Has David Denby written about an American Jewish golden age precisely at the moment it is ending?

In his new book “Eminent Jews,” Denby celebrates four leading Jewish cultural figures who emerged in the middle of the 20th century: Mel Brooks, Betty Friedan, Norman Mailer and Leonard Bernstein. All four were born after World War I and came of age after World War II; all four were secular Jews who took full advantage of the prosperity, tolerance, ambition and explosion of new media that helped turn their era into what the historian Yuri Slezkine calls the “Jewish century.”

Part biographer, part cultural critic, Denby calls the book a “group portrait of unruly Jews living in freedom.” Whether it was Brooks demolishing notions of good taste with a mocking musical about Hitler, or Bernstein sternly lecturing the Vienna Philharmonic for not appreciating Austria’s native son, the Jewish-born composer Gustav Mahler, Denby describes how his subjects overcame centuries of Jewish insecurity to assert themselves as society’s prophets, scolds, satirists and teachers.

“This is what it was like for Jews to express themselves with the degree of freedom, for good or for ill, that they never had before,” Denby, the longtime film critic for New York Magazine and later The New Yorker, said in an interview.

Join us for an online conversation with David Denby May 28 at 7 p.m. ET. Register here.

Hanging over each of the profiles, however, is the question of whether the American Jewish moment has waned. In an epilogue, Denby writes, “There was a period in the fifties, sixties, and seventies when American culture seemed almost Jewish.” Contrast that with his preface, in which he warns about resurgent antisemitism and the right’s flirtation with autocracy: “The death of democracy would almost certainly mean trouble for the Jews (as well as for everyone else), a minority protected in America by laws, customs, and sentiment.”

From the Ivy Leagues to publishing to the national discourse, others are lamenting that a period of astounding Jewish influence and physical and emotional security has come and gone.

Denby, 81, himself came of age when all four of his subjects were at the peak of their fame and influence. As a teenager he attended a performance of a Mahler symphony, conducted by Bernstein, that he calls life-changing. He profiled Mailer for The New Yorker in 1998, when the pugilistic novelist and “new” journalist was an almost tamed lion in winter. Denby was able to interview Brooks a number of times during the writing of the book, asking the now 99-year-old comic and director if he agreed with Denby’s interpretation of the “Inquisition” musical number from Brooks’ “History of the World Part I.” (More on that in a bit.)

As for Friedan, Denby was 30 or so — an “unawakened male chauvinist” — when he read Friedan’s groundbreaking “The Feminine Mystique,” published 11 years earlier, which gave voice to frustrated suburban women who were mostly valued as homemakers, mothers and consumers.

For each of his subjects, Denby identifies the Jewish energies and values that they embody, consciously or not. Brooks smuggled the exuberance of the Yiddish theater into the American mainstream; in his 2000 Year Old Man character, he........

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