In his book Eminent Jews, David Denby – a staff writer for The New Yorker and author, among others books, of Snark and Great Books – provides engaging, informative, insightful, mostly, but not entirely, celebratory biographies of four of eminent Jews: composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein; comedy writer, performer, and filmmaker Mel Brooks; feminist writer and activist Betty Friedan; and journalist and novelist Norman Mailer. Although Brooks detested the film Life Is Beautiful, Roberto Benigni’s 1997 comedy about a concentration camp, and claimed he would not joke about the Holocaust, Denby points out that he “came pretty close in ‘The Inquisition,’ an episode in [the film] History of the World, Part I, in which Jews are strung up, turned on spits, spun in a gigantic slot machine, xylophone tapped on their heads...” as Brooks, as Torquemada, sings and dances. Acknowledging “nothing particularly Jewish in her methods,” Denby attributes Friedan’s political activism to tikkun olam (the duty of Jews to repair the world) and to a temperament that was Jewish “in its insistent, even tormenting, moral energies,” including “existential guilt.” Because Jewish women experienced contempt from antisemites and “diminished status” within nuclear families and their own religious community, the vast over-representation of Jews in second-wave feminism is, “in the end, no great mystery at all.”
Author: BY GLENN C. ALTSCHULER
Published at: 2025-05-31 21:19:19
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