In the decades following World War II, as prosperity returned and antisemitism subsided, Jews in the United States were increasingly prominent and preeminent in popular culture, literature, and music, as well as social and political movements.
In his book Eminent Jews, David Denby – a staff writer for The New Yorker and author, among others books, of Snark and Great Books – provides engaging, informative, insightful, mostly, but not entirely, celebratory biographies of four of eminent Jews: composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein; comedy writer, performer, and filmmaker Mel Brooks; feminist writer and activist Betty Friedan; and journalist and novelist Norman Mailer.
An emotional, temperamental, and moral “Jewish vantage,” shaped by their Russian and Eastern European lineage and “made possible by freedoms Jews had never known before,” Denby indicates, played a pivotal role in the creative work of these “secular rabbis, without shawl and tefillin.
Mel Brooks’s Jewishness is, of course, impossible to miss. Exaggerated, parodic, and satirical, his humor, Denby writes, was “a way of asserting Jewish survival. You tried to kill us all, and you failed.” The “ultimate Diasporic Jew,” Brooks’s comedy sketch “The 2000 Year Old Man” [with Carl Reiner] travels through time, documenting Jewish anxiety, fear, baffled complaints, and resistance with a thick Yiddish accent.
Echoes of Florenz Ziegfeld’s “kitsch erotic stage extravaganzas” in “Springtime for Hitler,” the unforgettable song in the play The Producers, enabled Brooks to “humiliate Nazism by embedding it in the moldiest conventions of the commercial theater.”
Although Brooks detested the film Life Is Beautiful, Roberto Benigni’s 1997 comedy about a concentration camp, and claimed he would not joke about the Holocaust, Denby points out that he “came pretty close in ‘The Inquisition,’ an episode in [the film] History of the World, Part I, in which Jews are strung up, turned on spits, spun in a gigantic slot machine, xylophone tapped on their heads...” as Brooks, as Torquemada, sings and dances.
The sketch, Brooks declared, was “a delicious way of reminding the world” of Hitler’s “indescribable and despicable” concentration camps. Denby deems it “the closest he has come to a dangerous kind of modern art, dependent on extreme irony, the dislocation of representation and emotion… cruel and gleeful, too.”
NAILING DOWN the influences of Jewishness with precision for Betty Friedan, the author of The Feminine Mystique and founder of the National Organization for Women, and for Mailer and Bernstein, presents challenges Denby does not always meet.
Acknowledging “nothing particularly Jewish in her methods,” Denby attributes Friedan’s political activism to tikkun olam (the duty of Jews to repair the world) and to a temperament that was Jewish “in its insistent, even tormenting, moral energies,” including “existential guilt.” Because Jewish women experienced contempt from antisemites and “diminished status” within nuclear families and their own religious community, the vast over-representation of Jews in second-wave feminism is, “in the end, no great mystery at all.”
Friedan’s “stunningly insensitive” assertion that middle-class suburban housewives were living in “comfortable concentration camps,” Denby speculates, was grounded in a “specifically Jewish fear and anger” about “a loss of self and desire to resist” akin to the response of prisoners of the Nazis.
He maintains as well that Friedan’s critique of patriarchal Judaism did not mark a separation from her roots but a return to the Jewish tradition of quarreling with God, or more accurately, with religious authorities on Earth. And to her sense of herself as a prophet and new Jewish mother, she was “free to come and go, giving herself equally to the world and her home.”
Norman Mailer: Very much an American Jew
A DESCENDANT of Lithuanian Jews, Norman Mailer was “very much an American Jew” who believed in a “weakened God, unable to save the Jews in the Holocaust.” Determined to be celebrated as “a writer,” not “a Jewish writer,” he avoided Jewish themes and rarely gave Jewish names to sexually promiscuous or excessively aggressive characters.
However, Denby asserts, Mailer’s Jewish identity continued to preoccupy him. Rejecting the ethos of the shtetl (European Jewish village), he wanted to be a “new kind of Jew,” a prophet committed to exposing corrupt power, “unhampered by fear and guilt, although not unvisited by shame.”
Denby speculates, with tongue perhaps in cheek, that, in addition to biblical injunctions that women had a duty to produce children, Mailer drew on a “tribal memory” that had somehow “slipped into his unconscious” of contentions in the Kabbalah and Talmud that sexual ecstasy constituted communion with God when writing The Prisoner of Sex.
Unless he was asked directly, Mailer rarely said he was Jewish. But he did tell an interviewer that “Jews, with some justice, see the world as very tough, very unforgiving. Whatever you get, you pay for. We don’t have this [Christian] idea of grace or an extra forgiveness that you don’t quite deserve.”
Near the end of his life, Mailer wrote The Castle in the Forest, a novel that deserves to remain unread, about an agent of Satan who plants evil thoughts in the minds of Hitler’s ancestors.
Fascinated by violence, he wrote massive books about Gary Gilmore and Lee Harvey Oswald, “two lost American boys,” and helped another murderer, Jack Henry Abbott, get released from jail, only to learn that he had killed again. That said, Denby writes, Mailer “couldn’t write the story of a timid Jewish boy.”
LEONARD BERNSTEIN’S first symphony, written in 1943 at age 25, was subtitled Jeremiah and drew on texts from the Book of Lamentations. Bernstein returned “again and again” to the Hebrew Bible and Jewish liturgy.
Four Broadway musicals in Bernstein’s canon – On The Town; Wonderful Town; Candide; and West Side Story – Denby writes, “said something about the situation of Jews in America,” – i.e., they were outsiders, “in disguise, of course, and by implication.” Their tone, wised up but not cynical, “was formed by what Jews call sechel – knowingness, judgment, with a definite tinge of hope.”
Candide, Denby writes, “is a mordant and ironic tribute to Jewish survival triumphing over bouts of stupidity.” Although West Side Story is regarded as universal, “only American Jews could have created it.”
Denby indicates that Bernstein played a pivotal role in the revival of the music of Gustav Mahler and often quoted the great composer’s remark that he was “thrice homeless” as a Bohemian in Austria, an Austrian among Germans, and “a Jew throughout the world.”
Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts stemmed from his “Jewish instructional mania.” His self-criticism was “an aspect of his Jewish heritage.” Bernstein’s MASS “Judaizes Christianity” and “enlarges religious disbelief into disbelief in authority, society, and justice,” says Denby.
Readers, including me, can thoroughly enjoy and learn a lot from Denby’s book, even if they are not convinced by some of the author’s claims about Jewish influences on his subjects. After all, disputation is also a Jewish tradition.
And, like me, readers may well be carried away by his conclusion: Brooks, Friedan, Mailer, and Bernstein did, indeed, bring “the richness of Jewish sensibility into the minds and emotions of millions of people.” And they were “100 percent American and 100 percent Jewish.” Whatever that means.
The writer is The Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Emeritus Professor of American Studies at Cornell University.
Eminent Jews: Bernstein, Brooks, Friedan, Mailer, By David Denby, Henry Holt and Company, 383 pages; $32