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David Denby, "Eminent Jews: Bernstein, Brooks, Friedan, Mailer" (Henry Holt, 2025)
00:51:07
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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to the New Books Network. Hi, and welcome to the New Books Network. I'm your host, Rabbi Mark Katz, author of Yohanan's Judaism's Pragmatic Approach to Life. And I'm here with David Denby, author of the new book Eminent Bernstein, Brooks Friedan Mehler. The book talks about four prominent characters in both American Jewish history and American history, Leonard Bernstein, Mel Brooks, Betty Friedan and Norman Mailer. And we're so excited to have you on this podcast today. So we always begin the same way, which is rather than me. Read your bio, tell our listeners a little bit about yourself.
- [00:41]
B
Oh, well, I'm a New York guy. I went to school in Manhattan, in Riverdale, actually part of the Bronx, and then to Columbia, then to Stanford in the film program. And I started writing film criticism when I was about 25, 26 for the Atlantic first, and that didn't work out too well. So I wound up in Boston at the Boston Phoenix, the late lamented alternative weekly, and then from there to New York magazine for 20 years and then the New Yorker for 16 years. But I was never all in on movie criticism. I wrote a book about going back to Columbia and taking the core curriculum, the required courses in literature, classics of Western literature and political thinking. And I wrote a book about that called Great Books. And I wrote a book about my marriage falling apart when I lost my mind and over invested in the stock market. That book's called American Sucker. And I wrote a book about high school literary education lit up, which is a kind of prequel to Great Books. How do you turn on 10th graders to literature as a particularly good teacher at a public school in New York? And I've written essays on this and that. I had a piece on the Odyssey in the New Yorker a couple of weeks ago in anticipation of the big Christopher Nolan movie, which I haven't seen. It was all about the difficulties of taking on Greek epic and the differences between cinema and poetry and so on. So I'm no longer a movie critic, but the interest for special subjects is still there. And that was a lot of fun to do.
- [02:38]
A
This particular book that you've got it looks at, I would say it actually combines a lot of your interests together. Brooks has movies, you've got writing, you've got music. So tell us, how did you come to this particular book?
- [02:54]
B
I was trying to tease out how did Jews behave in situations in which they had more liberty, more freedom than ever before. Of course, this is a historical assumption. I don't know how they lived in Jerusalem in 50 AD so. But I thought about the period after the Second World War when anti Semitism receded, often because of the pressure of Jewish organizations, the horror of the Holocaust, general acceptance of Jews in American life. It was obvious to anyone that that, crassly speaking, Jews were doing well. High income earners among ethnic groups and you know, dominant in certain places like the movie business, the theater business, a lot of Jewish teachers, a lot of immigrant Jews from escapees from Germany and Austria and so on. So I chose these four individuals and I set the time frame. Born after the First World War, mature after the Second World War. And in 1948 we had a media revolution, and that is television became a mass medium. The long playing record became a mass medium. It's impossible to imagine Leonard Bernstein's career without the long playing record. And the paperback, the mass market paperback. You're too young, Rabbi. But when I was younger, at every supermarket, every drugstore, there were these circular metal racks with, I don't know, maybe Henry iv, Part one, and a novel by John Steinbeck and Betty Friedan. That's where her magnum opus, the Feminine Mystique, became a huge hit. So I chose those four. They didn't know each other except to clink glasses at parties. Intellectuals and artists drank a lot in the 50s. That's my impression. I mean that it was a kind of. That many of them felt that it was a conformist age, the triumph of consumerism and so on, and the hard drinking party. And certainly in New York, in California, they may have used a different substance, was a minor form of rebellion. Anyway, they met at parties, but they didn't. We've got here a great musician, a great American writer, Norman Mailer, a feminist revolutionary, middle class division, Betty Friedan and Mel Brooks, a vulgar clown. So they're very different. But there are temperamental affinities that I thought I could bring out by telling each of their stories. So it's really. A friend of mine said, how could you possibly have written four books and got paid for one? So that's the way it worked out. They reach about 35,000 words. And I do hope that without my pushing it too hard that they cast some light on one another.
- [06:25]
A
So how did you decide, I guess what to put in and what to keep for each of these different characters? I mean, each of them have had volumes written about them and your book was tight in the telling. And I'm sure you left important things out and you brought anecdotes in that probably were not in many other places. So how did you ultimately decide what 35,000 words to write for each of these four characters.
- [06:50]
B
I don't know if I can give you a formula. I mean, it just had to satisfy my sense of what was relevant to the drama of their lives and what was relevant to the notion of Jewish freedom. Those are the two things. And I would stop every once in a while and make some reflections on what I. You know, cultural reflections on Jewish character, though I tried to make them idiosyncratic, that is tied to the individual foibles. Like an example, Betty Friedan's irritability, her impatience, which drove everyone crazy. Where did that come from? Was it just her personal story? Was it also a kind of cultural inheritance? It had something to do with being a Jew in this country and the kind of drive that was there in that generation, which comes out in. In the general. I'm generalizing wildly that, you know, Jews want an anecdote to have a point. They don't like. They don't like careless, meaningless, wandering talk. They want a joke to have a good punchline. They want a life to have some meaning, an arc of significance. I'm sure you know, that the Hasidic. It's just a line. Rabbi Zusya. Yes. You're nodding. Rabbi Zusya was dying, and he said, when I get to heaven, they're not going to ask me, why weren't you Moses? They're going to ask me, why weren't you Zusya? Ouch. Meaning, why weren't you the best version of yourself? And I think for that, particularly for that generation, I'm not sure anymore, that demand to make the most of what you were, of what God gave you or your genes gave you to push always. I mean, a pushy Jew is both a pain in the neck and someone who gets something done. I mean, it's a weird. It's an insult, and it's praise at the same time. So these four were marked by that extreme attempt at self. It's not self transcendence, and it's certainly not self denial. I mean, it's a more. It's a more worldly kind of pressure on oneself.
- [09:33]
A
I want to play a little game because I don't assume that everyone who's listening to this podcast maybe knows that much about all four of the characters. I mean, I can say, for example, I learned a tremendous amount about Norman Mailer because me being 41 years old, I never actually encountered his writing and really kind of only knew him by name and knew that he was a famous writer before I Read your book. And so let's play a game with, let's say, two to three minutes on each of the people coming up with what you say is like the most important. Two to three minutes that someone who's never really heard of them or just heard of them by name only and maybe can say a sentence about them might be able to say so that they understand kind of who your book is about. So let's start with Leonard Bernstein.
- [10:22]
B
Well, he's a boy from suburban Boston, didn't even have a piano in his family until he was 10. By contrast, Herbert von Karion, the great Austrian conductor, was playing in public when he was 6. And Lenny just took off. He had the best music teachers in Boston, Harvard, and then fell under the. He became protege of the conductor of the Boston Symphony, Koussevitzki, and just his life exploded when he filled in for Bruno Walter at the York Philharmonic when he was 25 years old without a rehearsal. At the same time, to the consternation of many, he loved show business, he loved writing for the theater, he loved nightclubs. So he wrote four wonderful shows with brilliant collaborators, the most famous of which is the west side story. So by 1958, when he took over the New York Philharmonic as music director, the show writing was behind him. And from there on, he was a conductor and a writer of classical music. And his classical pieces, many of them are very good, and they're being played more and more. He became a kind of international celebrity in the classical world of the kind that had never happened before for an American and conducted all over Europe, was much loved. And he was a gay man who fell in love, very much entirely in love with a woman, Felicia Montelegra. And the difficult marriage that they had is well told in the movie Maestro. It leaves a lot of his life out, but it gets the family story very well. So he died younger than he should have because he smoked constantly and drank too much. A much revered figure. The early complaints about him that his conducting style was too flamboyant, that he moved too much, all of that went away. And the comedy of it was, it was Europe and his being hailed in Europe that changed the American attitudes towards him. And at this point, I mean, his musicals are performed everywhere, like student groups in Tokyo do their version of west side Story. So he's sort of over the top. Lenny. Betty Friedan was a plain girl who grew up in Peoria, Illinois, southwest of Chicago, a Protestant dominated city. And there was a Jewish community, but her father had a jewelry store and his gentile Colleagues would have nothing to do with him after closing hours. So there was plenty of anti Semitism. She did not get into her high school sorority. She was by far the best student in her school, which you could say, so what? But it mattered a great deal to her. Anyway, she winds up after Smith and a year at Berkeley in psychology in New York. She wanted to be where the action was and she wanted to be a journalist, although she didn't know what kind. And she worked for trade union publications and by degrees began noticing that women's rights in this country were inferior to men's, that women were being trapped by a kind of ideology, that they were really suited only for raising children and keeping homes. And she had nothing against either of those things. She had three children herself when she got married and was constantly telling feminists they should have children. So she used the methods of a professional journalist. She didn't have access to big data. It didn't exist in 1960, 61, 62. And when she wrote the Feminine Mystique, which I have read twice and is still very much worth reading, and her data sample was limited to upper middle class white women, and that was the critique of the book then and it's the critique of the book now. And factually that is true, but she reviewed the entire culture. She read experts, everyone was an expert on women, you know, in the early 60s, psychiatrists, priests, I'm sorry, rabbis, everyone, movie makers, magazine editors. She read the entire culture and found a kind of compound ideology of denigration. Women's capacities were just being honored, were not being honored as. As they should be. So the book came out and had an extraordinary effect in paperback. It sold 3 million copies, those racks at the front of drugstores, and she was all over the place. And the second wave of feminism, the women's movement was born and she was the leader of it for a while until she was very a diva, ish and impatient, as I said before, and demanded precedence and so on, and wound up losing her positions as the head of various organizations. And she carried on for another 30 years. And she had some effect overseas. She was instrumental in sort of getting feminist movements started in Israel. Mel Brooks, of course, is Mel Brooks. He just turned 100. His humor, I think, is darker and tougher than most people are willing to recognize. He did this extraordinary comedy routine with Howard Reiner, Carl Reiner, the 2000 year old man, in which Mel was of course a Jewish 2000 year old man who had an affair with Joan of Arc and so on, had lived through the ages. And Reiner said to him, what's the difference between comedy and tragedy? And Mel said, tragedy is when I cut my finger with a piece of paper. Comedy is when you fall into a ditch and die. Now that's not just a casual remark. I interpret his humor as being much darker than most people and of course, tremendous fun, and I hope I didn't kill the fun. And I analyzed the four of his best movies, the Producers and Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein and the History of the World Part 1. But young producers has that famous number of the Nazis dancing in a production number in a Broadway show, Springtime for Hitler. And I, I pushed him a little bit. I said, weren't you sort of nudging the Jewish audience? Because the audience from musicals, Certainly in the 50s and 60s, in the beginning was largely a New York Jewish audience. And then everyone came and the shows became hits by saying something to them like, get over it. You can make fun of the Nazis now they're gone, you're alive, you're doing well. And at first he said, no, I'm just an entertainer. But then I came back to it with Springtime, I'm sorry, with the Inquisition, which is a very outlandish and almost frightening number from History of the World Part 1. And it's about Spanish Inquisition. And Mel is singing and dancing as Torquemada, the Grand Inquisitor. And there are all sorts of Jews being strung up on the walls and tormented in various ingenious ways. So I asked him again, I don't want to put words in his mouth because since October 7th, he might not, you know, agree with what I asked him. I said, aren't you saying to the Jews, you're doing okay in America, get over. You don't have to murder yourselves. You can laugh at these tragedies in the past. And at the second time he said, yes, you're right. So there's that. That side to him as well as fabulous attack on hypocrisy. If you think of the Mel Brooks body in these movies is exploding with effluvia of one sort or another. It's the liberated body as comedy, which is the basic comic strain of burlesque. Although he didn't see that much burlesque when he was a kid. It was mostly gone. But it's a kind of roughhouse comedy that goes back to the Middle Ages or maybe even to, you know, ancient Greece and so on. And he, he embodied that in modern terms. Mailer was a middle class boy from Brooklyn who went to Harvard when he was 16 and grew up in a kind of very protective Jewish environment. He was sort of the neighborhood darling of, of the women in the neighborhood. Not just his mother and sister, but his aunts had resort properties on the Jersey coast. And he would, starting when he was 15, he would go there and take a room in the summer and they would feed him and he would write all day long. But he sort of burst out and was determined to sort of overthrow the constraints, the restraints, the hesitations of the milieu. He came out of first and second generation Jews and so they hated violence. He was often violent. They were reticent about sexual behavior. He was flagrant about sexual behavior, on and on like that. And he was also a fantastic writer. So the Naked and the Dead is still the best novel about World War II. And perhaps the greatest thing in it is a long virtuoso stretch, maybe 100 pages, in which it's set on an island which the Americans are attacking a Japanese held island in the Pacific in the war. And two friends carry a wounded buddy who's on a stretcher out of the jungle. And what he got there was the male body pushed to extremes and landing somewhere between exhaustion and death. And that was the state. It's a heroic state that fascinated him. He was a great writer about boxing. He wrote a great short book, the Fight, about the. You remember the Rumble and the jungle and the Zaire. And he wrote about American politics with a kind of penetration and a kind of sensuous and intellectual and moral depth that has never been done before or since. He wrote fantastically about the conventions, the Kennedy convention, The Goldwater Convention, 1968, a book called Miami and the Siege of Chicago. And a great deal of fiction attempted in his own mind to stir up the country which he felt had fallen into a kind of torpor after the war, as they all did, feeling that there was a kind of the American spirit had lost its adventurousness and had grown mediocre. And in all four of them, they wouldn't have put it that way, but they all felt that. And in their activities, their boldness, their risk taking, attempted to stir things up.
- [22:58]
A
So as I was reading your book, there were these kind of deep questions about a lot of. About all four of the people that you spoke about that kind of, you know, you would raise and you would mention, but it, you know, it leaves the reader thinking, I'll give you, the readers one example, then maybe have you opine on it. You did raise this question about Leonard Bernstein, about the debate that exists about whether or not he would have been even more prolific if he weren't as versatile, right, because he was writing for theater, he was writing classical music, he was conducting. And arguably he could have specialized in one of those three, but he decided to be much more eclectic in his way of being. And therefore his output in any given one was less. But cumulatively, he might have done more. And so I'm curious, because you raise that as a question, you kind of give some thoughts on it. I'm curious what you think the answer is to that question.
- [24:00]
B
Well, it was not only the things that you mentioned. He was also a great teacher. I mean, he was fantastic on television. There were the Young People's concerts, which are very much worth looking at. There's the Norton Lectures, the Unanswered Question, which is a complete introduction to classical music. He sits there with a bunch of Harvard students sitting around him in a piano, and he goes through the basics of harmony and so on, but in a very entertaining way. And so he was a fantastic teacher. He was a very good writer. He was really good at six things and. Yes, exactly what you said. People kept, including the press kept needling him. Why don't you give up conducting and just write shows? Or why don't you give up shows? And I think the answer is he had to do all of those things to be good, to be at his best at any one of them. And that's a level of giftedness that most of us cannot fathom. I mean, even Stephen Sondheim, who was very fond of him and who was the lyricist on west side Story after Bernstein died, he said, oh, he should have just devoted himself to one thing because he wasn't great at any of these things. And I think that's just simply a malicious lie. He was one of the world's greatest conductors. That was universally agreed upon, I would say, by 1975, and he had another 15 years to live, he was one of the world's greatest teachers of music. That was universally agreed upon. He himself castigated himself for not devoted, not devoting more time to his classical compositions. But when he would take off, it would be hard for him to settle down and write. And he did write a short opera and a long opera, which I don't think worked very well. I would have much preferred if he'd been more successful writing shows. There were attempts that didn't go anywhere. There was a show called 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue about the White House, and Alan J. Lerner, no less, was the librettist, and it was apparently stiff and Pompous, and it closed after four performances. But he wrote a lot of good music for it. And there is a recording of the best of the songs, if anyone is interested, that you can find. So there was that salvation at the end. He started to fall apart physically. When Felicia Montelegua died of cancer. And that story is very well told in Brad Cooper's movie Maestro. He blamed himself irrationally. I mean, he blamed his cheating on her with men, although that had nothing to do with cancer. And bizarrely, he sort of fell apart, not musically, but morally, so to speak, physically. And the last 10 years were not happy. They were happy musically and he was feted all over the world, but he sort of lost control of himself. He was a very beautiful young man. He was extraordinary looking young man and he completely let himself go. But I mean, it was still an absolutely amazing, an amazing life. I don't know the answer to your question. Would he have been a greater classical composer if he had put aside the conducting and just. Maybe, maybe not. I mean, maybe he went as far as he could as a classical composer. And some of these pieces are very good. The Chichester Psalms, which is a short choral piece commissioned by an Anglican bishop in England, is a wonderful piece and is performed quite often. The Serenade for Strings, solo violin, strings and percussion, is a wonderful piece. And now all the violin virtuosi have to play it. So, I mean, I think, in other words, there is good music there. The Kaddish Symphony number three has a vocal element in which a job like character assails God. And the text is rather bumptious and I wish some great poet would rewrite it. But a lot of the music is very exciting. So you have to go through his work and judge one by one.
- [29:01]
A
I'm curious, of the four, which was the hardest for you to write?
- [29:05]
B
Oh, Betty, of course, because she isn't very likable. The others were. I mean, once her book came out and became famous, she, you know, Boss Durant and the young women who were drawn to her and wanted to work for her. I mean, she felt she had to, you know, dominate every meeting she was in. She was absolutely against gay women joining the movement, which of course is, in political terms, stupid. You can't have a large scale women's movement and exclude gay women. I mean, she finally came around on that after years. So, I mean, she demanded the best table, the best car, the best seat. You know, she became a kind of diva and particularly difficult for women to talk to. I feel I could have talked to her that I would have found common ground with her. She was very, very bright, don't misunderstand. And she loved literature and she loved music. I mean, but she insisted on dominating everything. And so I got into unpleasant struggles with other feminist leaders like Gloria Steinem, who's still alive, and Bella Abzug. By the way, Norman Mailer wrote the best descriptions of Bella Abzug in his book called the Prisoner of Sex, which is a book about sex. And he had a meeting with Bella Abzug and when he was running for mayor of the city of New York, and she came to talk to him, he wanted her vote and her group's votes. And he wrote a very funny, affectionate portrait of her. I mean, he was certain Norman Mailer was not against bread and butter feminism, equal pay for equal work, abortion. He came around on abortion and so on. He had no problems with Betty Friedan, Bella Abzig, in fact, Gloria Steinem was her friend. It was the radical feminists of the late 60s and early 70s who, you know, blamed women's troubles on the. On the family, the prison house of Western culture, the family and children should be group raised and that sort of thing. And he wrote this extraordinary polemic called the Prisoner of Sex. And I said, it's the only male chauvinist text worth reading. It's rhetorically magnificent and morally stupid. He thought sex should be overwhelming. It should come up from the earth, and therefore that should have the maximum of risk. And therefore there should be no birth control, which is all very well for men, but leaves women with diapers to buy and a life to take care of. So it's worth reading for its eloquence and worth dismissing for its sort of blindness.
- [32:19]
A
That was one thing that I really appreciated about the Norman Mailer section. Just how eclectic his writing was. I mean, it felt to me like, and correct me if I'm wrong, but the way that you tend to describe him, it was almost irrelevant what he was writing about. Cause he was just such a good writer that he could write about paint drying. And you would probably read that because I'm not sure I could find a through thread in all of the different things that he considered in his writing.
- [32:48]
B
Well, there are a number of threads, I guess, but you're absolutely right. I mean, he wrote an enormous novel about ancient Egypt, which is, you know, pre civilization, before the Jews and the Christians. And it's all about magic and sex and so on in ancient Egypt, rebirth. And I frankly can't get through that one. But one through line was he was Drawn to young men who were so rebellious, they fell outside of society altogether. So there's an enormous book about Gary Gilmore. Gary Gilmore was a lifetime con who got out in Utah, was taken in by his family and immediately killed two men for no reason that anyone could discern. His family turned him in. He was convicted and he demanded that he be executed by firing squad, which he was. Mailer was not around at the trial or anything. His buddy Larry Schiller was and had a lot of interviews with the principals and called up Mailer and said, would you like to write a book about this guy? And Mailer devoted eight months of his life to interviewing people in South Central Utah, where they certainly hadn't seen many Jews before, from New York at that point. And he wrote this extraordinary book, the Executioner's Song, and took his own voice out of it altogether. It's composed entirely in the voices of the participants, of Gary, of his girlfriend, of his family, of the lawyers, of the court officers. The Executioner's Song. And I think it's one of the classics, post war classics of American literature. So there was that outsider, there was Lee Harvey Oswald. Schiller again got him involved after the KGB files opened up and he and Schiller went and put themselves down in Minsk and recreated what Lee Harvey Oswald and his wife Marina, his Russian wife Marina, what their life was like around 1960. And it is a superb picture of the, of what life was like, you know, in, in the Soviet Union at a terrible, terrible time. Trouble is, he couldn't stop writing, so he, he should have stopped when he got them to New York, to the United States. But he kept on going because he was determined to figure out, you know, who, who actually killed Kennedy. And after spending years on it, he came back to the Warren Commission's assumption that Lee Harvey Oswald was the sole assassin. But that's a brilliant book and he was drawn to people like that because he tried to understand them and what drove them. So there's that thread and he wrote a lot about American politics, but as I said, he wanted not to do vote counting and that kind of thing, but to get the spirit underneath it, what the values were. He'd go to these conventions and listen to the undertones and smell the smoke in the rooms and see what was not said from which he could suss out the American soul.
- [36:26]
A
I'm curious about your experience writing about Mel Brooks. I mean, of the four, Mel Brooks was the most closely related to your, to your public life, Right. As a film critic, I'm curious Did that make it easier or harder to write 35,000 words about Melbourne?
- [36:44]
B
Oh, I guess easier. And I was also able to talk to him. I spent a few hours with him in his. Maybe six, seven years ago in his office in Culver City. And then I talked to him on the phone maybe four or five times after that. The last time I called him, he said, you again. I'll give you 12 minutes. And he gave me 45 minutes. I mean. Cause once he starts with the stories, he can't stop. But I let go the movies that I didn't think worked very well, and there are certainly are some, and just concentrated on the fourth that I mentioned. Young Frankenstein, formally, is the best. It's the most smoothly told. That it takes off from those Frankenstein movies from the 30s with Boris Karloff. I think it's even better in terms of atmosphere as well as all the jokes, of course. And it has one of the greatest things in American movies. You remember Peter Boyle plays the monster, and they decide to dance, he and Gene Wilder, who creates him yet the young Frankenstein, they decide to perform Irving Berlin's Putting on the Ritz as a nightclub act. And they do it in front of a bunch of scientists and their wives and everything. And it's a sick joke because the monster can't quite do it. But I find it very moving because it's about the aspiration to make art against every discouragement. And it's at the same time hilarious and heartbreaking. I think it's the single greatest thing he ever did, and he didn't even want to do it at first. It was Gene Wilder who persuaded him. He thought, oh, well, no, it's not fair to Irving Berlin. I mean, this is one of his greatest, most rhythmically complicated numbers. And Wilder said, no, we can do this. And it turned out to be fantastic. So, yes, I mean, I guess I felt at ease with Bernstein because I never talked to him or anything, but I went to a lot of his concerts and he was always in my head. And a mailer I did interview in 1998 for the New Yorker. I spent a couple days with him. He couldn't have been nicer. His days of brawling and bullying and so on were over. He was 75. And he seemed to like my writing, my movie writing. So, I mean, that made things easier. I pan. And the movie that he directed, Tough Guys Don't Dance, the book version of that, which came first, is worth reading for his description of Provincetown, of the dunes, of the whole, of the air, the atmosphere of Provincetown. It's not a. It's a pot boiler. It's not a good book. It's not a serious book, but it has fabulous descriptive writing in it.
- [40:06]
A
So if you had to add another person, I'm sure as you were trying to debate who you're going to talk about, you had probably a short list that you then narrowed down to these four, who would it be?
- [40:19]
B
Well, there was Sid Caesar, who was only four years older than Mel. And I knew that David Margulik, a nonfiction writer, was working on a biography of Caesar, so I let that go. I reviewed the. David's book when it came out last November was very good. There's Richard Feynman, the great physicist who was part of the Manhattan Project. But there is a book by James Glick, G L E I C K, called Genius, which is so good and so successfully captures the Jewish atmosphere of. I think he grew up in Farock away of Feynman, that I thought. And. And also, I don't know anything about physics and I can't fake it. So I let that go. There was my mentor as film critic, Pauline Kael, who fit the time frame and certainly was a great character. But I had written about my relation to her in the New Yorker, and everyone said, oh, you've done it. Give it up. Let it go. So those were the three. There's short story writer Grace Paley, who's very talented. I mean, we're talking about everyone in that, in the time period that I set out. But I thought it was sort of. I just thought she wasn't well known enough to put on the COVID of the book. So those were the other possibilities.
- [41:50]
A
Thank you. Well, we're starting to come to a close now, so I have kind of one big final question, which is, you know, if someone walked away with, you know, a big lesson combining all these four lives together and understanding kind of your general thesis, what would it be?
- [42:10]
B
The German political theorist Hannah Arendt was bullied by antisemitic children in Germany. Konigsberg, when she was a child. And her mother said, you have to take care of this on your own. If the teachers made anti Semitic remarks, come home immediately and I'll report it to the school. But if the children. You have to handle it on your own. And from which she concluded, Hannah concluded that when you're attacked as a Jew, you have to answer as a Jew, meaning not in putting it in her later political theory terms, not as a defender of human rights, as a believer in Western culture, but as a Jew. And so I would say to people now, based on my four, that they were not afraid of anything. And this is a tough time now for Jews. And I've talked to a lot of audiences and people are afraid. Older people are afraid for the first time in their lives because of the amount of anti Semitism that has sprung up and because they don't often don't approve of what the Netanyahu government is doing in Gaza and the West Bank. And the only thing I could say to them was get together, exchange your views. It's very important that you meet together as Jews and just rehearsing what Hannah Arendt said. If you're attacked as a Jew, you must answer as a Jew.
- [43:55]
A
Well, thank you very much.
- [43:57]
B
Thank you.
- [43:58]
A
So we always end exactly the same way, which is most of our writers are working on something else. So what's the something else that you're excited to work on?
- [44:07]
B
Oh, I'm writing about Hannah Arendt, who came here in 1941, broke, stateless, very, very well educated, but wrote in a kind of elaborate, philosophical, highfalutin German metaphysics style and learned to write English with the help of a lot of wonderful American writers who was took to her and wound up writing an extraordinary book called the Origins of Totalitarianism, which came out in 1951 and analyzed what happened in Germany and Russia to produce the nightmarish regimes of Hitler and Stalin and then went on from there. So I'm writing an article about her and I would love to write about her life on the Upper west side, which is where she lived in very ordinary neighborhood of the Upper west side. The most of the German artists went to Los Angeles, the musicians, the novelists, the architects, or they lived in the maybe if they lived in a village, someplace fashionable. But she lived in the very hamish Upper west side and had a very ordinary physical life and an extraordinary mental life. So I would like to write about her life on the Upper west side.
- [45:25]
A
Well, when you do, we can't wait to read it.
- [45:27]
B
Oh, thank you so much.
- [45:29]
A
Thank you. So I've been with David Denby again. My name is Rabbi Mark Katz and the book that we've been talking about is eminent Bernstein, Brooks Friedan and Mehler. Thank you very much. Thank you for listening to this episode
- [45:44]
B
of the New Books Network.
- [45:45]
A
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- [45:55]
B
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- [45:56]
A
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- [46:00]
B
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- [46:02]
A
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- [46:09]
B
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