REVIEW: Eminent Jews: Bernstein, Brooks, Freidan, Mailer by David Denby

Reviewed by J. Michael Lennon

David Denby took on quite a job of work when he decided to depict the lives of four famous 20th-Century Americans: Leonard Bernstein, Mel Brooks, Betty Friedan, and Norman Mailer in Eminent Jews (Henry Holt and Co.; April 2025).

Fairly presenting the event-laden, controversy-crammed lives of this talented quartet, all of whom were the children of immigrants from Eastern Europe or Russia, in 350 pages is a task that would intimidate, if not discourage entirely any sensible biographer. The challenge he took on required the delicate balancing of celebration and criticism, scene and summary, drama and fact in the lives of these four Ashkenazi Jews, all born after WWI, all gaining fame after WWII, all living mainly in New York City.

Presenting dramatically the key disasters and victories—the operatic moments—of their lives could have easily crippled the presentation of a second sine qua non: the factual trusswork undergirding any worthy biography. Or the opposing pitfall: stuffing in too many names, dates, accounts of parties, meals, trips, liaisons and so on. As a biographer who has struggled with a surfeit of material, I can testify to the lure of this slippery slope. Biographers always run the risk of letting their narratives run level to their sources, destroying a good story with marginally important information.

Denby brought four assets to the task: 1) he likes and admires his four  giants; 2) he never sidesteps the hairy, controversial aspects of their lives: the promiscuity of Bernstein, who was sexually ambidextrous; Mailer’s fascination with violence and the near-fatal stabbing of his second wife; the aggressive hogging of the spotlight by Friedan and Brooks; 3) he is also a New York Jew and his social and artistic life overlaps those of his subjects; 4) he writes a fluid, fluent prose and is master of the narrative essay (he reviewed films for New York and New Yorker for decades), as well as full-length nonfiction books, most notably, Great Books: My Adventures with Homer, Rousseau, Woolf, and Other Indestructible Writers of the Western World (1996), an engrossing account of how he repeated the Great Books course at Columbia University that he’d not fully appreciated in his undergraduate days 30 years earlier.

All four were quick to grasp the possibilities of emerging media: television (Mailer more than the others, but Bernstein’s “Concerts for Young People” ran on CBS for 13 years); the long-playing record (Bernstein was also prolific here, and Brooks’ and Carl Reiner’s “The 2000-Year Old Man” sketches are deathless); and the paperback (Friedan’s 1963 magnum opus, The Feminist Mystique, sold millions, as did Mailer’s 1948 novel, The Naked and the Dead). Brooks and Bernstein also had more than one Broadway musical triumph. Denby gives close attention to Brooks’ The Producers (2001), and Bernstein’s West Side Story (1958), both of which were blockbuster hits, and are revived regularly. Brooks is the only one of the four not to appear on the cover of Time, but he was just as much a darling of the media as the others. A New York Times reporter once said to me, “We love Norman Mailer at the Times.” The same is true of the other three, all “good copy.” Denby is adroit in his explanations of how each in her/his own way was sensitive to the needs and opportunities of the new media. As he puts it, “being outsiders only sharpened personal habits of risk-taking and entrepreneurship.” Another factor was the rapid shriveling (but not the disappearance) of anti-Semitism after WWII. As it faded, “Jewish reticence faded as well.”

None of the four (Bernstein possibly excepted) were at all observant, but none of them ever pretended to be other than Jewish, although Friedan’s family dropped the “m” from Friedman because it sounded less Jewish. Also, as Denby makes clear, all four were Ashkenazi Jews, and therefore considerably more unbuttoned and outrageous than German Jews, and not affected by what he calls “that lingering disease, Jewish self-hatred.” Brooks, he noted, was at one point, “the noisiest man in New York (which is saying something)” given the boisterous loquacity of the other three.

“In different ways, they liberated the Jewish body, releasing the unconscious of the Jewish middle class, ending the restrictions and avoidances that the immigrants and their children, so eager to succeed in America, imposed on themselves. People didn’t go to Betty’s exhortations, Norman’s books, Mel’s movies, and Bernstein’s concerts and West Side Story for displays of rectitude and good taste . . . The elements in these four of wildness, anger, public exaltation, gross burlesque are a good part of what audiences wanted from them.”

Denby provides numerous anecdotes about the early years of his characters (and they are all real characters), which cannot be retailed here. But I must include one, concerning Brooks, which is too delicious to leave out. When he was five, he saw the 1931 original Frankenstein, with the unforgettable Boris Karloff in the lead role. He was frightened, worried that monster would get him when he was asleep.

“On a hot summer night, he closed the window near his bed. But Kitty [his mother] wanted some air in the fifth-floor apartment, and, according to Mel, held forth as follows: “In order for Frankenstein to bite you, he’s got to leave Russia, Transylvania, wherever he’s from. First, he has to catch a train to a seaport. Then he’s got to have money to get on a boat, a ship, to go all the way from Romania to America. Then when he lands in America, in New York, he’s got to know which subway to take to get to Williamsburg. Then he’s got to know which apartment to go to. If he climbs up the fire escape, any of the windows  . . . he’ll eat someone on the first floor, why would he climb to the fifth floor?”

Reassured, young Mel went to sleep, but he never forgot the story. Over forty years later, in 1974, he made Young Frankenstein, starring Gene Wilder, Marty Feldman, Madeline Kahn, and Peter Boyle, indisputably, his film masterpiece.