David Denby, EMINENT JEWS: Bernstein, Brooks, Friedan, Mailer
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[0:44]David Denby is the author of eminent Jews Bernstein Brooks, Frieden, Mailer.
[0:50]David Denby is the New York Times bestselling author, also, of great books.
[0:55]His other books include American Secker and Lit Up.
[0:58]He was a film critic for New York Magazine and the New Yorker, where he is now a staff
[1:03]writer.
[1:04]His essays have appeared in the New Republic and The Atlantic.
[1:07]He lives in New York City with his wife, novelist Susan Reger.
[1:10]Welcome, David.
[1:11]Thank you so much for coming on to talk about eminent Jews Bernstein, Bernstein, or Bernstein.
[1:17]I always get it wrong.
[1:18]Bernstein, yeah.
[1:19]Bernstein, yeah.
[1:20]Bernstein Brooks, Frieden, and Mailer.
[1:23]I mean, I watched the movie and everything.
[1:25]I should know this about Leonard Burns.
[1:27]I mean, the one with Bradley Cooper.
[1:28]I mean, that's not the only reason why I should know it, but I don't know.
[1:32]Welcome.
[1:33]Thank you.
[1:34]Thank you.
[1:35]I think Mike Sprou is pretty good, by the way.
[1:37]A lot of people didn't like it, because oh, it didn't have more about his Broadway career,
[1:43]or more about his Jewishness.
[1:45]But when you make a biopic, I learned this through many years of film criticism.
[1:50]You have to have a plot.
[1:52]And if you're as good as Leonard Bernstein and you were good at five or six things, you're
[1:55]just going to go swinging from one thing to another.
[1:58]There are many documentaries about him that do that.
[2:01]And what Brad Cooper decided was, we'll tell a family story.
[2:05]That's what we'll do.
[2:06]And I thought it was very moving.
[2:07]And other parts of his life were sort of stuck in the sides.
[2:11]You saw him conducting a lot.
[2:14]That's true.
[2:15]Yeah.
[2:16]I loved that movie, to be honest.
[2:17]Oh, good.
[2:18]And with his wife.
[2:19]Oh, my gosh.
[2:20]Anyway, off track.
[2:22]But of course, somehow I find myself talking about film with you.
[2:26]Wait, start off.
[2:26]I want you to talk about this book.
[2:28]But give a little background about your film, critic career, and all of that.
[2:31]Because it's quite unique.
[2:33]Oh, I was a graduate student at Stanford
[2:36]and the great movie critic Paul and Kale plucked me out of nowhere as Ville.
[2:40]And I became one of her disciples and suddenly I had a job.
[2:45]And then she threw me out after five or six years said, you don't have a kid.
[2:50]This is not for you.
[2:51]And that was the first lucky thing that happened was that she took an interest
[2:55]in this sort of moldy graduate student.
[2:57]And the second great thing that happened was she threw me out.
[3:00]Because I never would have written half of what I've written.
[3:03]I wrote a book about Columbia's Western Classics course.
[3:07]I've written a lot of stuff that's nothing to do with movies.
[3:10]But I was a critic for 45 years, including 20 at New York magazine
[3:16]and 16 at the New Yorker going on and off with Anthony Lane
[3:20]until about 10 years ago.
[3:21]When they said enough, Zibi, I just sat on my couch and I read.
[3:27]I didn't want to see any movie at all.
[3:29]Oh, not even Casablanca.
[3:31]Not even Casablanca.
[3:34]I just sat there reading Dickens and Mark Twain.
[3:37]And anyway, now I'm drifting back into, I loved Anora.
[3:42]Yeah, I think it's hilarious.
[3:44]So I want to see the Bob Dylan movie.
[3:46]And I'm sort of swinging back into movie going again.
[3:49]I won't tell anyone that you're starting to tread into the movie universe.
[3:55]You can quietly do it and keep it a secret.
[3:57]Yeah, exactly.
[3:59]It's become a kind of private communion with you in the screen.
[4:03]What should be?
[4:04]I like going to the theater.
[4:05]The old magic was you went with strangers, right?
[4:09]And it was a kind of religious, everyone felt the same thing at the same time.
[4:14]And if you look at people as they come streaming out of a movie theater,
[4:18]they have this kind of glazed look, right?
[4:21]They're not quite, they don't want to yield up that image and go back to life.
[4:28]And you can see their eyes when they come out into the street.
[4:31]They're still playing the movie and they're still held, even a bad movie.
[4:36]Oh, I'm, you know, beginning to enjoy that again.
[4:39]And so glad, glad that, glad you're going back to what you obviously
[4:44]love.
[4:45]And of course, writing to and this book in particular, and then in Jews.
[4:50]So you profiled four different notables.
[4:53]Why these?
[4:54]How did you pick?
[4:55]How did you narrow it down?
[4:56]And why these four?
[4:57]And did you ever consider like just writing a book about normal mailer or just writing
[5:01]a book about any of them individually?
[5:04]Like why put all four together?
[5:06]Well, they certainly each one deserve a book of their own and there are very good books
[5:11]about mailer and Leonard Bernstein.
[5:14]But I thought it would, these four form a kind of moment in time for me.
[5:19]They were born after the First World War and they emerged after the Second World War by
[5:24]means of their own gifts and temperament.
[5:28]And also because it was a time that media were exploding.
[5:32]So if you just look at 1948, the long-playing record becomes a mass medium and television
[5:38]becomes a mass medium.
[5:40]And then a few years later, the mass market paperback, Betty Friedan's book, The Feminine
[5:47]Mystique, which sort of kicked off second wave feminism, not that she was the only feminist
[5:52]around in the early 60s.
[5:53]She wasn't.
[5:54]But this was the one.
[5:55]It sold about 60,000 copies in hardcover, which is good in 1963.
[6:00]I mean, I would take that.
[6:02]Exactly.
[6:03]I'll take 50,000 in hardcover, but anyway, go on.
[6:05]Well, we'll take it right exactly.
[6:07]But then it went into mass market paperback.
[6:09]And you remember when we were kids, well, maybe when I was a kid, there were those metal
[6:14]circular rags.
[6:15]I remember that very well.
[6:16]Yes.
[6:17]Right.
[6:18]And it would have shakers, tragedies and maybe, I don't know, were novel by Pearl
[6:21]Buck.
[6:22]Exactly.
[6:23]And that's where Betty went and she sold 1,300,000 copies in mass.
[6:29]So in other words, these people very gifted, a little crazy, very egotistical, but also
[6:35]very generous at the same time, which is the paradox I spend a lot of time working on,
[6:40]entered into the media and reached millions of people in a way that others would not have.
[6:46]Also, I thought this was a period of when Jews were not afraid.
[6:52]Mel Brooks was walking across 57th Street near Carnegie Hall.
[6:57]And he's the sketch writer for Sid Caesar, the great, your show of shows that was on
[7:03]in the early 50s.
[7:05]And his colleagues are with him from the show.
[7:08]And three nuns were approaching across 57th Street.
[7:13]And the guy in his left says, no, Mel, no, he said, what?
[7:17]And the other guy on his right who was Neil Simons, famous playwright eventually, he said,
[7:23]what is wrong with you?
[7:24]He's nothing.
[7:25]Nothing's wrong with me.
[7:26]The three nuns come up close, they're sketch writers for Sid Caesar, come up close.
[7:31]And he says, take off those customs, the nuns sketch is out.
[7:39]I said to him, how do they react?
[7:42]He said, they hit the ground.
[7:44]OK, one of the very brief anecdote Leonard Bernstein is in Vienna with the great Vienna
[7:49]Philharmonic in 1972.
[7:52]And he's teaching them their own music, Marlors 5th Symphony.
[7:56]Marlors had been head of the state opera and the conductor of the Philharmonic.
[8:00]He played some of his fantastic symphonies with them.
[8:04]He was a Jew, he was, you know, banned from 19th, from the honorless 1938 to 1945.
[8:11]And they had played some of his music after the war.
[8:13]But they didn't know it.
[8:15]They didn't love it.
[8:16]And he heard grumblings from the ranks, chica music, we won't translate this.
[8:21]This is a family network, right?
[8:24]And he was shocked.
[8:25]This was their own music.
[8:26]And he had to teach it to them.
[8:28]So my point is, in those two cases that I could give you, you know, cases for the other
[8:33]two, was, I don't, I don't mean to say that, you know, being tough with Gentiles, some sort
[8:39]of Jewish virtue, it is not, of course.
[8:43]They were not afraid of being punished.
[8:46]They were not afraid.
[8:47]And I thought, OK, that means something, we're talking about the 60s in the United States
[8:52]and also overseas.
[8:53]This is an American Jew from provincial Boston teaching the great Vienna Philharmonic
[8:58]had to play their own music.
[9:00]I mean, it's rather extraordinary.
[9:02]And then he went on to have an incredible career as a conductor as well as a composer
[9:06]and a pianist, a writer and a lover and a teacher and, you know, on a non-lenny.
[9:13]So I thought, this was a period after the war, anti-Semitism had gone down.
[9:18]I mean, we don't have to say too often it's a kind of foul underground stream that pops
[9:24]up again as at the current moment.
[9:27]We've got it popping up again.
[9:28]But after the war, I mean, it was horror over the Holocaust and it was obvious that American
[9:34]Jews were doing well financially except the Jews didn't want to say so.
[9:39]Shush.
[9:42]Don't poke the bear, right?
[9:43]It wasn't until the late 90s, Zibi, that scholarship, like sociology and economic history
[9:50]caught up with the fact that the Jews had done really well.
[9:53]the working class by 1950 had diminished to like 10%.
[9:58]I mean, it was in the middle.
[10:00]an upper and middle class and upper and upper and middle class.
[10:03]And, you know, because the enormous number of people went into the professions, not into oil or rail roads, right or steel, not those professions,
[10:14]but certain parts of investment banking, of course, and every kind of manufacture of clothing, retail, and loiring, doctoring, you name it.
[10:25]So, there was that, and then there was a powerful group of intellectuals in New York, the so-called New York intellectuals who were setting literary standards.
[10:34]So, a whole bunch of things that suggested that Jews had really enjoyed a kind of success and liberty that, in my reading of history, they had never had anywhere else before.
[10:50]So, that was how, if you were completely free in a way you had never been before, for good and for ill, this is, I don't ignore their terrible faults, for good and for ill, how would you behave as an American Jew?
[11:05]That was the idea of the book.
[11:07]And I love it. I love that you're like, my story is remarkable and how unremarkable it is. I was just a kid from Park Avenue that moved to West End Avenue.
[11:16]That's a New York joke, but I think I'm here. I'm here. I'm here for it.
[11:21]Right.
[11:23]You know, I found so much of Mel Brooks' story interesting because I didn't really know as much about his life as I knew about some of the others.
[11:29]And, you know, one thing that you point out is his use, his ownership, taking ownership of the word Jew, that before it could be, you know, Jewish was sort of the more I think you called it, the more anodine way to say it.
[11:42]And Jew is like, you know, something that, you know, hit to the core. But by taking ownership of the word and by Mel Brooks saying like, you know, I'm a short Jew from whatever.
[11:52]And like, you know, actually I'm trapped and I was there. All the funny things I can't even do it. That was terrible.
[11:58]But anyway, his use of this word, how it changed things too. Why don't you speak about that for a sec?
[12:03]And he told, he said to Johnny Carson, it was around 1980. I mean, it was very famous. He said, this is all a big fraud. Right?
[12:11]I was born five foot 11 inches. Perfect straight nose blonde hair. And I went into, I think he's at Mount Sinai actually. And they knocked the stuff things out of me.
[12:25]And they shortened my legs by two two inches and they broadened my nose and they brought my voice down.
[12:31]What you were just saying, because I wanted to be a Jew comic. Yes, Jew.
[12:36]I didn't say a Jewish comic. He wanted a branded, you know, and it's just a quirk of the language.
[12:42]What you were just saying, Jewish just seems like descriptive, you know, and neutral Jew still has some power.
[12:52]It's like a brand. It's still stortles. And for the rest of his life, Zibi, the word Jew popped out of him, like candy from a gumball machine.
[13:03]Whenever he could say it, he would say it. And Mel, he's still alive, of course. And I got a note from him, by the way. He said, he said, you got most of it right.
[13:16]I'm taking that as a semi compliment. He did something, I mean, a lot of his jokes are about death.
[13:23]I mean, if you look through his kind of humor, I mean, it's an expression of bodily life, you know, in the body and all of its joys and all of its humiliations, everything.
[13:36]We don't need to enumerate, but everything that the body does in it. He was saying, I'm alive. You try to kill all of us. You didn't do it. We're still alive.
[13:45]To the point where he could make fun in his movies of these atrocities, you know, springtime for Hitler and the producers, which in 1967 caused a lot of shock.
[13:56]And then even more, shocking, was the Inquisition, another musical number. This one from History of the World Part 1.
[14:05]The city, I panned that movie in New York magazine.
[14:08]No.
[14:09]Yes, and he remembered.
[14:11]Oh, no.
[14:12]Yes.
[14:13]And I now think that number. I mean, it's part of a whole bunch of sketches in that movie and some of it is hilariously funny.
[14:20]But there he is as Turkramada, the grand inquisitor in a red casket with singing and dancing monks and Jews strung up on the walls and being tormented in various awful ways.
[14:32]And I said to him, we're making a message here to the Jews like your life, they're dead, get over it, get over it.
[14:41]And now I don't want to put words in his mouth and I don't know that he would say that since October 7th, but we're talking about 40 years ago, that movie.
[14:49]I thought he was saying, he's asserting, we have survived.
[14:55]No.
[14:56]We have survived.
[14:58]And so I can revive these Jew killers, Hitler, Turkramada, in order to kill them again with humor.
[15:05]And so I take him a little more seriously than without, I hope, killing the fun because, of course, mainly he's extremely funny, but he's also a kind of critic of manners.
[15:16]In his way, all those old West movies, when they went out there in the plains for nights and had dinners of beans, what happened then?
[15:28]I mean, certain noises emerge which has given five generations, four generations of teenagers, a great, great thrill.
[15:39]I mean, he's the critic of hypocrisy, of false appearances, of false gentility.
[15:47]He's very Russian.
[15:48]He kept telling me I had to read the Russian classic.
[15:50]I mean, he had no education at all.
[15:52]He just ran out of class and got flacked on the head as he was leaving.
[15:56]But he became a great reader.
[15:58]And when you talk to him, even in his little late 90s, he's very precise.
[16:05]And I said, well, how do you always do that?
[16:08]You say exactly what you want to say in the fewest number of words.
[16:11]And you said, look, you're a kid in the cat skills.
[16:14]You've got three minutes out there.
[16:16]You have to be, you know, can't waste words.
[16:21]But then he also said, not at that moment, but at another moment, that you can tell an amateur comic because he rushes to the punchline.
[16:29]You have to learn when to delay or even go off the beat.
[16:33]So those two things, on the one hand, concise, on the other hand, don't rush what you have to say.
[16:39]Build a little suspense.
[16:41]Maybe we can all learn from Mel Brooks. This is great.
[16:44]I think he's one of a kind. It's pretty hard to learn from a genius.
[16:49]That's the problem.
[16:51]So how do you feel, I mean, you know, to our discussion of the word, Joe,
[16:55]you named it eminent Jews. So you're using the power of the word, even in the title here.
[16:59]And of course, this is coming out post October 7th.
[17:01]How do you feel about, you know, since October 7th or maybe it made just how are you feeling about being Jewish yourself coming out with this type of book now?
[17:11]And just tell me more about that.
[17:13]I feel that if this book has a message and it certainly didn't begin that way because I started it.
[17:19]I don't know.
[17:20]Sometimes doing the Korean war, you know, but a long time ago.
[17:24]And if there's a message, it is be not afraid.
[17:28]Be not afraid.
[17:30]I don't have to tell you that, but everyone needs to hit Jews, need to hear that.
[17:34]Get together in groups.
[17:35]Talk over what's happening. What Donald Trump is doing.
[17:38]What's happening to the universities. What's happening to the things that you love.
[17:41]Get together, be not afraid and speak up.
[17:44]So that's, I mean, you know, how would they all respond to this moment?
[17:50]And Marilyn Mayer would have written descriptions of Donald Trump's inner life and lack of inner life in a way that would have been just overwhelming as pros.
[17:59]Betty would have hated the fact that the white Christian male has now been reasserted as the central figure for all humanity.
[18:08]Right?
[18:09]So Lenny would have made music.
[18:11]He would have made speeches too. He made too many speeches.
[18:14]But basically, he would have made music because he thought music creates souls. Music creates humanity.
[18:21]And he conducted everywhere.
[18:24]And, you know, that West Side Story is, it's put on by Japanese eight-year-olds.
[18:30]I mean, it's close. I'm not joking.
[18:32]I know. I know you're not.
[18:34]Jamie Bernstein, his daughter, says it's particularly in 2018, which was the centenary.
[18:41]It's universe as universal as any American artwork is.
[18:45]And I mean, it resonates everywhere.
[18:48]So he would, in this moment, he would have continued to make music certainly.
[18:53]But they all would have, and Mel would have been just disgusted by Donald Trump and would have created some, you know, Travis of the Trump administration that I'm sure would have been great.
[19:05]So they would have responded.
[19:07]Each in his own way, in his own genius, I think, and say, be not afraid.
[19:13]And are you afraid?
[19:14]I'm concerned.
[19:16]I think Trump's using antisemitism on the campuses, the way of, you know, denying the great universities the federal funding that's been coming very successfully since the end of World War II.
[19:29]That that's a pretense.
[19:32]And the Jews are being set up as the heavies because there are a lot of people suffering.
[19:36]And they keep claiming, oh, we're doing this to combat antisemitism.
[19:39]I don't think he gives a damn about antisemitism.
[19:42]I mean, he invites Holocaust deniers to his dinner table in Mar-a-Lago.
[19:46]He makes vaguely antisemitic jokes.
[19:48]This is all about crushing liberal civilization.
[19:52]And starting with the universities.
[19:54]Are you afraid to go on the road with a book like this at this current time?
[19:58]I'm not.
[19:59]I mean, I don't-
[20:00]Nothing nasty has come my way. I mean, it's only been out of week, but I'm I'm not at the moment
[20:07]But let's check back again in six months
[20:10]So I mean, yes cautious
[20:13]Yes, where he yes, that's a kind of Jewish characteristic in any case, but
[20:20]No, I don't I don't think I'm afraid and I'm sort of leading with my with the noses if you look look at the cover
[20:26]There are some people those are David Levine
[20:29]I mean
[20:30]caricatures that were all in the in the New York Review of books a Jewish artist to Jewish editors
[20:35]The way they were saying is we can have fun with ourselves with cliches about ourselves
[20:40]We're not afraid and some people have said oh, I don't like those you know those those
[20:46]But they're caricatures. They're not photographs. And yeah, everyone who got caricatured by David Levine
[20:53]But these have a particular you know fun aspect to them. I think
[20:59]Suggest that the editors and the writer were not afraid and this was in the 60s and 70s when those pictures were drawn
[21:07]Amazing. Well, David. Thank you so much. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for discussing and thanks for
[21:13]empowering other Jews to feel that they can speak out. Thank you. Well, let me just say what you do is very important and
[21:21]Keep on going. It's very important. The you know this kind of world that you've created is very very seriously important
[21:29]So thank you. Okay. Thank you. I appreciate it
[21:33]Okay, see you next time
[21:36]Hello next time
[21:38]Thank you. Bye. Thank you for listening to totally booked with Zibi formerly momstone have time to read books
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