Review of Eminent Jews: Bernstein, Brooks, Friedan, Mailer
J. Michael Lennon's review of David Denby's group biography Eminent Jews, praising Denby's command of four event-laden lives and his refusal to sidestep the controversial — including Mailer's fascination with violence and the stabbing of his second wife. An about-Mailer piece.
Read an excerpt (rights pending)
J. Michael Lennon. “Review of Eminent Jews: Bernstein, Brooks, Friedan, Mailer.” Hippocampus Magazine, 6 May 2025. https://www.hippocampusmagazine.com/2025/05/review-four-eminent-jews-by-david-denby/
Lennon reviews David Denby‘s Eminent Jews (Henry Holt, 2025), the group biography that gives one of its four portraits to Mailer alongside Leonard Bernstein, Mel Brooks, and Betty Friedan. Writing as a biographer who has “struggled with a surfeit of material,” Lennon admires Denby’s navigation between operatic drama and “the factual trusswork undergirding any worthy biography,” and credits him with four assets: affection for his subjects, a refusal to sidestep “the hairy, controversial aspects of their lives” — Bernstein’s promiscuity, “Mailer’s fascination with violence and the near-fatal stabbing of his second wife,” the spotlight-hogging of Friedan and Brooks — his own overlapping life as a New York Jew, and a fluent narrative-essayist’s prose.
The review foregrounds Denby’s thesis that the four “liberated the Jewish body,” releasing the unconscious of the Jewish middle class as postwar anti-Semitism faded and “Jewish reticence faded as well,” and that their shared outsider status “only sharpened personal habits of risk-taking and entrepreneurship.” Lennon notes Denby’s eye for the four figures’ early mastery of emerging media — Mailer with television, Bernstein with the long-playing record and his “Concerts for Young People,” Brooks and Bernstein on Broadway, Friedan and Mailer in paperback (The Feminine Mystique and The Naked and the Dead) — and closes with a “too delicious” Mel Brooks anecdote about a childhood fear of Frankenstein that surfaced decades later in Young Frankenstein (1974).
The full text is held in this project’s working archive at the full-text page; rights are not yet cleared for public display (see that page’s rights-note). Lennon is this project’s founding editor and, with G. R. Lucas and Susan Mailer, co-edited Lipton’s: A Marijuana Journal (2024).
Related pages
- 2025-05-06-lennon-review-eminent-jews | Eminent Jews: Bernstein, Brooks, Friedan, Mailer | David Denby | J. Michael Lennon | The Naked and the Dead | Lipton's, A Marijuana Journal | About this project