In the provocative Eminent Jews, journalist and film critic David Denby defines four iconic artistic disruptors--Leonard Bernstein, Mel Brooks, Betty Friedan, and Norman Mailer--as paramount risk takers of their generation, providing detailed historical context and incisive critical analysis of their culturally significant contributions to their respective creative fields.
Denby (Snark, Lit Up) attributes the communal chutzpah of his subjects to having "lived in the 'Golden Era' of relative safety and abundant achievement for the American Jews after the Second World War." Their audacious personalities "took advantage of liberty in every possible way."
Brooks's "rage and daring" is personified in brash humor, learned in the Catskills "Borscht Belt," developed in the writers' room for Sid Caesar's Your Show of Shows, and perfected on screen (Young Frankenstein) and stage (The Producers). Even with death as an obsessive theme, the force of farce was with him and his audiences. The inconvenient truths Friedan experienced during the late 1950s surfaced in radical protest grounded in "her own aggrieved sense of herself." Supported by "Reform Judaism's injunction tikkun olam," which encourages Jews to focus on "the necessity of repairing the world," Friedan's efforts culminated in the societal tsunami of The Feminine Mystique. Mailer's boisterous ego bled into the boxing ring and into hard-edged fiction and reactionary journalism (The Naked and the Dead; The Armies of the Night), but also a violent marital history. Bernstein shattered musical expectations for classical composition and conducting, on Broadway and in film, with his volcanic temperament and powerhouse performances.
Denby's comprehensive use of memoirs, biographies, and interviews, supplemented with personal anecdotes, renders indelible portraits of these eminent Jews who simply wanted to be appreciated and remembered. --Robert Allen Papinchak, freelance book critic