Eminent Jews
Bernstein, Brooks, Friedan, and Mailer
On behalf of: Kathy Robbins - The Robbins Office, Inc.
Leonard Bernstein, Mel Brooks, Betty Friedan, Norman Mailer. Brilliant, brash, yet soulful, they were 100 percent Jewish and 100 percent American. They upended the restrained culture of their forebears and changed American life.
They worked in different fields, and, apart from clinking glasses at parties now and then, they hardly knew one another. But they shared a historical moment and a common temperament. For all four, their Jewish heritage was electrified by American liberty. The results were explosive.
As prosperity for Jews increased and anti-Semitism began to fade after World War II, these four creative giants stormed through the latter half of the twentieth century, altering the way people around the world listened to music, defined what was vulgar, comprehended the relations of men and women, and understood the American soul. They were not saints; they were turbulent and self-dissatisfied intellectuals who fearlessly wielded their own newly won freedom to charge up American culture.
Celebratory yet candid, at times fiercely critical, David Denby presents these four figures as egotistical and generous—larger-than-life, all of them, yet more than vulnerable, even heartbreaking, in their ambition, ferocity, and pride.
Reviews
“With Eminent Jews, David Denby has written a fantastic book about four remarkably talented and consequential figures of American arts and letters. The book is as brilliant and witty as its subjects.”—Aaron Sorkin
“An exuberant, beautiful, wise celebration of American Jewish life in the twentieth century, and, let’s use the word, eminent cultural history. His deeply psychological portraits of his four subjects will be regarded as the definitive ones.”—Franklin Foer, author of The Last Politician
“David Denby manages to capture his subjects in a remarkable way, all the while grounding them in their personal and public circumstance. By this feat he has enabled us, perhaps, to enjoy and understand them as they actually were.”—Bradley Cooper
“A marvel. I cannot recall the last time I devoured a book as I did this one. . . . The writing is sensational: witty, persuasive, lyrical, passionate. The reader laughs, grimaces, tears up, is alternately delighted and disgusted, by the antics and sometimes unmet ambitions of these four oversized, manic Jews…. As a cultural history of postwar America, Eminent Jews stands alone.”—David Nasaw, author of Andrew Carnegie
“Denby’s writing makes everyone sparkle, warts and all, and captures better than any other recent author how particular ‘eminent’ Jews shaped mid-twentieth-century American culture.”—Rebecca Kobrin, Knapp Professor of American Jewish History, Columbia University
“What a wonderful book, at once deeply serious and wildly entertaining. Denby’s Jews are brilliant, obnoxious, hilarious, heroic, wrestling with life like Jacob with the angel. And, above all, they are proud; no more of that historic cowering…. We need this book very badly right now.”—Joe Klein, author of Primary Colors