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

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).

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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 |

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.

Recommended Resource:

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

For Further Listening:

• Previous episodes on Tolstoy and War and Peace