I have only one complaint about Eminent Jews: Bernstein, Brooks, Friedan, Mailer (Holt, 2025), David Denby’s artfully realized, gracefully written biographical tetralogy about four brilliant, nervy, pathbreaking members of the tribe: I wish Bella Abzug had been the fifth.
Best remembered for her Bronx-brassy voice and broad-brimmed hats, Abzug, the fiery civil rights lawyer, New York congresswoman, and world renowned spokesperson for women’s and human rights, was the rare public figure who could talk tachlis (that is, get down to brass tacks) to presidents and prime ministers, Wall Street billionaires, or pissed off Teamsters, without altering her message.
No matter how often right-wing Rottweilers nipped at her heels, Bella stood firm, an unapologetic advocate for everything worth fighting for. In the fifties, peace, civil rights, and nuclear disarmament were her top issues. Later, the Vietnam War, freedom for Soviet Jewry, and funding for Israel (she never gave up on the Zionist dream). Then equal rights for women, workers, gay people, and racial and ethnic minorities. Her colleagues, including Tip O’Neill, the gruff, Irish Catholic speaker of the House, voted her “the third most powerful member of Congress.” Despite her swagger, she radiated a sexy coquettishness and a saucy sense of humor that belied her tough exterior. A staunch feminist, she was happily married for decades to an adoring, supportive man, and she was a devoted mother of two daughters. She also had a successful career. You could love “Battling Bella” or hate her, but you damned well couldn’t ignore her.
I’ve lingered on her many astonishments only to underscore the stark contrast between Abzug and Betty Friedan, the feminist pioneer widely considered (notably by Betty herself) “the mother” of Second Wave feminism, and the only female—or political eminence—who rates a chapter, the shortest, in this four-chapter book.
When Denby chose Friedan as his one and only, he had to know he was taking on a heavy load: not just a famously disgruntled woman with an intemperate disposition and a cohort of similarly aggrieved female followers, but the Herculean task of decoding a movement roiled with arcane ideological disputes and internal fractures. It makes sense that Denby, a veteran New Yorker writer and erudite polymath with seemingly encyclopedic knowledge of classical music, performing arts, and the literary scene, would pick Leonard Bernstein, Mel Brooks, and Norman Mailer. But why Betty Friedan, instead of, say, Gloria Steinem or Barbra Streisand?
Because his mission in this book is much bigger than biography. He’s using the lives of these prominent, complicated, striving, flawed and fabulous individuals to map the world of American Jews in the mid–twentieth century, a world fast fading from memory, now jostling for its place in history. His chapters on Bernstein, Brooks, Friedan, and Mailer reveal intimate truths that define a remarkable, transitional generation more explicitly than the best scholarly data. Telling their stories, he illuminates the seismic influence of the immigrant experience, antisemitism, the Holocaust, and everyday Jewish fears and fixations on their work and personal relationships. Ours, too.
Friedan comes through in the book as she was in life—dour, snarly, and smart, her formidable accomplishments forever shadowed by demons of low self-esteem and her toxic jealousy of Bella and Gloria. No serious writer could make this splenetic woman likable. But Denby dives deep enough to make her relatable, and deep enough into her role as an agent of change to prove her deserving of the term “Eminent.”
The Feminine Mystique, a whopping bestseller in the early sixties, catapulted Friedan onto the national stage and changed the lives of millions. She co-founded the National Organization for Women (NOW) and with stunning speed mobilized a mass movement of post-war (mostly white, college-educated, middle-class) women chafing at the bonds of traditional domestic roles and raring to resist sexism in every sphere of life in the United States. Marches, demonstrations, boycotts, conferences, litigation, legislation, sit-ins in board rooms and bar rooms: each was an arrow in her quiver. Her TV appearances, books, op-eds, and lectures amplified her impact, as she traveled the country raising public consciousness about gender stereotypes and power inequities and spawning new chapters of NOW, which remains the largest women’s advocacy organization in the country.
Unfortunately, that impressive record was speckled with blind spots that made her leadership hugely problematic and controversial: she “hated lesbians and was convinced they were a danger to the women’s movement,” Denby writes, correctly. She “ignored working-class women” and “disregarded Black women altogether.” She had an “endless obsession with marriage and family, [insisting on] the family’s necessary place at the center of feminist thinking,” at a time when most feminist theorists and activists were working to unshackle women from compulsory domesticity and rid society of the suffocations of the nuclear-family model. “She threw tantrums and shouted things like, ‘Don’t you know who I am?’”
Denby can’t soft-pedal Friedan’s incendiary statements or sugarcoat the incongruence of a feminist leader being stunningly, rudely dismissive of large segments of her presumed constituency. No one could make Betty Friedan likable. But he unpacks her discontent without disdain, tracing it to the depredations of patriarchal Judaism, mitigating our rush to judgment with the force of his authorial empathy:
… the “otherness” that she felt as a Jew when she was young was reinforced by the subordinate position of women…. In the past, Jewish women had experienced contempt and estrangement in a double way—as anti-Seminism from outside the community and, for some, as diminished status within the community. Jewish women drew on their knowledge of the past even as they fought for selfhood in the present. That so many second-wave feminists were Jewish seems, in the end, no great mystery at all.
Mystery is not an issue when it comes to Denby’s three male eminences, whose celebrated lives unspooled in the public eye for more than half a century. Let’s be honest, each of these charismatic titans of testosterone, with his appealing domain of culture, be it comedy, music or literature, is more fun to read about than Friedan and her Byzantine world of movement politics and aggrieved plaintiffs. The guys have different personalities, which, though not always endearing, are undeniably magnetic; their friends, colleagues, and enemies are glamorous, their talents prodigious.
But, while their adoring moms might disagree, none was perfect. Mailer stabbed his second wife, almost fatally, with the pen knife he used to clean his nails. Bernstein and his wife, apparently politically naive and, remarkably, for him, tone-deaf, hosted a fundraiser for the Black Panthers in their apartment at the Dakota and got skewered by Tom Wolfe for their “radical chic.” Mel Brooks was roundly reviled when The Producers first gobsmacked moviegoers with its upbeat, in-your-face musical number, “Springtime for Hitler.”
He’s using the lives of these prominent, complicated, striving, flawed and fabulous individuals to map the world of American Jews in the mid–twentieth century, a world fast fading from memory, now jostling for its place in history.
By viewing his outsized subjects through a Jewish lens, Denby helps us contextualize their behavior. He also allows us to revisit their work, which we thought we knew so well, and see with fresh eyes the streams of Jewish content running through it and the brilliance of their creative, subversive Yiddishe kops.
Brooks, for instance, “is not just a comic performer and moviemaker, he’s a walking instrument of American Jewish culture and life.” Blazing Saddles is “a moving example of Black-Jewish collaboration in an exciting time.” “Young Frankenstein is a Jewish monster movie.” “In the late sixties, as the Holocaust became a constant topic of public discussion, memory and emotion remained vibrantly at issue, and Mel was teasing and provoking those memories in [The Producers]…. ‘Deal with it,’ he seems to be saying to the Jews. Anger, yes. Self-pity, no.” “Many Jewish comics get us to laugh at Jewish traits while avoiding the Jewish past; [Brooks] violently reverses the process, restaging the calamities of the past as musical comedy or … as comedies of survival.”
Mailer “wanted to be a new kind of Jew, unhampered by fear and guilt—although not unvisited by shame.” The Naked and the Dead, the writer’s breakout novel, was “a book that perhaps only a nice Jewish boy could have written; a nice Jewish boy, that is, in flight from his background …. In the character of Goldstein, Mailer’s fear that he was not tough enough for the army gets resolved in a portrait of formidable staying power.” “He believed that physical courage was necessary equipment for a great writer (Hemingway was the model) and that Jewish men in particular had to overcome all sorts of weaknesses.” “He hated the softness of Yiddishkeit; he escaped the ‘nice Jewish boy’ by inventing the bad Jewish boy.”
Bernstein “became a prime liberator of the Jewish body,” writes Denby, tying the conductor’s expressive physicality on the podium with the sexual energy that complicated his private life and turbocharged his music. “The ballet [Fancy Free], created by two urban Jewish bisexual men [Bernstein, and choreographer Jerome Robbins], was about three sailors bursting out of their pants.” Denby also interprets West Side Story Jewishly: “…it has become ‘universal’; but only American Jews could have created it,” because its creators, Bernstein, Robbins, Stephen Sondheim and Arthur Laurents [book], “were all descended from immigrants …. So these four had many reasons to create a show about outsiders, race hatred, and prejudice.”
These farshpayz [appetizers] only hint at the rich literary feast ahead for readers of many stripes. Hopscotching genre boundaries, Denby glides with grace between psychology, sociology, history, biography, and criticism without once losing his theme in the weeds of academic jargon. His book is for people who aged into sentience during the last eighty years and tend to follow arts, letters, politics, and pop culture with particular fervor especially when the most compelling characters in each category happen to be Jewish. Doubtless, it will also be catnip for culture vultures and history buffs who couldn’t put down Ben Sidran’s There Was A Fire: Jews, Music and the American Dream (2012), J.J. Goldberg’s Jewish Power: Inside the American Jewish Establishment (1996), Neil Gabler’s An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood (1988), and, before that (1976), Irving Howe’s World of our Fathers: The Journey of East European Jews in America.
But you don’t have to be Jewish to love Eminent Jews. You only have to be lucky enough to score a copy before its first printing sells out.