures, borrows its title from the biographer Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians (1918), in its time a notorious takedown of four Victorian icons, including the saintly Florence Nightingale.
By contrast, Denby celebrates his self-selected Rushmore of outsized, culture-altering Jewish eminences: Mel Brooks (who turns ninety-nine this summer), Betty Friedan, Norman Mailer, and Leonard Bernstein. Born between world wars, and starting out in the 1940s and ’50s, these figures “liberated,” in Denby’s view, “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.” In a series of richly-drawn, novella-length portraits, Denby argues that these exemplary figures forged “a new kind of American Jew.”
Collectively, Denby’s pantheon of cultural giants display an unabashed “assertiveness.” Seeking to break from an older generation perceived as too accommodating, too deferential to the dominant host culture, Denby’s eminent Jews are “unafraid” and “unruly.” They emerged on the national scene around the same time: social activist (Friedan), antic disrupter (Brooks), subversive critic (Mailer), and soulful healer (Bernstein). Their “exuberant brazenness” helped transform American culture during what Denby labels the midcentury “breakout period” of American Jewry.
Denby seems to be the most inspired by Mel Brooks, (in part, perhaps, because he continues to be in touch with Mel, and remains in awe of his astonishing comedic energy), and we revisit, chronologically, most of the now iconic phases of his career. These include Brooks’s early turn as a tummler in the Jewish mountain resorts; his role as a member of the legendary writer’s room on Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows in the early 1950s; his Oscar-winning animated film The Critic (1963); the breakthrough comedy of The Producers (1967), and so on.
Denby is more critical of Betty Friedan, despite her singular achievement and subsequent fame in the early 1960s after the publication of The Feminine Mystique (1963), a bestseller that helped ignite the social revolution of Second Wave feminism. Denby admires Friedan’s self-declared “passion against injustice… which originated from my feelings of the injustice of antisemitism.”. But he also highlights Friedan’s “pile-driving manner;” her “humorlessness;” her “impatience.” While Denby admires Friedan’s ingrained, unswerving, Jewish-inspired ethical passion for human rights and her power as a “Jewish moralist,” his ultimate assessment is that “Betty Friedan’s temperament was ill suited to the revolution she had unleashed.”
Norman Mailer’s “eminence” may be debatable, but he looms for Denby as a key midcentury figure (a best-selling novelist, subversive cultural critic, political journalist, and more). Mailer is perhaps the strongest portrait in Eminent Jews, a figure who “wanted to be a new kind of Jew, unhampered by fear and guilt.”
Mailer’s literary legacy remains the invention of “Mailer,” the supremely self-conscious third person narrator of Armies of the Night (1968), a keenly-observant protester during the 1967 March on Washington against the war in Vietnam. The thrill of reading Mailer’s “joyous and grief-struck” memoir as a student still resonates for Denby. In the end, Mailer’s eminence issues from his “granular yet soul-enlarging journalism.” His itch to identify “with outsiders and criminals” may remain deeply problematic, but for all his transgressions, Denby praises Mailer for his efforts that “reached for the American soul.”
The figure of Leonard Bernstein also moves Denby deeply. Bernstein’s “emotionally overpowering music” flows from his revolutionary conducting style, which early in his career was criticized as “over expressive, undignified,” or too “emotionally explicit.” For Denby, however, Bernstein’s brilliance found expression in the “liberated Jewish body.”Like Brooks and Mailer, Bernstein “let loose.” In Denby’s assessment, Bernstein “brought the richness of American Jewish sensibility into the minds and emotions of millions of people.”
Taken together, Denby’s eminent mid-twentieth-century Jews illustrate a “combination of asserted freedom and ethical purpose” thwarted, in the previous generation, by the constraints of a dominant culture. Eminent Jews reexamines these disruptive Jewish souls, inviting them to break through again, to be recognized and celebrated as agents of cultural renovation.
Donald Weber writes about Jewish American literature and popular culture. He divides his time between Brooklyn and Mohegan Lake, NY.
