Behind four of Americas most Eminent Jews

If you were going to sum up the post-war American Jewish experience, who would you pick as the age’s great exemplars? The choices would clearly be dizzying. In film there’s everyone from Woody Allen to Steven Spielberg to Stanley Kubrick.In literature, there’s Saul Bellow, Philip Roth and Bernard Malamud.

In music, there was Bob Dylan, Barbra Streisand, Irving Berlin — well, if we’re going to get into musical theater, we could be here a while ..

.New Yorker writer David Denby has come up with four names to essentially fashion a group biography around.He picked Mel Brooks, Betty Friedan, Norman Mailer, and Leonard Bernstein, and the book he produced is called “Eminent Jews.”The title is a deliberate (and bold) wink to Lytton Strachey’s landmark 1918 book “Eminent Victorians,” which chronicled the lives of Henry Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Dr.

Thomas Arnold, and Major-General Charles George Gordon (the British soldier better known as “Chinese Gordon”).But where Strachey offers a glimpse of an age across a vast landscape of religion, war, and education, Denby’s quartet had more modest reach: New York (with a little LA) and its culture.Mailer’s profile is the most emblematic of the quartet’s impact on contemporary culture.The writer was at once the kid from Brooklyn who went to Harvard at 16; was sent to the Pacific during World War II; became a national celebrity at 25 when he penned “The Naked and the Dead” (which was probably as much a curse as a blessing); ran for mayor of New York; stabbed one of his wives; fathered some untold number of children (one of whom I went to grade school with) and became one of the best journalists/sages of his age.

While much of his fiction now feels dated, there are few greater pleasures than “The Executioner’s Song” or “The Armies of the Night.”But despite Denby’s best efforts to declaim otherwise, the Jewish part of Mailer was never the central thing.Mailer was more a fi...