740 Mel Brooks and Other Eminent Jews (with David Denby) | War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (#13 GBOAT)

Summary

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Podcast Summary: The History of Literature — Episode 740

Title: Mel Brooks and Other Eminent Jews (with David Denby) | War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (#13 GBOAT)
Host: Jacke Wilson
Guest: David Denby
Date: October 13, 2025

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Overview

In this episode, Jacke Wilson talks with acclaimed critic and author David Denby about his new book, Eminent Jews, which profiles four influential Jewish Americans—Leonard Bernstein, Mel Brooks, Betty Friedan, and Norman Mailer—from what Denby calls the "Golden Age of American Jews." The discussion covers the traits uniting these figures, the broader societal changes that allowed their prominence, and the ways in which they represent both endings and beginnings for American Jewry. Wilson also shares a reading of Virginia Woolf’s 1917 review of Tolstoy, reflecting on what makes his genius so enduring, as part of his ongoing "Greatest Books of All Time" countdown (with a brief focus on War and Peace).

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Revisiting Tolstoy’s Genius Through Virginia Woolf

Timestamps: [03:17] – [14:25]

• Jacke reads excerpts from Virginia Woolf’s 1917 review of Tolstoy’s The Cossacks, highlighting what she sees as his unique genius: an unmatched observational ability, psychological depth, and “profund psychology and superb sincerity.”
• Woolf’s take: while some contemporary (to her) English fiction seems obsolete, Tolstoy’s writing feels radically contemporary, as if “written a month or two ago.”
• Notable insight: Tolstoy’s writing never settles for mere surface observation—he uses what he sees to seek even deeper existential riddles.
• Jacke reflects on Tolstoy being "sort of like Shakespeare in that sense," universally admired by major literary figures—with the odd exceptions (Flaubert eking out criticism, and Tolstoy himself regarding Shakespeare).

Notable Quote:

“With Tolstoy, you can go to Henry James and Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner, Isaiah Berlin, Nabokov… I can’t think of a serious literary figure who wasn’t in awe of Tolstoy.”
— Jacke Wilson [05:00]

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2. Introducing Eminent Jews and David Denby’s Project

Timestamps: [14:25] – [18:29]

• Jacke introduces David Denby's new book, which adapts the group-biography model of Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians, but instead of satirizing his subjects, Denby seeks to celebrate.
• The four figures—Bernstein, Brooks, Friedan, and Mailer—lived through a period when American Jews were ascendant in public life, marking a dramatic shift from earlier eras of assimilation and repression.
• Denby’s purpose: to “extend the notion of eminence” to people closer to “our own sensibility,” not just legal or scientific notables but cultural figures who shaped public life.

Notable Quote:

“These four were not the hypocrites … they were sort of, so to speak, the personalities who came out of repression.”
— David Denby [19:12]

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3. Shifts for American Jews After WWII

Timestamps: [22:40] – [30:35]

• Postwar America saw an unprecedented fading of antisemitism and a widespread, if unspoken, sense that Jews had “arrived.”
• Earlier Hollywood moguls remained deeply anxious about displaying Jewishness publicly; postwar, that anxiety faded and assertiveness became possible.
• Conditions: the horrors of the Holocaust were publicly acknowledged, America’s victory elevated the status of Jews, and new media (TV, LPs, paperbacks) gave Jewish creatives mass reach.

Notable Quote:

“After the war there was the reverse, a kind of philo-Semitic atmosphere...They had arrived and they felt comfortable for the first time during the long years of the diaspora.”
— David Denby [27:36]

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4. Behind the Choice of Figures: Mel Brooks as Exemplar

Timestamps: [31:08] – [40:43]

• Mel Brooks chosen for his “irrepressibility” and role as a bringer of joy, but also for the unexpected darkness in his comedy—using ridicule and musical farce to deflate antisemitic fears and Nazi horrors.
• Denby traces the explosive, burlesque tradition Brooks inherits and the psychological origins of Brooks’s comedic style (rooted in childhood loss and unconditional love from his mother, Kitty).
• Brooks’s humor often circles trauma: “He is a great bringer of joy… but his humor is much darker than many people realize.”
• A deeper reading of The Producers (“Springtime for Hitler”) and History of the World, Part I (the Inquisition scene), which Denby sees as Brooks’s way of telling Jewish audiences to “get over it” (the trauma is real, but survival and joy are the answer).

Notable Quotes:

“His humor is much darker than many people realize.”
— David Denby [32:56]

“He was the noisiest man in New York in the 1950s, which is, you know, really saying something.”
— David Denby [32:56]

“That’s how I interpret it: he’s purging himself and purging the Jews of fear.”
— David Denby [36:06]

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5. Norman Mailer: Chronicler, Provocateur, and Contradictory Genius

Timestamps: [41:10] – [54:10]

• Mailer’s importance lies not only in his literary output but in how completely he was an American writer, entwined with the nation’s psyche, unlike contemporaries like Saul Bellow (whom Denby acknowledges as the superior novelist).
• Mailer’s greatest works are those where he fuses personal myth with national themes—The Naked and the Dead, the convention essays, The Armies of the Night, The Executioner’s Song.
• Mailer’s existential philosophy: act out your impulses to understand them, rather than psychoanalyze.
• His personal flaws (e.g., the stabbing of his second wife) are discussed unsparingly but not ignored; Denby argues that, despite bad behavior, Mailer deserves literary rehabilitation due to his unmatched contributions.

Notable Quotes:

“His project was America… He was fascinated by it and just had this juice for it.”
— Jacke Wilson [48:27]

“He plotted his life on a kind of graph, and the one axis was glory and the other was shame.”
— David Denby [41:33]

“There is no prose—you have to go back to Whitman’s poetry to find prose as extraordinary.”
— David Denby [44:06]

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6. The Group Biography: Endings (and Beginnings)

Timestamps: [57:51] – [62:47]

• Each biography in Denby's book is subtitled The End of…: self-pity (Brooks), subservience (Friedan), shame (Mailer), apprenticeship (Bernstein)—all negative forces overcome in the story of 20th-century American Jews.
• Wilson observes that the "endings" are also beginnings: these individuals not only closed old chapters but opened new ones, paving the way for future American Jewish assertiveness and achievement.
• Denby and Wilson discuss whether such golden eras of upward mobility and fearless creativity are still possible in today’s America, with Denby expressing cautious optimism that the liberating effect endures.

Notable Quotes:

“These are four beginnings as well.”
— Co-host/Interviewer [58:33]

“America poured into them, these four, and they, as Jews, poured into America.”
— Jacke Wilson [58:38]

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Additional Notable Quotes & Moments

• On the struggle of group-biography writing:

  “If there’s any art in this, it’s the art of compression, of saying in the fewest number of words that without cheapening it, without simplifying it.”
  — David Denby [21:12]

• On Mailer’s literary generosity:

  “He wouldn’t give up on people. And if he thought you had something … he was remarkably generous.”
  — David Denby [54:10]

• Closing praise:

  “Thank you so much. And can I say, I’ve been interviewed many times, and this was by far the best one.”
  — David Denby [63:01]

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Timeline of Key Segments

| Timestamp | Topic | |---|---| | 03:17–14:25 | Virginia Woolf on Tolstoy’s Genius | | 18:29–22:17 | Denby Introduces Eminent Jews & Intentions | | 22:40–30:35 | Postwar America & Jewish Ascent | | 31:08–40:43 | Mel Brooks: Comedy, Darkness, Family, and Trauma | | 41:10–54:10 | Norman Mailer: American Identity, Achievement & Flaws | | 57:51–62:47 | Thematic Closures and Ongoing Legacy |

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Takeaways

• David Denby’s Eminent Jews is a celebration of assertiveness, creativity, and cultural integration, representing a unique era in American Jewish history.**
• Each subject—Brooks, Bernstein, Friedan, Mailer—embodies not just personal greatness but serves as a lens on a broader historical moment.
• Discussion foregrounds the tension between assimilation and self-assertion, and between personal flaws and public achievement.
• The legacy of this era is an open question, with optimism that the freedoms and recognitions won by these figures, though challenged, endure in American society and its culture.

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Recommended Resource:

• Eminent Jews: Bernstein, Brooks, Friedan, Mailer by David Denby

For Further Listening:

• Previous episodes on Tolstoy and War and Peace

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Transcript

[Jack Wilson]

The History of Literature Podcast is a member of the podglomerate Network and Lit Hub Radio. Hello everyone, it's Jack Wilson telling you that the History of Literature Podcast tour through Literary England is still accepting deposits and we'd love to have you join us. We will be visiting some of the greatest literary sites in history, including walks.

[Co-host/Interviewer]

Tours, pub visits, visitors and leisure time.

[Jack Wilson]

Activities, and with visits from scholars and other special guests as we experience the amazing cities of London, Oxford and Bath in a small group accompanied by yours truly. If you love literature and if you love life, you are not going to want to miss this.

[Co-host/Interviewer]

It's next year in May of 2026.

[Jack Wilson]

But we need you to put down a deposit now so we can finalize the itinerary.

[Co-host/Interviewer]

2026 is around the corner people.

[Jack Wilson]

Give yourself something to look forward to next spring. You can find out more at John Shors Travel John S H O R.

[Co-host/Interviewer]

S or you can find the links.

[Jack Wilson]

To the itinerary and sign up [e-mail] hope to see you soon.

[Alan Sisto]

I'm Alan Sisto, the Man of the west here at the Prancing Pony Podcast. And I'm Sean Marchese, the real life Lord of the Mark. Every week here at the Prancing Pony Podcast, along with Sean or other co hosts, I explore the works of J.R.R. tolkien, author of the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings, bringing along lots of pop culture refere plenty of nerd humor and the occasional bad punk. It's just a couple of friends hanging out at the pub talking about our favorite books. We cover just a few pages every episode, reading important sections of the books and having a chat about what we've read. Now we do a ton of research for each episode so that we can bring as much background information to our conversation as possible. We do all the heavy reading so you don't have to. It's a great way for first time readers to learn the basics of Tolkien's world, while for Middle Earth veterans it's a deep dive into their favorite stories. Now the Tolkien fandom is like no other, so we spend time in the community giving talks at Tolkien events, recording live episodes and hanging out with our listeners on Discord to engage with our audience every chance we get. So if you're ready to dive into the most beloved world in fantasy literature and become a part of a vibrant, active community of listeners, then look for the Prancing Pony Podcast wherever you listen.

[Jack Wilson]

Hello, today on the podcast, a conversation with David Denby about his book Eminent Jews, which looks at four brilliant, brash and soulful Jewish Americans from what's been called the Golden Age of American Jews. Plus, we continue our march across the battlefield of the greatest books of all time with a quick look at War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy. All that coming up today on the history of literature. Okay, welcome to the podcast. I'm Jack Wilson. This might be the last week, people, the last opportunity for you to sign up for the tour we're taking of Literary England. I had a grand conception for the tour. We will travel to to great sites where guests are standing by ready to greet us. And we'll have a happy band of merry warriors, literary warriors of all, all of us, but warriors at rest, enjoying food and drink and one another's company, inspired by visiting the favored haunts of Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf and Charles Dickens and William Shakespeare and my personal favorite, Dr. Johnson. A week in May 2026 and I could not wait. Well, several of you have signed up and that's very encouraging, but I'm told that we're still a few people short, so we will reassess to see whether this is feasible. But in the meantime, if you are interested, now is the time to head on over to John Shores Travel and sign up. Or you can get there by historyofliterature.com where we have links to the itinerary. Emma and I cleared our schedule for that week and we will be there and we would love to have you join us too. I think it will be a week to remember. That's John Shors Travel S H O R S with no e or historyofliterature.com and click on the link to the Jack Wilson History of Literature podcast tour through Literary England. We'll have links in the show notes as well. So War and peace, number 13 on our list of greatest books of all time. We did an entire episode on Tolstoy years ago and another one just on this novel, War and Peace, only last year. So instead of repeating all of that, I would encourage you to listen to those episodes. But for now, for today, I'll bring you a review of Virginia Woolf's from 1917, in which she talks about what makes Tolstoy's genius so special. The review is of another book, the Cossacks, which was a collection of fiction detailing Tolstoy's time in the Caucasus. But there are passages where Woolf reflects on Tolstoy's genius, his greatness. That's one of the wonderful things as a podcaster about considering an author like Tolstoy with some authors, you can find a biographer or a scholar who has a nice phrase or something, a keen insight, a flash, a moment. But with Tolstoy, you can go to Henry James and Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner, Isaiah Berlin, Nabokov, you can get. You can get Dostoevsky and Chekhov to weigh in. I can't think of a serious literary figure who wasn't in awe of Tolstoy, sort of like Shakespeare in that sense. I can only think of one serious literary figure who's not in awe of Shakespeare, and that, of course, is Tolstoy himself. I wonder if. If Shakespeare would have returned the favor by denigrating the author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina. Hmm. Well, let's be real. Shakespeare probably wouldn't have talked about Tolstoy. He just would have stolen his plots and turned them into plays. Which seems fair enough. And I wish I could stop there, put a little. A little period on that paragraph. But I remember now that there was another major literary figure who criticized Tolstoy. Gustave Flaubert. Tolstoy repeats himself, Flaubert said, and he philosophizes two cardinal sins for the avatar of the quote, unquote. Perfect novel, Madame Bovary, where the writer disappears like a magician tossing flash powder, or in this case, perfect prose, into the air so he can make his escape. Tolstoy sometimes tosses flash powder. Other times he appears on stage by simple candlelight. And we see the presence of the magician as well. Or sometimes the magician just straight out talks to the audience. Talks to the audience directly. Here I am. Let me tell you what I think about this. That fer flare is taboo. Okay, time for Woolf. This appeared in the Times Literary Supplement as a review of the Cossacks in 1917. Woolf, where was she in life? She was as a novelist. She was herself kind of an embryo at this point. She had published the Voyage out so she could stake a claim as a novelist. But this was two years before her second novel and five years before her breakout novel, Jacob's Room. So she's considering Tolstoy, one suspects, as someone to admire, to learn from, maybe be intimidated by, but also to surpass, or maybe I should say to equal, by adapting prose and the novel to her own era, the way he exemplified his. Here's the review. Quote. It is pleasant to welcome Tolstoy's the Cossacks and Other Tales of the Caucasus to the world classics. The greatest of Russia's writers say Mr. And Mrs. Maude in their introduction. And when we read or reread these stories, how can we deny Tolstoy's right to the title? Of late years, both Dostoevsky and Chekhov have become famous in England, so that there has been certainly been less discussion and perhaps less reading of Tolstoy himself. Coming back to him after an interval, the shock of his genius seems to us quite surprising. In his own line, it is hard to imagine that he can ever be surpassed. For an English reader proud of the fiction of this country, there is even something humiliating in the comparison between such a story as the cossacks, published in 1863, and the novels which were being written at about the same time in England. As the lovable, immature work of children compared with the work of grown men, they appear to us. And it is still more strange to consider that while much of Thackeray and Dickens seems to us far away and obsolete, the story of Tolstoys reads as if it had been written a month or two ago. I'll skip ahead a little bit as she describes the story that's under review. And then she says, perhaps it is the richness of Tolstoy's genius that strikes us most in this story. Short though it is, nothing seems to escape him. The wonderful eye observes everything. The blue or the red of a child's frock, the way a horse shifts its tail, the action of a man trying to put his hands into pockets that have been sewn up. Every gesture seems to be received by him automatically and at once referred by his brain to some cause which reveals the most carefully hidden secrets of. Of human nature. We feel that we know his characters both by the way they choke and snooze, and by the way they feel about love and immortality and the most subtle questions of conduct. In the present selection of stories, all the work of youth and all laid in a wild country far from town civilization. He gives freer play than in the novels to his extraordinary keenness of physical sensation. We seem actually able to see the mountains, the young soldiers, the grapes, the Cossack girls, to feel the firmness of their substance and to see the bright colors with which the sun and the cold air have painted them. Nowhere, perhaps, has he written with greater zest of the excitement of sport and of the beauty of fine horses. Nowhere has he made us feel more acutely how fiercely desirable the world appears to the senses of a strong young man. Then she goes on to say, Tolstoy seems able to read the minds of different people as certainly as we count the buttons on their coats. But this feat never satisfies him. The knowledge is always passed through the brain of some Ol Kewan or Pierre or Levin who attempts to guess a further and more difficult riddle. The riddle which Tolstoy was still asking himself, we may be sure, when he died. And the fact that Tolstoy is thus seeking that there is always in the center of his stories some rather lonely figure to whom the surrounding world is never quite satisfactory, makes even his short stories entirely unlike other short stories. They do not shut with a snap like the stories of Maupassant and Merame. They go on indefinitely. It is by their continuous vein of thought that we remember them rather than by any incident. And thus we end by thinking again of the unlikeness between ourselves and the Russians, and by envying them that extraordinary union of extreme simplicity combined with the utmost subtlety which seems to mark both the educated Russian and and the peasant equally. They do not rival, as in the Comedy of Manners. But after reading Tolstoy, we always feel that we could sacrifice our skill in that direction for something of the profound psychology and superb sincerity of the Russian writers. End quote. Hmm. What a great review. The fact that Tolstoy is seeking. He can read minds, but this feat never satisfies him. It only leads to a further and more difficult riddle. That's what makes Tolstoy seem so wise. It's what led people to look to him as a kind of guru, almost a holy figure. Religion is all about explaining things that can't be explained, those further and more difficult riddles. It's not just that Tolstoy was so good at writing novels that turned him into a revered figure. It's what he was writing about. It's the questions he asked and how he asked them. You don't finish a Tolstoy novel and think, well, that's it. I can't improve on this. I might as well hang it up. You finish a Tolstoy novel and you can't wait for the next day to begin. David Denby has taken a concept introduced by one of Virginia Woolf's friends, Lytton Strachey, in his book Eminent Victorians. But as David and I will discuss, David's project is a little bit different. Denby comes not to bury, as Strachey did, but to praise. The overall project, though, still holds a biography of an era through an in depth look at four individuals. For Denby, it was Leonard Bernstein, Mel Brooks, Betty Frieden, and Norman Mailer. Although you'd think I'd have zeroed in on Norman Mailer, which I actually was prepared to do. I enjoyed the section on Mel Brooks so much that I mostly asked questions about that.

[Co-host/Interviewer]

But all four portraits in this book.

[Jack Wilson]

Eminent Jews are fascinating, and the era that they reflect is a fascinating one too. The era in America where prosperity increased, and thanks in large part to World War II and the horrors of the Holocaust, anti Semitism in America was fading. In literature, it's an era of Norman Mailer and Saul Bellow and Philip Roth and many, many others. In arts and entertainment, it runs from Sid Caesar all the way through Larry David. And as David Denby shows, individuals from this era were united by a common temperament, a devotion to their historical moment, their ability to impose themselves on that moment, and a commitment to being both Jewish and American. They weren't perfect, but they were perfectly suited for their times. David Denby after this hey everyone.

[Co-host/Interviewer]

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[Jack Wilson]

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[David Denby]

Oh, thank you. Very happy to be here.

[Co-host/Interviewer]

So the title Eminent Jews, I recognized as a nod to Lytton Strachey's book Eminent Victorians, which also covered three men and a woman from what was then a recent era. And Strachey famously wrote to Virginia Woolf in 1912 that the Victorians struck him as a set of mouthpieces, bungled hypocrites, and he wanted to skewer their pretensions. But you made clear that your project is something different. What were you setting out to explore?

[David Denby]

Right, Exactly. Strachey was concerned with hypocrisy, the Victorians who spoke nobly but acted awfully many times out of ignoble or selfish reasons. And so it was a kind of exposure. It's also very funny. Trent Russell read it in prison. He was in prison during World War I and he was laughing aloud in his cell and the warden came in and said to him, prisoners in the British prison system are not supposed to laugh that much. Anyway, that was Lytton Strachey. It was very amusing and it's a wicked book and my book is a celebratory book. So I played with the Strachey reference. But to reverse it, as you said, these four were not. They were the opposite of hypocrites. They were very much themselves, without fear in everything that they did, or almost everything they did. Everyone has secrets, of course, but they were sort of, so to speak, were personalities who came out of repression. And the previous generation of children of Russian and Eastern European immigrants were often very discreet in their behavior. They wanted to fit in. They wanted to be successful. Philip Roth said just in passing remark that, you know, the Jews were successful in the United States for 40 years. They went to bed sober. I don't know if that's true, but I remember my parents who were very gentle people, having great contempt for what they called shickers, meaning drinkers, male particularly. And the reason for the contempt was that they were not good family men. If you were an alcoholic, you didn't take care of your family. That was the basis of it. Anyway, these four brazenly themselves, and I want to extend the notion of eminence and not to great people in jurisprudence or scientific research, but closer to our own sensibility, closer to show business, to public life. So that's one reason for these four.

[Jack Wilson]

Yeah.

[Co-host/Interviewer]

Now, I read that Strachey started out with the idea of 12 profiles and then he ended up settling on four. Did you always know that you wanted to choose four people?

[David Denby]

I always wanted to choose four because it seemed the right amount of persons and it seemed doable, though in fact, it was very hard to write because this form of 30 to 35,000 words for each biography, and they are full scale. Biography.

[Co-host/Interviewer]

Yeah, right.

[David Denby]

You know, it's birth, it's struggles, it's ascent, it's decline, it's death.

[Jack Wilson]

Yeah, yeah.

[Co-host/Interviewer]

Each one could be their own slim volume.

[David Denby]

They could. And maybe that's a good publishing idea. Issue that pamphlets, Betty Friedan, you know, standing alone. It's a hard form because if you're writing a book about something, you throw in everything you think of that's relevant and then you edit it down. Or if you're writing a 5,000 word essay for a magazine, you know, you have to observe a certain economy of scale from the beginning. But in this, I didn't want to leave anything important out, so I kept going down roads which I then had to eliminate. If there's any art in this, it's the art of compression, of saying in the fewest number of words that without cheapening it, without simplifying it. That was my intent anyway.

[Co-host/Interviewer]

And there's maybe also a bit of an opportunity here with writing a group biography of this, with people who are kind of coming from the same era, where you can also kind of tell us about that era and show us the era from some different sides. And it really is almost like a biography of this time period as well as the four individuals.

[David Denby]

Well, that's lovely, that's beautifully said. I mean, these four didn't really know each other. I mean, it's not like biographies where they were all sitting in Concord, Massachusetts or something like that. I mean, they clinked glasses now and then at parties. Everyone drank in the artistic and intellectual bohemian world in the 50s in New York, 50s and 60s, I had the feeling that the drinking was extremely heavy. This was, you know, a little before the drug era. And it was a way of signaling one's membership in a kind of dissenting cohort in a time of considerable conformity, consumerism, anxiety, nothing compared to what we have now. But that's the way people felt in the 50s, so they didn't really know Each other. But I thought there were similarities of temperament produced by common background. And the idea was to find four people who matured after World War II and took advantage of new media and particularly the long playing record. You can't imagine Leonard Bernstein's career without the long playing record. Television. You can't imagine any of these Ford's careers without television.

[Co-host/Interviewer]

Right.

[David Denby]

Mass market paperbacks. Betty Friedan's the Feminine Mystique sold about 60,000 copies in hardcover in 1963, which is really not bad at all. She was very unhappy with the publisher. But in paperback, there were what's now gone. There were inexpensive paperbacks that were on kind of circular metal racks at the front of every drugstore, every supermarket. When I was a kid, you would go in and there would be maybe a couple of Shakespeare plays and a couple of, maybe, I don't know, John Steinbeck. And there was Betty Friedan. So she sold a million copies in the subsequent year. So anyway, and she got all. She hated to fly, and she flew all over the country. My point is that their ability to publicize what they were thinking and feeling and writing and performing and doing matured in a way after the war that gave them an enormous advantage. And then, as you suggested, it was obvious. You weren't supposed to say it out loud, but it was obvious that as an ethnic group, the American Jews were doing well. And not in big industries like oil or chemicals or railways or airways, or not in heavy industry, but certainly in the professions, in universities and teaching of all kinds, in entertainment of all kinds, and every kind of business, small businesses and so on, by the thousands and thousands. But Ira Katznelson, historian at Columbia, told me that until the late 90s, there was no academic research into this question of the success of Jews in America, because basically, Jews did not want to appear to be boasting, don't poke the bear. So it was better to be quiet, shush. Now, that's no longer true.

[Co-host/Interviewer]

But you draw the contrast between the Hollywood Jews in the 1930s and. And then those who came in this golden era after World War II. And really is the thing that connects these four in a way is what you refer to as assertiveness and this refusal to shrink back. So what is it about this particular time period? I think there are a lot of different factors. But what conditions made this assertiveness possible and desirable for these four?

[David Denby]

Yeah, well, first of all, just going back for a second. The Hollywood Jews, the moguls who ran the business, except for Darrell Zanuck at Warner's and then at Fox, the moguls were all Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. And they were constantly being attacked in the press for polluting America's youth. There was a censorship board that was set up in order to self police and so on. And they were particularly nervous that if they criticized Germany or Nazis or even mention them that they would be accused of of trying to get America into another war. So they kept the mention of Jews and Germans completely out of the movies until 1939. Confessions of a Nazi Spy, Warner Brothers with Edward G. Robinson up till then. So they were, I would say, cowardly. They were to a man extremely anti fascist in temperament. And privately they did all sorts of things. But anyway, that kind of anxiety disappeared after the war. There was for the horrors of the Holocaust became widely known. There was the anti Semitism which was widespread in the 30s and 40s. Even during the war it was very hard for Jewish immigrants to get into this country. We took more than anyone else, but we could have taken a lot more. The State Department, and this has been well documented, was very anti Semitic in the 30s and 40s. But after the war there was the reverse, a kind of philo Semitic atmosphere. It was, as I say, because Jews were perceived as part of the American fabric who were doing well and behaving on the whole quite well. And we're generalizing here a great deal. And were dominant in the entertainment intellectual professions. So like the New York intellectuals produced extraordinary magazines and literary essays and some fiction and poetry and so on. They had arrived and they felt comfortable for the first time during the long years of the diaspora. If you think of, I don't know, Spain and England and then later France, even after emancipation, Napoleon emancipated the Jews and Germany and Austria and so on. You could have a middle class professional career in 19th century Berlin and Budapest. But you were under all sorts of constraints. The attitude was that you were there on sufferance, that you can stay here, you can practice your religion, you can enter the professions, but you have to be very cautious about many things and observe this and that ban. And so the United States and in Israel, the Jews were no longer there on sufferance. I mean, they were welcome. And George Washington no less, wrote a letter in 1794 to the congregation in Newport, Rhode island, saying every man should feel safe. The stock of Abraham, its descendants should feel safe under their vine and fig trees. A very eloquent letter which I find very moving. Anyway, all of that came together, I think in the 50s. And my quest was how would American Jews behave How would Jews behave for good or for ill? And there's plenty of bad behavior in this book. I don't want you to think, or anyone to think that this is just a simple goody good celebration. On the contrary, how would they behave for good and for ill, if they enjoyed a kind of liberty they had never had anywhere before? Maybe in the ancient world, who knows? Right. But never in Europe before. And so. And that liberty, it seemed to me, peaked after the Second World War. So I thought of other people. There's Rich Richard Feynman, the physicist, but it's a great biography of him called Genius by James Glick. I thought of the great film critic Pauline Kael, who was a mentor of mine for a while, but I had written about her in the New Yorker. Anyway, there were other. In that time slot that I set up, born after the First World War, matured after the Second World War, there were other people. Saul Bellow was older, Philip Roth was younger. So I settled on these four.

[Jack Wilson]

Right, right. Okay.

[Co-host/Interviewer]

Well, let's take a quick break and then we'll come back and we'll talk.

[Jack Wilson]

About the Four with David Denby.

[Co-host/Interviewer]

Okay, we're back. So, David, let's look at the four individuals you chose. And let's start with Mel Brooks. And I was going to mention this when you had talked about how Lytton Strachey's book was very funny and was causing Bertrand Russell to laugh and so on. Your book is also very funny. These people are all such dynamic personalities, and there's so many anecdotes. And Mel Brooks is. It's hard to get through a paragraph without seeing something that he did which is kind of outrageous or funny. Just his sort of joie de vivre is always not far from the surface. But why did you choose Melbruck? Certainly there would have been a lot of other Jewish entertainers you could have chosen from this era, but what is it about him that makes him such a good exemplar of what you wanted to explore?

[David Denby]

Well, the outrageousness that you mentioned. I mean, you know, Woody Allen is very talented, but he's a very, totally different temperament. You know, neurotic and literary. And Mel comes out of burlesque and traditions of roughhouse and travesty going back to the Middle Ages, if not all the way back to ancient Greece. And it's. The body in burlesque is essentially exploding. Right. It's not a cautious body. It's not a contained body. And Mel and Norman Mailer, too, by the way, were both insistent on all of the organs of the body and what I can only call the effluvia of the emitted by the body. So. And there's that. And Mel is a great bringer of joy, as you said.

[Co-host/Interviewer]

Well, he jumps on the table, he slept, slides down the hallway, he's just sort of irrepressible.

[David Denby]

Irrepressible and a pain in the ass.

[Jack Wilson]

Yeah.

[David Denby]

I mean, I said he was the noisiest man in New York in the 1950s, which is, you know, really saying something. But the other thing is that his humor is much darker than many people realize. I mean, if you listen to his jokes and like the great ongoing sketch, the 2000 Year Old man that he did with Carl Reiner, which was just, you know, an audio only like this, there's a lot about death and suffering. And I started thinking about his attitude towards Jewish history and particularly the Nazis, of course. And so I couldn't stop thinking about two things. There's in the film that produces the musical number Springtime for Hitler in which a swishy SS officer walks down the steps followed by chorus girls, you know, with beer mugs in their hair and pasties on their naked breasts and so on. And he's ridiculing the Nazis by burying them in the cliches of Broadway production numbers. And it caused a certain. This was 1967. So there's a lot of talk about the Holocaust in the late 60s. That was when that word began to be used. There was a lot of upset with that. Even though people loved it and sang it and since has become like folk music. People sing it at Springtime for Hitler and Germany, you know, okay, we got the joke. And when I talked to him about it, I talked to him five or six times, spent a few hours with him. He. I said, were you saying something to the Jews in your audience? Like, you know, you've been through hell, get over it. I mean, the Nazis dead, you're alive, you're doing well in America. And at first he wouldn't cop to it. He said, no, no, no, I'm just an entertainer, you know, a very good one, mind you, but I'm just an entertainer, okay? But then I started thinking about a much more shocking sequence which is History of The World Part 1. The History of the World Part 1 is a series of sketches of atrocious behavior throughout history. It's very, very funny. It begins with Mel in Charlton Heston's red robes, you know, from the Ten Commandments. Holding.

[Co-host/Interviewer]

Holding the fifteen Commandments, right?

[David Denby]

He's holding three. Hero Israel I Come from God to give you his laws in these 15. And he unfortunately drops one of the tablet and tablets 10, 10 commando. That's how it begins. But then there's this extraordinary thing in it. The Inquisition. Another musical number. And l in a red cassock is Tokamada, the Grand Inquisitor. And there's, of course, boys of other monks with him. And the Jews are strung up on the walls and being tormented in all sorts of ways. And at a certain point, nuns enter and take off their habits, and underneath they're wearing white bathing suits, and they pull the Jews, who are all in black with black hats and paisas and so on into the water below the water. I mean, it is an image of Jewish humiliation, the likes of which it's hard to find comparison. So I take him more seriously than other people do.

[Co-host/Interviewer]

When you reviewed that, you were not on board.

[David Denby]

I panned it. Yes, you're quite right, in 1981 in New York Magazine. And when I saw him, I said, you know, I panned this movie. And he said, oh, I know. I mean, a lot of the rest of the movie is harmlessly bawdy and fun, but that thing is really a thrust in the vitals and. And it's very hard to know how to respond to it. And he did finally, after I pressed him on it, say, yes, okay, you're right. I was trying to say, get over it. Now. I don't want to put words in his mouth. After October 7, he might not say anything like that anymore. The whole situation has changed. But he was offering a message to the Jews among his audience. And his feeling is, you keep ridiculing Hitler. He has a black comb in his back pocket which he whips out from time to time when he's being interviewed or something and puts it under his nose and just starts screaming German gibberish. Double talk and German gibberish and Hitler style. It's an obsession he can't get away with. And I think it's a way of purging himself and purging the Jews of fear. That's how I interpret it. He's a remarkable man when you talk to him. The last time I talked to him, he was a mere 97, now 99. He's very precise, and he didn't read anything when he was in school, but I never went to college. I think he went for a night or two. But he's read a great deal and he's very precise, as I said. I said to him, how is it you manage always to Say what you want to say in the fewest possible words. And he said, when you're in the Catskills, as he was, and you're 16, and they say, you got three minutes, kid. Get out there. You have three minutes. You learn to be very. You learn to be very concise. So that's Mel. Long may he live. None of us wants him to die, which is, in a way, an unkind request to make of anyone. I mean, it's flattering and unkind at the same time. Time we wanted to live forever.

[Co-host/Interviewer]

Well, he also is an example of. Even though we've been talking about this. Sort of the grand themes of the era and the sort of social movements and the larger scale. He's also an example of someone who really is an individual who's formed by more localized things like parents and childhood circumstances. And, I mean, he grew up without his father. And you can kind of see some of that in him and his desire to make people laugh and to draw attention. And also his mother, Kitty, just sounds like a remarkable presence.

[David Denby]

Yes. His father died when Mel was 2. He has no memory of him. And it kills him. He can't see his face. And he's always. I think you put your finger on something. I mean, that he's. He wants to. It's the one person he can't entertain. So he has to entertain everyone. I mean, I know that's dollar book Freud, but still, it's very suggestive. Kitty had four sons. Mel was the youngest and worked in the garment district and even worked at night and, you know, got everyone to school and cooked for everyone. And in the winter, the. Mel was the last in bed. They slept on one bed, but not lengthwise, but across the bed. It's the only way to get four boys there. She would warm his clothes on the radiator and then under the sheet, undress him and dress him as she was singing to him. Is it any wonder he's still alive at 99?

[Jack Wilson]

Yeah.

[Co-host/Interviewer]

God. And that it enabled him to take these risks that he took when he was trying to break into show business or when he was, you know, going up on stage. He knew that there was someone who loved him. That he had been loved and he was loved.

[David Denby]

Absolutely. I mean, and he had an appeal. When he was starting out in the Catskills, and he was 16. And he would put on his suit and Hamburg and carry a suitcase and jump into the water while the ladies were slumbering after enormous lunch and say, business is terrible. I can't go on. And then the gentile Jews didn't swim and a lifeguard would fish him out. And they would say, the ladies would say to Melvin, you're terrible, but we love you. He had that.

[Co-host/Interviewer]

Okay, so I'm a little worried we're not going to be able to cover all four. And I want to make sure we cover Norman Mailer because we are on the History of Literature podcast here, so we can maybe circle back and talk about Betty Frieden and Leonard Bernstein at some point. But let's look at Norman Mailer. And you mentioned Saul Bellow, and I think a lot of people would consider him to be a more accomplished novelist than Mehler. But what makes Mailer a better fit for your book?

[David Denby]

Agree with the general assessment that Bellow was a greater novelist. Norman had problems with extensive plots. He was at his greatest. Well, his initial book, The World War II novel, the Naked and the Dead, I think is still regarded as the best World War II novel. And what it is, there's an incredible virtuoso stretch of about 150 pages when two army guys are carrying a wounded comrade out of the jungle on a stretcher. And what he got there was the extremes of male exhaustion, a kind of special state somewhere between exhaustion and death. That was what he was interested in, the outer edge of effort. And he had this whole morality of his own. He thought if he had experienced any impulse from the depths, you know, a passing thought, a dream or something like that, you don't go on the couch, which is what people of middle class background, particularly Jews, did in the 1950s and 60s. No, Norman said, you act it out to see what it's about and what it's made of. He plotted his life on a kind of graph, and the one axis was glory and the other was shame. And he took this as literally as the warriors in the Iliad and was extremely demanding on himself and on others and got into a lot of trouble, including one despicable act which haunted him his whole life, which was in a drunken party in 1960. He left the party at his house and went out on the street and got into fistfights and came back. And his second wife, Adele Morales, insulted him in a way that I. She recorded the insult herself in her own book. So I take it literally. I spent a lot of time trying to understand what she said and what set off an explosion in him. And he reveals it in his writings about other things, about a boxing match. Anyway, he stabbed her with a penknife and was very lucky, and she was very lucky. Not to have died. And believe it or not, when he got out of Bellevue for observation and she got patched together, she was there at the front door with their two little daughters. She wanted the marriage to continue. He was married to four women after that. This man had an enormous fascination for women. His biographer, Michael Lennon, told me that he would walk with Mailer in Paris when Mailer was in his 70s, and women would come up and take his hand. Young French women come up on the street and take his hand. All right, but that's neither here nor there. I mean, is he a great writer if he's not a great novelist? And the answer is yes. What he got was the undercurrents of the country, what was churning around in the unconscious, the under stream, as he was reporting on great public events. He was the matchless writer about conventions, starting at 1960, the JFK convention. That is classic piece of writing. And then he did one on the Goldwater Convention. 64. And then there's a book, Miami and the Siege of Chicago, which is about both conventions in 1968. These are American classics. There is no prose. I mean, you have to go back to Whitman's poetry to find prose as extraordinary. That was poetry, of course, but this had that kind of density and warmth and tactility. And he wrote a great book about the moonshot. And he wrote extraordinary book about the Rumble in the Jungle. Everyone remember the Rumble in the Jungle fight in Zaire in 1974. It's called the Fight. So when he could describe something that was ongoing, and sometimes he injected himself into it. Armies of the Night, which is another classic, which is about a march on the Pentagon at the height of the Vietnam War in 1967, October 1967, when it came out, it won every prize. And everyone speaking of Whitman compared it to Whitman. And he created himself as an actor in the drama. There was the guy writing the book, and then there was Mailer, who was there in Washington, making a fool of himself, acting badly, acting nobly. And he sort of created himself. He was saying, you know, who's doing all this recording, this observation and all of this nonfiction? Well, you know, there's a person doing it, and he's an actor, too, so let's make him real. And then in an extraordinary turnabout in the Executioner's Song, which I think is widely considered his greatest book, he took himself out altogether. It was about. Gary Gilmour was a lifetime convict who was finally released and received with a decent amount of warmth by family and friends in South Central Utah, and he killed two people, two men, for no reason that anyone could understand. It made no sense whatsoever. His family turned him in, and he was convicted. And at that point, we were not executing anyone. And he demanded execution by firing a squad. And it finally happened that way. And the ACLU and many liberal organizations were trying to get the execution overturned or at least stayed. And he said, no, I want to die this way. And Mailer became fascinated with this and spent eight months in Utah interviewing everyone. This was after Gary was dead and he turned out this extraordinary book, the Executioner Song, which is composed entirely of the voices of the different characters. Gary Gilmore, his girlfriend, the court officers, the people who died, every one. And there is no Mailer present, except he's present everywhere in the shaping of it. And in a way, it was an answer to Truman Capote's big hit In Cold Blood, which was also about two guys who murdered meaninglessly. Well, they wanted some money. The Clutter family and Kansas, a great bestseller. Mailer's book is a much superior literary creation. And this was a guy who had his hand on the American pulse for about years. And I mean, and women shudder at the sound of his name. But actually, when he was alive, he had a lot of women friends and a lot of women writers who supported him and thought he was great, including, most significantly, Joan Didion, who has praised him many times.

[Co-host/Interviewer]

Yeah, it was a good thought experiment for me to kind of think through, well, why is Mailer a better fit here than Saul Bellow? Because even though I've always considered Bellow to be an American writer, I've been very proud of him as a fellow American. And as I went to school in Chicago, and he was there, and he's inescapably part of Chicago in America, but also his sensibility, it's almost like he's a little above it in some sense. And Mailer seems like he's right in America, like Whitman or Melville or Twain. His project was America. He was fascinated by it and just had this juice for it. The way an individual's destiny is intertwined with a nation and the democratic experiment and the highs and lows and the way that it forms him, and he forms it. It's just impossible to imagine him, not in America or America of that era, existing without him.

[David Denby]

That was brilliant. I couldn't possibly have said it better, and I thank you. And, of course, leads to one thinking, oh, God, if only he were alive to write about Donald Trump. Because in some way, he was Donald Trump in some minor ways, and he would understand that kind of vaunting egotism and narcissism, and he would capture Trump better than anyone. No, you're absolutely right. I mean, his project, if you can use that awful word, was to link together the underground thoughts and desires and fears of the nation, as you put it, with the great public events, including feminism. He, for the record, Mailer was. Had no problem with mainstream feminism, equal pay for equal work. He came around on abortion, supported women's right to have an abortion. He didn't think they should carry a child they didn't want to have. What he objected to in an extraordinary magazine article which became a book called the Prisoner of Sex, it was all in Harper's Magazine. This was the heroic age of American journalism, when Mailer would take up an entire issue of Harper's, you know, someone else in the New Yorker. I mean, not anymore, of course. Anyway, the Prisoner of Sex is his diatribe against radical feminism. Not against Betty Friedan, by the way, and not against Gloria Steinem, who was actually a friend of his, Gloria Steinem, still alive, but against Kate Millet, who wrote a book called Sexual Politics, which was on the COVID of time magazine in 1970. He objected to their characterization of the family, which he totally believed in, despite all his philandering. He was very much a family man. And I've met the kids. There are nine of them. I know six of them pretty well, and let me tell you, they are okay. They are not lost. What he objected to is the radical feminist attack on the family as the prison house of Western society in which women were enslaved by their roles of childbearing, child care. He believed in the family and he believed in that. Sex was the kind of ultimate truth about two people, and he didn't want the interference of any kind of technology, including birth control. Just to show how consistent he was, he was against masturbation. Everything that's good in one goes up into your hand, he said about men, which outraged a lot of men who said, oh, God, there goes my life, you know. But he. Yes, and what he was against was the introduction of technology into sex, and in particular, how shall I put it? The expulsion of the penis from women's sexual enjoyment. The book Prisoner of Sex I characterized as rhetorically magnificent and morally idiotic. Yeah, because sex should arise from the earth, you know, Everything has to be transcendent, and you either grew as a human being or you failed as a human being. I mean, all this existential view of sex, whatever it is, will be left with a child to raise and he didn't take responsibility for that part of this transcendent transaction. But as an actual father, he was intermittent, putting it mildly. But he was very good and very loving and he insisted his children study hard. They all went to good schools, they all have good, interesting jobs. So it's a mixed bag about him. I mean, you can say, yeah, he's a philanderer, he's cheating on all his wives, including his last wife, Norris Church, who was an extraordinary woman, but at the same time, he was a family guy who was there. So I find it very hard to make any kind of blanket dismissal of it on the basis of his conduct. We don't have that much art in this country. I mean, are we going to give up on Woody Allen? Are we going to give up on the great conductor James Levine? Are we going to give up on Louis ck? I mean, you know, Shakespeare left his wife and children behind in stratford and spent 30 years in London. Tolstoy abandoned his wife Sonia, who had borne him, I think it's 13 children. And for God's sakes, copied War and peace to three times. Dickens abandoned his wife, who had borne him 11 children, I believe, and set up his girlfriend in a country house and denounced his wife in the London papers. I mean, the trash cans of the Upper west side are not lined with Shakespeare and Dickens books that have been cast out because of disgust. So let's be a little careful here. I mean, we don't have that much art in this country. And Mailer is a great writer and his reputation needs to be rehabilitated.

[Co-host/Interviewer]

Well, what I like about reading Mailer is I often am kind of scratching my head at what seems like some of the most intelligent but wrong headed thinking that you can imagine. But he's so passionate and he follows his convictions and he puts it all on the line and he lays himself out there and you feel like you're getting your money's worth with him, that whatever it is, he's not kind of watering down what he wants to say. Or he'll have his beliefs and he'll give them their full airing in as good a writing as he can summon forth at that moment. And it makes it kind of invigorating to read him even, because he's very enjoyable to disagree with as well as to agree with.

[David Denby]

Absolutely right. You can match wits with him. And he loved that. He didn't want passive readers. He liked combat and he was remarkably generous at times. His collected letters, which his biographer Michael Lennon has put together, one of the things that's remarkable about. Well, there's some literary letters to people like Diana Trilling, the critic, wife of Lionel Trilling and critic in her own right, that are as good literary letters as has ever been written in this country. But also sometimes to some struggling writer he had never heard of or never met, wrote him and asked for advice or complained or something. And he was remarkably generous. He wouldn't give up on people. And if he thought you had something, including the awful Jack Henry Abbott, like Gary Gilmore, a lifetime con and murderer. And Norman and other literary folk in New York lobbied the federal system to get him released. And then when he was released, like Gary Gilmore, he murdered a waiter in the East Village meaninglessly and went on the lam. And Mailer was left in a mortified state, facing the press and practically in tears, saying, haven't you ever tried to help anyone? And even after Jack Henry Abbott was captured and went back to prison, Mailer wouldn't give up on him. And he hated that Abbott was a Marxist Leninist. So what he sent him avoid things was some volumes of the Talmud that collected Jewish law, not the Old Testament, but the rabbinical literature created after the Old Testament or the Hebrew Bible. And Abbott was fascinated by it and became a kind of prison house rabbi, boasting to everyone that he knew more about Judaism than his literary friends in New York. And I think Mehler was amazed and appalled. But he was looking for, you know, the ultimate outsider. And the third one, I call them the Lost Boys, was of course, Lee Harvey Oswald. The whole mystery of who the hell was he and how did this nobody manage to fell the most powerful man on earth. And mail and his buddy Lawrence Schiller went to Russia. The KGB files had opened. This was after the fall of communism. And he reconstructed in Oswald's tale a book that no one, as I, as far as I can tell but me, has read. And the first half of it, which is about Lee Harvey Oswald and his wife, his Russian wife, Marina in Russia, is absolutely extraordinary. I mean, it's a complete recreation based on those files, based on things that they said and did of what their lives were like in the dreary Soviet Union of 1958, 59, whenever Harvey Oswald was there. But the problem was he couldn't stop writing. So he got them back to the United States in the early 60s and he kept on going because he was trying to solve the riddle of, you know, who actually killed Kennedy if it wasn't Lee Harvey Oswald. And he wound up rewriting the Warren Commission Report. So the second half of the book, although brilliantly told, is an extraordinary letdown. But my general point was he was obsessed with the nonconformist who was so far outside of society that he becomes a Christian criminal. So there was Jack Henry Abbott and Gary Gilmore and Lee Harvey Oswald, all fatherless men, all products of the American flux, the chaos. And for Mailer, his task was to build them into something that mattered.

[Co-host/Interviewer]

Well, your chapters all have subtitles with an end.

[Jack Wilson]

We have Mel Brooks and the End.

[Co-host/Interviewer]

Of Self pity, which we've kind of touched upon here when we talked about his sketches, like the Inquisition and Springtime for Hitler. There's Betty Frieden and the end of subservience. Norman Mailer is the end of shame. And Leonard Bernstein, who we haven't talked about too much, is the end of apprenticeship.

[Jack Wilson]

And even though they're all an ending.

[Co-host/Interviewer]

A discerning reader might observe that the endings are of negative elements. Self pity and subservience and shame and apprenticeship. Things that might hold you back. So it's almost like these are four beginnings as well.

[Jack Wilson]

Do you think though that we're.

[Co-host/Interviewer]

I mean, is this era continuing?

[Jack Wilson]

I mean, another quote you have is that America poured into them, these four, and they, as Jews poured into America, a happy intermingling made possible by freedoms that Jews had never known before.

[Co-host/Interviewer]

Four, which is really the America I grew up in. And I'm not sure it's the one that we're passing along to my teenage sons.

[Jack Wilson]

Is it no longer possible to do what these four did? Or do you think that we're continuing.

[Co-host/Interviewer]

That they've paved the way and started something, that we're now on a trajectory where it is possible?

[David Denby]

I would hate to think it's no longer possible and I don't believe it. I think that Norman and Mel and Betty certainly that the Feminine Mystique, which came out in 1963, not that she was the only feminist around town, but that book had an enormous effect. Even people who didn't read it or just heard about it. Oh, there's a series of interlocking ideologies which condemn women to second class citizenship. Their only proper role is at home having children, taking care of children, buying things for the home. The notion that that existed as an ironclad ideology in many parts of the country, that was a shocker. So she was a liberator, she lost her way. And that's part of what the chapter is about. It's about a rise and then kind of fall. In Betty's case, I mean, so did these people have a liberating effect. I mean, in general, I think Mel, you can see the comedians. Larry David, for instance, is unimaginable with that. Mel Brooks, right?

[Co-host/Interviewer]

Yeah, yeah.

[David Denby]

Mailer's Heirs, I think Joan Didion, I mentioned, was 1. Don DeLillo, extraordinary fiction writer, is certainly one other journalist who of lesser talent. But the creating oneself as a character and dissolving the notion of impartial observer has had an enormous effect on certain kinds of narrative journalism. And Lenny was. I said, the end of apprenticeship because he wanted very much to bring American music to the world stage and American musicianship to the world stage. And there's a lot of skepticism about him at first. His very bodily expressive way of conducting upset a lot of people, particularly the German Jews who were writing music criticism in New York in the late 50s and 60s. But he was a great beloved figure in Vienna, the center of classical tradition and all over the world. And he wanted the American achievements in music. The classical achievements were sort of minor. There were Charles Ives and Aaron Copland, and there were many people who then followed him. But our great native glories were show music and jazz. And he very much, you know, wanted Europeans to respect that, admire it, love it, and he embodied it. And the tragedy was that he. Well, he wrote the four great shows before he took over the New York Philharmonic in 1958, on the town, Wonderful Town, Candide and West side Story, and then never completed another successful show. But he wrote a lot of classical music, some of which is very good. There's the Serenade for violin and strings. There's the Kaddish Symphony Number three. There's a number of ballets and so on. The movie score for on the Waterfront, the great Elia Kazan movie with Marlon Brando and Eva Marie Saint. I think he had a considerable influence. He was a great teacher. He taught all the time. He taught on the podium. He was teaching the orchestra. Not just in rehearsal, but in performance. He was teaching the audience, by, so to speak, acting out the music in a kind of parallel body form to the emotional narrative of the music itself. He taught in music classes. He taught at Brandeis, he taught in lectures. He taught in bed with young men. I mean, he never slept. He just kept on going until he. His magnificent body wore itself out.

[Co-host/Interviewer]

Well, all four of these profiles are completely fascinating. I highly recommend the book, which is called Eminent Jews. Bernstein, Brooks Frieden, Mailer, David Denby. Thank you so much for joining me on the history of literature.

[David Denby]

Thank you so much. And can I say, I've been interviewed many times, and this was by far the best one.

[Co-host/Interviewer]

Oh well, thank you.

[David Denby]

So your questions and your commentary were all first rate.

[Co-host/Interviewer]

There we go. That's going to do it for this episode of the History of Literature.

[Jack Wilson]

My thanks to David Denby for being here and for those kind words at the end.

[Co-host/Interviewer]

And my thanks to Virginia Woolf for.

[Jack Wilson]

Doing some of the heavy lifting when it came to Leo Tolstoy and War and Peace. We will have Emily Bronte's desk drawer.

[Co-host/Interviewer]

Coming up soon and a quick trip down to Chile. And then we go all October with.

[Jack Wilson]

Edgar Allan and Mary Shelley and maybe a few more goblins and monsters as well. Wild Jane Austen is waiting in the wings and Catherine Mansfield and Ernest Hemingway and a horrible poet, maybe the worst.

[Co-host/Interviewer]

One you've ever heard and lots more besides. And don't forget, if you can swing.

[Jack Wilson]

It, we have a tour of Literary England that has a slot open just for you. That's John Shore's Travel or the History of Literature Dot com.

[Co-host/Interviewer]

I'm Jack Wilson.

[Jack Wilson]

Thank you for listening and we'll see you next time.

[Alan Sisto]

The town of Milton may seem normal at first glance, but the shadows are cursed and the expansive woods surrounding town are forbidden. They call it the void and nobody comes back alive.

[David Denby]

You're headed straight for the void.

[Alan Sisto]

Milton lives suspended in time, trapped by a darkness that seems to be creeping closer and closer.

[Co-host/Interviewer]

It's safe.

[David Denby]

The void is kept at bay.

[Jack Wilson]

Is it though?

[Alan Sisto]

Join three friends as they embark on an epic journey into the heart of darkness. The Void Wherever you get your podcasts.

[David Denby]

This is just the beginning.

[Jonathan F.P. Rose]

What does it mean to live for the common good? Introducing the Garrison Institute Presents the Common Good, the brand new podcast from the Garrison Institute, a leading, not for profit organization exploring the intersection of contemplation and engaged action in the world. Hosted by me, Jonathan F.P. rose, a co founder of the Garrison Institute, the series dives into the threads that bind us all. First, you'll discover the interdependent nature of life with environmental entrepreneur Paul Hawken and trailblazing plant intelligence researcher Monica Gagliano. Next, we unlock the mysteries of the mind with renowned psychiatrist Dan Siegel and Pulitzer Prize winning author Siddhartha Mukherjee. Finally, we experience compassion in action with social justice activist Conda Mason and environmental leader Bill McKibben. We invite you to listen, reflect and join us in acting for the common good. Follow the Garrison Institute presents the Common Good on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you are. Listening now.