Leonard Bernstein, Mel Brooks, Betty Friedan, and Norman Mailer. Brilliant, brash, they were 100% Jewish and 100% American, and hell-bent on shaking up the world of their fathers. Boy did they ever.
They worked in different fields, and apart from clinking glasses at occasional parties (as New Yorker critic and bestselling author David Denby puts it, “intellectuals and people in the arts drank a great deal in New York sixty years ago”) they never met. But they shared a common historical moment, and a common temperament, fueled largely by their Jewish heritage. Or, in Denby’s words, Jewish vantage.
In post-war America, as the prosperity for American Jews increased and anti-Semitism began to fade, these four very individual individuals stormed through the latter half of 20th-century America, altering the way people listened to music, defined what was vulgar or not, comprehended the relations of men and women, understood the nation’s soul. What they accomplished wasn’t entirely due to their being Jews. But it is fundamental to understanding their drive and their vision. America poured into them, and they, as Jews, poured into America.
A century ago, Lytton Strachey established a new form of biography with Eminent Victorians, four disconnected portraits rich with psychological insight and wit. It is one of the great books (a subject Denby knows well!). But it is a skeptical book. Eminent Jews is not. It is celebratory yet honest. As Denby writes of his four subjects, “I love them. I glory in them, I converse with them (mostly in my head), but I am a biographer not a hagiographer.”
