New York Times bestselling author, veteran film critic, and New Yorker staff writer David Denby chats with Zibby about EMINENT JEWS, which profiles Leonard Bernstein, Mel Brooks, Betty Friedan, and Norman Mailer. The conversation spans from Denby’s early years under the mentorship of Pauline Kael to his decades-long career at The New Yorker, before diving into the cultural impact and complex legacies of the book’s four iconic Jewish figures. Along the way, they discuss the evolution of Jewish identity in American media, the legacy of Bernstein as portrayed in Bradley Cooper’s Maestro, Mel Brooks’ fearless comedy, and what it means to reclaim the word "Jew."

Transcript:

Zibby: Welcome, David. Thank you so much for coming on to talk about Eminent Jews. Bernstein, or Bernstein. I always get it wrong. 

David: Bernstein. Yeah. 

Zibby: Bernstein, right? 

David: Yeah. Yeah. 

Zibby: Bernstein, Brooks, Friedan and Mailer. I watched the movie and everything. I should know this about Leonard Burns. The one with Bradley Cooper.

That's not the only reason why I should know it, but. 

David: Yeah. 

Zibby: Anyway, welcome. Thank you. 

David: Thank you. I think its is pretty good, by the way. A lot of people didn't like it because, oh, it didn't have, more about his Broadway career or more about his Jewishness. But when you make a biopic. I learned this through many years of film criticism.

You have to have a plot. And if you're as good as Leonard Bernstein and you were good at five or six things, you're just gonna go swinging from one thing to another. There are many documentaries about him that do that, and what Brad Cooper decided was, we'll tell a family story. That's what we'll do.

And I thought it was very moving and the other parts of his life were stuck in. The sides. You saw him conducting a lot. That's true. 

Zibby: I, yeah, I loved that movie, to be honest, in the scene. 

David: Oh good. 

Zibby: And with his wife. Oh my gosh. It was, anyway anyway, off track. But of course somehow I find myself talking about film with you.

Wait, start off. I want you to talk about this book, but give a little background about your film critic career and all of that. 'cause it's quite unique. 

David: Oh, I was a graduate student at Stanford on the great movie critic calling Kale, plucked me out of Nowheresville, and I became one of her disciples. And suddenly I had a job and then she threw me out after five or six years, said, you don't have it, kid.

This is not for you. And that was the first lucky thing that happened was that she. Took an interest in this sort of moldy graduate student. And the second great thing that happened was she threw me out because I never would've written half of what I've written. I wrote a book about Columbia's Western classics course.

I've written a lot of stuff that has nothing to do with movies, but I was a critic for 45 years, including 20 at New York Magazine and 16 at the New Yorker, going on and off with Anthony Lane until about 10 years ago. When they said enough Zibby, I just sat on my couch and I read I didn't wanna see any movie at all.

Not even Casablanca, not even Godfather. I just sat there reading, Dickens and Mark Twain and anyway, now I'm drifting back into I'm a, I loved a Nora. Yeah I think it's hilarious. So I wanna see the Bob Dylan movie, and I'm swinging back into movie going again. 

Zibby: All right. So that's, I won't tell anyone that you've, that you're starting to tread into the movie universe.

You can quietly do it and keep it a secret. 

David: Yeah. It's exactly, it's a, it is become a kind of private communion with you and the screen, what it should be. I like going to the theater. The old magic was you went with strangers. And it was a kind of religious, every, everyone felt the same thing at the same time.

And if you look at people as they come streaming out of a movie theater, they have this kind of glazed look, they're not quite, they don't want to, yield up that image and go back to life. 

And you can see their eyes when they come out into the street. They're still playing the movie and they're still held even a bad movie.

So I'm, I beginning to enjoy that again. 

Zibby: I'm so glad. I'm glad that glad you're going back to what you obviously love and of course writing too. 

David: Oh, yeah. 

Zibby: And this book, in particular, eminent Jews. So you profiled four different notables. Why these, how did you pick, how did you narrow it down, and why these four?

And did you ever consider like just writing a book about Norman Mailer or just writing a book about any of them individually? Like why put all four together? 

David: They certainly, each one deserve a book of their own, and there are very good books about mailer and Leonard Bernstein. But I thought it, it would these four form a kind of moment in time for me.

They were born after the first World War and they emerged after the second World War. By means of their own gifts and temperaments. And also because it was a time that media were exploding. So if you just look at 1948, the long playing record becomes a mass medium, and television becomes a mass medium.

And then a few years later, the Qua, the Mass Market paperback, Betty Friedanan's book, the Feminine Mystique, which kicked off second wave feminism. Not that she was the only feminist around in the early sixties. She wasn't, but this was the one. It sold about 60,000 copies in hardcover, which is good in 1963.

Zibby: I would take that. 

David: Yeah, exactly. 

Zibby: I'll take 60,000 in hardcover, but anyway, go on. 

David: We'll take it. Exactly. But then it went into mass market paper back, and you remember when we were kids? Maybe when I was a kid, there were those I, those metal circular racks. 

Zibby: I remember that very well.

Yes. 

David: And it would have Shakespeare's tragedies and maybe, I don't know, a novel by Pearl Buck. 

Zibby: Yes, exactly. 

David: Something like that. 

Zibby: Yes. 

David: And that's where Betty went and she sold 1 million, 300,000 copies in mass. So in other words, these people, very gifted, little crazy, very egotistical, but also very generous at the same time, which is the paradox I spend a lot of time working on entered into the media and reached millions of people in a way that others would not have. Also I thought this was a period of when Jews were not afraid. Mel Brooks is walking across 57th Street near Carnegie Hall and he's the sketch writer for Sid Caesar, the Great your show of shows that was on in the early fifties, and his colleagues are with him from the show.

And three nuns are approaching across 57th Street. And the guy on his left says, no, Mel, no, he said what? And the other guy on his right who was Neil Simon's famous playwright eventually, he said, what is wrong with you? He said nothing's wrong with me. The three nuns come up close. They're sketch writers for since these come up close.

And he says. Take off those costumes. The nun's sketch is out. I said to him, how did they react? He said they hit the ground. Okay. One other very brief anecdote, Leonard Bernstein is in Vienna with the great Vienna Phil Harmonic in 1972, and he's teaching them their own music. Mahler's fifth Symphony.

Mahler had been head of the state opera and the conductor of the Philharmonic. He played some of his fantastic symphonies with them. He was a Jew. He was, banned from 19 from the Anulus, 1938 to 1945, and they had played some of his music after the war, but they didn't know it. They didn't love it, and he had grumblings from the ranks.

Shya music, we won't translate this. This is a family network. And he was shocked. This was their own music and he had to teach it to them. So my point is, in those two cases, and I could give you, cases for the other two, was I don't mean to say that, being tough with Gentiles is some sort of Jewish virtue.

It is not. Of course, they were not afraid of being punished. 

They were not afraid. And I thought, okay, that means something. We're talking about the sixties in the United States and also overseas. This was an American Jew from provincial Boston teaching the great Vienna Philharmonic, how to play their own music.

It's rather extraordinary. And then he went on to have an incredible career as a conductor, as well as a composer and a pianist, a writer and a lover, and a teacher. And on and on Lenny. So I thought. This was a period after the war antisemitism had gone down. I mean it, we don't have to say too often.

It's a kind of foul underground stream that pops up again as at the current moment we've got it popping up again. But after the war, it was horror over the Holocaust and it was obvious that American Jews were doing well financially, except the Jews didn't wanna say so shush. Don't poke the bear.

It wasn't until the late nineties Zibby that scholarship, like sociology and economic history caught up with the fact that the Jews had done really well. The working class by 1950 had diminished to 10%. It was a middle and upper middle class and upper middle class and because the enormous number of people went into the professions, not into oil.

Or railroads. Or steel, not those professions, but certain parts of inve. Investment banking, of course, and every kind of manufacturer of clothing, retail, and law lawyering, doctoring. You name it. So there was that, and then there was a powerful group of intellectuals in New York, the New York intellectuals who were setting literary standards.

It's a whole bunch of things that suggested that Jews were, had really en enjoyed a kind of success and liberty that in, as in my reading. Of history they had never had anywhere else before. So that was how would, how if you were completely free in a way you had never been before, how for good and for ill.

This is, I don't ignore their terrible fault for good and for ill. How would you behave as an American Jew? That was the idea of the book. 

Zibby: And I love that. I love that you're like, my story is remarkable and how unremarkable it is. I was just a kid from Park Avenue that moved to West End Avenue.

David: That's a New York joke, but I think 

Zibby: I got it. I'm here. I'm here. 

I found so much of Mel Brooks' story interesting. 'cause I didn't really know as much about his life as I knew about some of the others. And one thing that you point out is his use, his ownership, taking ownership of the word Jew, that before it could be, Jewish was the more, I think you called it, the more odine way to say it.

And June is something that hit to the core, but by taking ownership of the word and by Melbrook saying I'm a sure Jew from whatever, and actually I'm trapped and I'm, I was there. All the funny things. I can't even do it. That was terrible. But anyway, his use of this word, how it changed things too.

Why don't you speak about that for a sec. 

David: Yeah. He told, he said to Johnny Carson, this is around 1980, he was very famous. He says this is all a big fraud, right? I was born five foot. 11 inches. Perfect. Straight nose, blonde hair. And I went into, I think he said Mount Sinai actually. And they knocked the stuffings outta me and they shortened my legs by two, two inches and they broadened my nose and they brought my voice down what you were just saying, because I wanted to be a Jew comic. 

Zibby: Yes. Jew comic. 

David: He doesn't say a Jewish comic. He wants it a branded, and it's just a quirk of the language, what you were just saying. Jewish just seems descriptive, and neutral Jew still has some power. Al it's like a brand.

It's still startles and the, for the rest of his life, Zibby, the word Jew popped out of him like candy from a gumball machine. Whenever he could say it, he would say it. And Mel ha he's still alive, of course. And I got a note from him by the way. He said,.. 

Zibby: Oh, good. 

David: He said, you got most of it.

I'm taking that as a semi compliment. He did something. A lot of his jokes are about death. If you look through his kind of humor it's an expression of bodily life, and the body and all of its joys and all of its humiliations, everything. We don't need to enumerate, but everything that the body does.

And he was saying, I'm alive. You tried to kill all of us. You didn't do it, we're still alive. To the point where he could make fun in his movies of these atrocities that, springtime for Hitler and the Producers, which in 1967 caused a lot of shock. I bet. Yeah. And then even more, I. Shocking. Was the Inquisition another musical number?

This one from History of the World Part one? 

Zibby: Yep. 

David: Zibby. I panned that movie in New York Magazine. 

Zibby: No. 

David: Yes. And he remembered. 

Zibby: Oh no. 

David: Yes. And I now think that number, it's part of a whole bunch of sketches in that movie, and some of it is hilariously funny, but there he is, as Turk Ada of the Grand Inquisitor in a Red Cassick with singing and dancing monks.

And Jews strung up on the walls and being tormented in various awful ways. And I said to him, you making a message here to the Jews you're alive. They're dead. Get over it. Get over it. And now I don't wanna put words in his mouth and I don't know that he would say that since October 7th, but we're talking about 40 years ago, that movie.

I thought he was saying asserting we have survived. We have survived these and so I can revive these Jew killers, Hitler to MA in order to kill them again with humor. And so I take him a little more seriously than ev without I hope killing the fun because of course, mainly he's extremely funny, but he's also a kind of critic of manners.

In, in his way. When all those old West movies, when they went out there in the planes for nights and had dinners of beans, what. Happened then, certain noises emerge, which, has given five generations, four generations of teenagers, a great thrill.

So he's the critic of hypocrisy of false. Appearances false gentility. He's very Russian. He kept telling me I had to read the Russian class. He had no education at all. He just, ran outta class and it got thwacked on the head as he was leaving. But he became a great reader and he's.

When you talk to him, even in his middle, late nineties, he's very precise. Very precise and I said how do you always do that? You say exactly what you wanna say in the fewest number of words. And he said, look, you're a kid in the Catskills. You've got three minutes out there. You have to. You have to be, can't waste words.

But then he also said, not at that moment, but at another moment, that you can tell an amateur comic because he rushes to the punchline. You have to learn when to delay or even go off the beat. So those two things on the one hand, concise. On the other hand, don't rush what you have to say. Build a little suspense.

Zibby: We can all learn from Mel Brooks. This is great. 

David: It's, I think he's one of a kind. It's pretty hard. Pretty hard to learn from a genius. That's the problem. 

Zibby: So how do you feel, to our discussion of the word Jew, you named it eminent Jew. So you're using the power of the word, even in the title here, and of course this is coming out post-October 7th.

How do you feel about, since October 7th, or maybe it made, just how are you feeling about being Jewish yourself coming out with this type of book now? And just tell me more about that. 

David: I feel that if the, if this book ha has a message and it's, it certainly didn't begin that way. 'cause I started, I don't know, sometime during the Korean War, but a long time ago.

And if there's a message, it is be not afraid. 

Be not afraid. I don't have to tell you that, but everyone needs to hear. Jews need to hear that. Get together in groups, talk over what's happening, what Donald Trump is doing, what's happening to the universities, what's happening to the things that you love, get together, be not afraid and speak up.

So that's, how would. They all respond to this moment, Norman Mailer would've written descriptions of Donald Trump's inner life and lack of inner life in a way that would've been just o overwhelming as prose Betty would've hated the fact that the white Christian male has now been reasserted as the central figure in of, for all humanity.

So Lenny would've made music, he would've made speeches too. He made too many speeches, but basically he would've made music. 'cause he thought music creates souls. Music creates humanity. And he conducted everywhere. And that West Side story is it's put on by Japanese eight year olds.

It's close. I'm not joking. 

Zibby: I know. You're not. 

David: Jamie Bernstein his. His daughter says it's particularly in 2018, which was the centenary, it's universal, as universal as any American artwork is. And it, it resonates everywhere. So he in this moment, he would've continued to make music, certainly, but they all would've, and Mel would've been just disgusted.

He is disgusted by Donald Trump and would've created some, travesty of the Trump administration that I'm sure would've been great. So they would've responded each in his own way, in his own genius. I think and say, be not afraid. 

Zibby: And are you afraid? 

David: I'm concerned. I think what Trump's using antisemitism on the campuses a way of, denying the great universities, the federal funding that's been coming very successfully since the end of World War ii.

That, that's a pretense and the Jews are being set up as the heavies. 'cause there are a lot of people suffering and they keep claiming, oh, we're doing this to combat antisemitism. I don't think he gives a damn about antisemitism. He invites Holocaust deniers to his dinner table. And Ma Maa Lago, he makes vaguely antisemitic jokes.

This is all about crushing liberal civilization and starting with the universities. 

Zibby: Are you afraid to go on the road with a book like this at this current time? 

David: I'm not, I don't, nothing nasty has come my way. It's only been out a week, but I am, I'm not at the moment, but let's check back again in six months.

Yes, cautious, yes. Wary yes. That's the kind of Jewish characteristic in any case. But, no, I don't. I'm, I don't think, I'm afraid, and I'm leading with my, with the noses. If you look at the cover, there are some people, those are David Levine caricatures that were all in the New York review of books.

A Jewish artist, two Jewish editors. The, what they were saying is, we can have fun with ourselves, with cliches about ourselves. We're not afraid. And some people have said, oh, I don't like those, those car, but they're caricatures. They're not photographed and everyone who got caricatured by David Levine, but the, these have a particular, fun aspect to them of, I think suggests that the editors and the writer were not afraid.

And this was in the sixties and seventies when those pictures were drawn. 

Zibby: Amazing. David, thank you so much. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for discussing and thanks for empowering. Other Jews to feel that they can speak out. 

David: Thank you. 

What I, let me just say what you do is very important and keep on going.

It's very important that, this kind of world that you've created is very seriously important. So thank you. 

Zibby: Thank you. I appreciate it. Okay. See you next time. 

David: Hello. Next time. 

Zibby: Bye. Thank you. 

David: Bye.