‘Eminent Jews: Bernstein, Brooks, Friedan, Mailer’
By David Denby
Henry Holt, 400 Pages

Lytton Strachey’s famous “Eminent Victorians” (1918), an irreverent depiction of the leading lights of an age that in the biographer’s view took itself way too seriously, comes to mind when reading David Denby’s latest.

Strachey brought a formidable wit and candor to biography that had been suppressed in the 19th century in favor of weighty tomes that glorified the illustrious. When James Anthony Froude told the truth about the fraught marriage between Thomas and Jane Carlyle, he was widely denounced as a Judas.

Mr. Denby has quite another purpose in mind: He wishes to celebrate four eminent Jews who were profoundly Jewish all in their profoundly contrarian Jewish ways. He examines their defects and pays attention to their critics, but in the end sees all four as far larger than the sum of their faults.

Mr. Denby begins with Mel Brooks, who had a hard time finding the comic genius that eventually resulted in “The Producers,” “Blazing Saddles,” and “Young Frankenstein.” Now 98, Mr. Brooks was loud and pushy and, well, too Jewish for some people. Yet he made a point of poking fun at gentiles and Jews alike, and perhaps comes closest in temper to Strachey.  

Mr. Denby’s Brooks had the courage to be himself at a time when many Jews just wanted to fit in. No problem making a monster movie, studio executives told him, but you cannot make it in black and white. Mr. Brooks agreed, and then made the movie in black and white. He did that sort of thing over and over again, including in his outrageously funny appearances on Johnny Carson’s show. I just watched a clip of him impersonating Frank Sinatra crooning “America the Beautiful,” a cigarette, of course, in hand.

As to Betty Friedan: What is all this nonsense about the famous “The Feminine Mystique” liberating only middle class white women? Mr. Denby asks. This was a courageous woman always pushing, pushing, pushing to put women on an equal plane with men in work and family life. That she was not a very successful leader of the women’s rights movement, that she stayed way too long in an abusive marriage — Mr. Denby concedes all that — but like Mr. Brooks, she leaned into a kind of stubborn Jewish intensity that would not allow her to let go of her vision of a just society that had to include a full measure of women, which also meant going against orthodox Judaism even as she staunchly supported Israel, spending much time there as Leonard Bernstein did.

What unites Bernstein, Friedan, and Mr. Brooks is their unapologetic Jewishness even as they were all American in their responses to their culture and to the world at large. Bernstein was criticized for trying to do too much — composing, conducting, teaching, moving frenetically between pop (“West Side Story”) and classical music (“Symphony No. 3, Kaddish”), becoming way too physical in his style on stage. He ended up pleasing American critics after he went into the heart of Berlin and showed Germans and the rest of the world what a Jew could do: forgive but not forget, as he made friends with a former Nazi who was a world renowned conductor, Herbert von Karajan.

Norman Mailer is another kind of Jew altogether in Mr. Denby’s book. Mailer rarely wrote about Jewish characters and sometimes his fiction fails to convince, Mr. Denby argues, precisely because Mailer was unwilling to capitalize on his Jewishness to write about what he actually knew best. Mailer tried to be something else: a mainstream novelist in the tradition of Ernest Hemingway.

The irony for Mr. Denby is that Mailer did his greatest work by making himself a character in brilliant books like “Armies of the Night.” Mr. Denby might have made more of Mailer getting into a shouting match with an antisemite after an arrest at a Pentagon protest march. Then Mailer disappeared, absorbed in the Western voices of his masterpiece, “The Executioner’s Song.”

All four of Mr. Denby’s eminent Jews were alike in their secularity. If they were not religious Jews, they were Jewish nonetheless in an unalterable way that remains important to Jewish and American history. Mr. Denby quotes George Washington’s welcoming words to Jews: America needed them; without them the very idea of America would be poorer.

Mr. Rollyson is the author of “Norman Mailer: The Last Romantic” and “Lillian Hellman: Her Life and Legend.”

___________________

Correction: Herbert Von Karajan was a renowned conductor. His first name was misspelled in an earlier edition.