Leonard Bernstein, Mel Brooks, Betty Friedan, and Norman Mailer. Brilliant, brash, yet soulful, they were 100 percent Jewish and 100 percent American. They upended the restrained culture of their forebears and changed American life.
They worked in different fields, and, apart from clinking glasses at parties now and then, they hardly knew one another. But they shared a historical moment and a common temperament. For all four, their Jewish heritage was electrified by American liberty. The results were explosive.
As prosperity for Jews increased and anti-Semitism began to fade after World War II, these four creative giants stormed through the latter half of the twentieth century, altering the way people around the world listened to music, defined what was vulgar, comprehended the relations of men and women, and understood the American soul. They were not saints; they were turbulent and self-dissatisfied intellectuals who fearlessly wielded their own newly won freedom to charge up American culture.
Celebratory yet candid, at times fiercely critical, David Denby presents these four figures as egotistical and generouslarger-than-life, all of them, yet vulnerable, even heartbreaking, in their ambition, ferocity, and pride.
David Denbyis the
New York Timesbestselling author of
Great Books.His other books include
American Suckerand
Lit Up. He was a film critic for
New Yorkmagazine and
The New Yorker, where he is now a staff writer. His essays have appeared in
The New Republicand
The Atlantic.He lives in New York City with his wife, novelist Susan Rieger.
ANew YorkerBest Book of the Year
David Denby succeeds marvelously inEminent Jews, his portrait of four icons who defined American culture in the second half of the 20th century. . . . Throughout, he makes a convincing case that his subjects exercised a 'moral strenuousness' that accounts for the lolp
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