Eminent Jews: Bernstein, Brooks, Friedan, Mailer
David Denby's group biography of four postwar Jewish-American cultural figures — Leonard Bernstein, Mel Brooks, Betty Friedan, and Norman Mailer — published by Henry Holt in 2025. A New Yorker Best Book of the Year, it gives one of its four portraits to Mailer. This is the project's first secondary (about-Mailer) Work page.
David Denby. Eminent Jews: Bernstein, Brooks, Friedan, Mailer. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 8 April 2025. 400 pp., hardcover. ISBN 978-1-250-19340-7.
A collective biography of four figures — the composer-conductor Leonard Bernstein, the comedian and filmmaker Mel Brooks, the feminist author Betty Friedan, and Norman Mailer — who, in Denby’s argument, were “100 percent Jewish and 100 percent American” and who “upended the restrained culture of their forebears and changed American life” in the decades after World War II. The title nods to Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians (1918); as Jonathan Alter observes in a jacket note, the book belongs in that lineage.
Denby’s Mailer chapter: “Norman Mailer and the End of Shame”
Mailer is one of the book’s four subjects — caricatured on the jacket (and at the chapter head, in David Levine’s drawing) as a boxer in a ring. Denby sets him beside Bernstein, Brooks, and Friedan as an exemplar of a generation whose “Jewish heritage was electrified by American liberty”: “turbulent and self-dissatisfied intellectuals who fearlessly wielded their own newly won freedom to charge up American culture”. The chapter devoted to him — the book’s third, running to some twenty-four titled sections from “Middle-Class Jewish Boy at War” to “Kaddish” — is a full life-of-Mailer organized around a single idea named in its title: the abolition of shame.
The thesis: shame, and the “nice Jewish boy”
Denby’s Mailer sets out to destroy the image of “a nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn” — the self-description Mailer called “absolutely insupportable,” Denby notes, “because, for a while, it was true” (Denby 2025, ch. 3). The slight, studious, mother-adored boy from Crown Heights remade himself, “step by step,” into “a barrel-chested macho.” Denby is careful to distinguish shame — which he treats as a quasi-Greek falling-short of a standard of courage — from guilt: Mailer “wanted to be a new kind of Jew, unhampered by fear and guilt … although not unvisited by shame,” an emotion “it was necessary to face … and annihilate” (Denby 2025, ch. 3). The whole project, Denby argues, was a deliberate inversion of inherited Jewish morality: “Traditional Jewish morality was devoted to thou shalt not; Mailer was devoted to thou shalt.” He “escaped the ‘nice Jewish boy’ by inventing the bad Jewish boy” (Denby 2025, ch. 3).
The Jewish body, Freud, and a “weakened God”
Much of the chapter turns on what Denby calls “the Jewish body” — the body as “a theater of pleasure and pain, an arena of heroism and failure,” against what he describes as the bodily reticence of immigrant Jewish culture. Mailer’s counter-morality of “risk and appetite” required rejecting Freud: where Civilization and Its Discontents prizes the sublimation of instinct, Mailer “acknowledge[d] their power and … act[ed] them out” — “Act stronger than you feel,” he told his sister Barbara, “and you will soon feel as strong as you act” (Denby 2025, ch. 3). Denby links Mailer’s idiosyncratic theology to the Holocaust: a diminished, embattled God “unable to save the Jews,” who “needed man’s help” — “God is in danger of dying,” Mailer told an interviewer in 1958 (Denby 2025, ch. 3). Denby reads “The White Negro” (1957) as the manifesto of this counter-self and of the Hipster, but also as “an almost complete negation of everything Jews had fought to achieve in America,” and he dwells on the essay’s notorious candy-store passage as “doubly hostile to Jews,” recalling James Baldwin‘s objection to its romance of Black violence (Denby 2025, ch. 3).
The work, read through Jewishness
Denby moves chronologically through the career, reading each major book against Mailer’s Jewishness. The Naked and the Dead is praised for its portrayal of “the male body at the outer edge of fatigue,” and for the two Jewish soldiers, Roth and Goldstein, in whom “Mailer’s fear that he was not tough enough for the army gets resolved.” He treats Advertisements for Myself as the book in which Mailer declares himself “imprisoned with a perception,” and notes the half-suppression of his characters’ Jewishness — citing Philip Roth’s “Writing about Jews” and Mailer’s regret at renaming the cook in “The Language of Men.” He reads “The Man Who Studied Yoga” (1952) as a parable of Jewish middle-class inertia, and the Deer Park years through the marijuana “Lipton Journal,” which Denby notes “was published in 2024” — see Lipton’s, A Marijuana Journal (Denby 2025, ch. 3).
The New Journalism is Denby’s turning point — the “rebirth” of 1960. “Superman Comes to the Supermarket” finds Mailer’s public voice; The Armies of the Night (“history as a novel, the novel as history”) makes him “a New York Jew in Washington,” its Jeremiah “reborn in argument and verity.” Denby’s verdicts are frank: The Prisoner of Sex is “astonishing for its combined rhetorical brilliance and moral stupidity” (and, he stresses, a book in which Mailer finally “throws in the towel”); The Executioner’s Song is a masterpiece made by “two New York Jews in Utah,” with the producer Lawrence Schiller as its unlikely hero; The Fight is “a New York Jew in Africa,” in which Denby reads Ali’s victory as a sign of power “passing out of white hands, which means out of Jewish hands, too.” Apart from The Naked and the Dead and The Executioner’s Song, Denby holds, Mailer “was not a major novelist,” and he confesses he “can’t get through” the late “enormous novels” Ancient Evenings, Harlot’s Ghost, and The Castle in the Forest (Denby 2025, ch. 3).
The stabbing as moral center
The chapter’s ethical pivot is the “Terrible Night” of 19 November 1960, when Mailer stabbed his second wife, Adele Morales. Denby insists the act “will always be unforgivable,” and reads Advertisements for Myself “ironically” in its shadow; he later connects the “faggot” taunt that preceded the assault to Mailer’s own 1962 essay on the Griffith–Paret fight. He weighs the disputed line “Get away from her, let the bitch die” — repeated by Louis Menand but absent from Adele’s 1960 statement to police — and concludes “the truth can’t be known.” Mailer’s own verdict, to his daughter Betsy, was “I let God down.” Denby places him in the company of artists who did terrible things — Dickens, Tolstoy, Picasso, Pound — for whom “only appreciation and discrimination combined can do him justice” (Denby 2025, ch. 3).
The lost American boys, and the close
A through-line of the chapter’s second half is Mailer’s fascination with violent, fatherless, self-educated men — Gary Gilmore, Jack Henry Abbott, and Lee Harvey Oswald — whom Denby calls “superfluous products of the American disorder … all three became murderers.” Mailer, he writes, “was lucky not to become a murderer himself,” and his Judaism functioned as “a kind of order-making and redemptive force” — a devotion to work, children, and “large-scale intellectual effort” that he could never quite turn into the rescue of others. The chapter ends, in a section titled “Kaddish,” with Mailer’s death of renal failure at Mount Sinai on 10 November 2007, three of his children reading the mourner’s prayer at his bedside (Denby 2025, ch. 3).
Denby’s estimate
Denby’s overall judgment is admiring. Mailer “was a great American, extraordinary in the fecundity of his reinventions,” and — alongside Bellow, Roth, Didion, and DeLillo — “the most talented American prose writer of the postwar years,” even if “not a major novelist.” He offers an explicit Mailer canon: The Naked and the Dead, Advertisements for Myself, the convention reports, The Armies of the Night, The Executioner’s Song, The Fight, “the first half of Oswald’s Tale,” and “half a hundred essays and provocations.” Above all Denby reads him as “a secular prophet, warning of technology’s grip on our souls” — a Victorian sage’s heir who “fulfilled” the Jewish obligation “to do serious thinking about many things” (Denby 2025, ch. 3).
Reception
Named a New Yorker Best Book of the Year. In The New York Times Book Review, Alexander Nazaryan judged that Denby “succeeds marvelously,” making “a convincing case that his subjects exercised a ‘moral strenuousness’ that accounts for the longevity of their works and ideas”.
The author
David Denby is a longtime New Yorker staff writer and a former film critic for New York magazine and The New Yorker; his earlier books include the best-selling Great Books, American Sucker, and Lit Up. Denby also contributed a cover blurb to the 2024 Lipton’s, A Marijuana Journal.
A note on this entry
This is the first secondary entry in Works and Days — a book about Mailer rather than by him — given full-page treatment; in the bibliography it is recorded with kind about. Like other post-2016 additions it carries no legacy-id (see About this project). The account of Denby’s argument above is drawn directly from the chapter text (the EPUB held in raw/new/); quotations are kept brief, for scholarly identification and commentary. The full text is not reproduced here, and no wiki/texts/ page is created for this copyrighted work.
Related pages
- The Naked and the Dead | The White Negro | Advertisements for Myself | The Deer Park | The Man Who Studied Yoga | Lipton's, A Marijuana Journal | Hipster | Adele Morales | About this project