David Denby, "Eminent Jews: Bernstein, Brooks, Friedan, Mailer" (Henry Holt, 2025)

July 22, 2026

AI Summary

5 min read

David Denby’s Eminent Jews: Bernstein, Brooks, Friedan, Mailer examines four towering figures born after World War I who came of age after World War II, at a moment when anti-Semitism in America was receding and a media revolution—television, the long-playing record, and the mass-market paperback—gave them unprecedented reach. Denby, a longtime film critic for The New Yorker and New York magazine, structured the book as four separate 35,000-word portraits, each designed to cast light on the others without forcing connections. “How could you possibly have written four books and got paid for one,” a friend asked him, and that is roughly the shape of the project.

The four lives, compressed

Denby’s treatment of each figure is less a biography than a moral and temperamental portrait keyed to a single question: how did Jews behave when they had more liberty than ever before?

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What you'll learn

1 (01:28) **Introduction & Guest Background** - Host Rabbi Mark Katz introduces David Denby and his book *Eminent Jews*. Denby shares his career path from film critic (Atlantic, Boston Phoenix, New York, New Yorker) to author of *Great Books*, *American Sucker*, and *Lit Up*.
2 (07:28) **Selecting the Four Figures** - Denby discusses how he decided what to include in each 35,000-word profile, focusing on the drama of their lives and cultural reflections tied to individual foibles.
3 (12:58) **Leonard Bernstein: The Prodigy & Polymath** - A concise portrait of Bernstein's life, from a boy without a piano until age 10 to a world-famous conductor and composer.
4 (15:38) **Betty Friedan: The Reluctant Revolutionary** - Friedan's background in Peoria, Illinois, and her path to writing *The Feminine Mystique*.
5 (19:01) **Mel Brooks: The Dark Clown** - Denby argues Brooks's humor is darker and tougher than most recognize, using the "2000-Year-Old Man" routine and *The Producers* as evidence.
6 (22:31) **Norman Mailer: The Brawling Genius** - Mailer's background as a middle-class boy from Brooklyn who burst out of his protective Jewish environment.
7 (25:53) **Bernstein's Versatility: Curse or Gift?** - The host asks about the debate over whether Bernstein would have been more prolific if he had specialized.

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Show Notes

What made a generation of Jewish artists and intellectuals transform American culture? In this episode, Rabbi Marc Katz sits down with acclaimed cultural critic David Denby to discuss his book Eminent Jews: Bernstein, Brooks, Friedan, Mailer (Henry Holt, 2025), a vibrant portrait of four extraordinary Americans whose Jewish identities helped shape the modern United States.

Though they worked in vastly different fields, Leonard Bernstein, Mel Brooks, Betty Friedan, and Norman Mailer shared a remarkable historical moment. Coming of age after World War II, they entered an America where Jewish opportunity was expanding and antisemitism was beginning to recede. Their Jewish heritage, energized by the freedoms of American life, fueled bold, unconventional careers that reshaped music, comedy, literature, feminism, and public debate.

Denby paints these figures in all their complexity: ambitious, difficult, generous, provocative, and endlessly creative. Rather than offering simple hero worship, he explores how their outsized personalities and relentless drive allowed them to challenge old assumptions about art, politics, gender, humor, and what it meant to be both fully Jewish and fully American.

Together, Denby and Katz explore why this particular generation produced so many cultural revolutionaries, how Jewish identity informed their work without defining it, and what their legacies reveal about the changing place of Jews in postwar America.

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