A former Gaza hostage’s famous pancakes are coming to New York City Friday at a one-day popup at the downtown Israeli restaurant 12 Chairs.

Keith Siegel’s pancake recipe became a sensation while he was held captive from Oct. 7, 2023, until Feb. 1. The Hostages and Missing Families Forum advocacy group published the recipe in a cookbook last year, and his daughter Shir turned it into an Instagram sensation.

Shir posted every Saturday morning about how much she missed her dad’s pancakes, which he made for the family on Shabbat. Soon, Israelis were tagging her in their own pancake photos as a show of solidarity.

For most of the 484 days he was held hostage, Siegel, 66, was the oldest living American-Israeli hostage in Gaza; he and his wife, Aviva, were kidnapped by Hamas from their home on Kibbutz Kfar Aza on Oct. 7. Aviva was released in a temporary ceasefire in November that year.

When Keith Siegel was freed — saying that he had dreamed of eating his family’s pancakes multiple times a day while he was held captive— Shir encouraged her followers to make pancakes to celebrate his return. The post went viral, and his recipe appeared in media across the country.

In late March, a two-day kosher pancake popup featuring Siegel’s recipe took place at Tel Aviv’s Sarona Market, where the pancakes were made by some of Israel’s best chefs. With a pay-what-you-wish menu, proceeds from the popup went to a rehabilitation fund for the Siegel family.

Now, with the Siegel family heading to New York City to press for the release of the remaining hostages, they’re bringing their pancakes with them.

The Hostages and Missing Families Forum reached out to 12 Chairs about hosting a pop-up, the restaurant was immediately on board, according to Kate Amrani, 12 Chairs’ marketing coordinator.

“We’re building a community,” she said. “So people will feel we’re all here together to support and to be with each other and to have fun and try the pancakes that everyone knows about.”

The pancake popup will be a pay-what-your wish, grab-and-go experience at 12 Chairs Next Door in Soho, which is adjacent to their restaurant at 56 MacDougal St. Three varieties of pancakes will be on offer: Siegel’s classic maple syrup and butter pancakes, and two other flavors yet to be determined.

The event will run Friday from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., with proceeds going to the Hostages and Missing Families Forum.

The event precedes both the Israel Day parade on Sunday and Keith and Aviva Siegel’s appearance at Temple Emanu-El on Monday night at an event designed to galvanize support for freeing the remaining hostages taken on Oct. 7. Until Monday, when the final living U.S. citizen in Gaza was released in a deal between the United States and Hamas, there were 58 hostages, of whom up to 23 are thought to be alive.

Since 1540, a prestigious chain of scholars has held the title of the Regius Professor of Hebrew at the University of Cambridge.

But not one of these scholars of Hebrew and Semitic studies was Jewish — until this year.

In September 2025, Aaron Koller will become the first Jew to join the university’s department of Middle Eastern Studies as the Regius Professor of Hebrew, a role established by King Henry VIII. Koller is packing up from New York City, where he has taught at Yeshiva University, specializing in Hebrew from biblical to medieval texts, since earning his doctorate there in 2009.

According to Koller, it’s no surprise that Jews never made the cut before. Henry VIII, who founded the Church of England along with the professorship, intended it for Anglican churchmen to teach Hebrew in the Anglican tradition. That idea lasted until recently.

“Fifty years ago, it wouldn’t have struck anyone as odd that no Jewish person had held the position,” Koller said in an interview. “It was pretty clearly — not officially, but very clearly — meant for an Anglican professor of the Old Testament.”

Koller — who spent the 2022-23 academic year in Cambridge — credits his predecessor, Geoffrey Khan, with breaking the mold. Khan is not a member of the Anglican Church nor a specialist in the Old Testament, but a scholar of Semitic languages with mixed British, Indian and Iranian ancestry.

In his new role, Koller wants to promote the study of Hebrew texts over the thousands of years between the Hebrew Bible and the modern state of Israel, drawing on Cambridge’s rich trove of manuscripts that includes the Cairo Genizah, the vast collection of medieval manuscripts discovered in Egypt in the late 19th century. Koller hopes that introducing students to these writings will open them up to new angles of studying cultural and intellectual history across the world.

Despite being the first Jewish Regius professor, Koller said he is wary of narrowing the department around “Jewish studies for the Jews.” In the United States, Jewish studies departments tend to attract Jewish students looking to connect with their identity and heritage. That fills a valuable need, said Koller, but he wants to build out Hebrew studies as a home for any student with a humanistic interest in Hebrew — addressing the same historical and philosophical questions that draw people to studying ancient Greek or Latin.

“No one thinks that Greek studies would only be for Greeks,” he said. “Greek studies spend a lot of time trying to explain to the world that this is of universal significance. It’s not for every single person, but it’s for any given person; [they] will find something interesting here. And I very much want to do the same for Hebrew studies in Cambridge.”

As far as faculty representation, there is still progress to be made in the Regius Professorship.

“There still hasn’t been a woman in the position,” said Koller. “That’s yet to be solved.”

The Supreme Court of Argentina discovered over 80 boxes of material from the Nazis in its basement last Friday, prompting court officials to work with local Jewish organizations to review their contents.

The boxes were sent in 1941 from the embassy of Nazi Germany in Tokyo to German diplomats in Argentina. Their contents include Nazi postcards, photographs and propaganda material, which, the court said in a statement Monday, were “intended to consolidate and propagate Adolf Hitler’s ideology in Argentina.”

After the shipment came to Argentina, Argentine authorities feared the contents could affect Argentina’s neutrality at the time in World War II, and the boxes were referred to the Supreme Court.

It is unclear what action the court may have taken at the time, but the trove of material will now be reviewed in collaboration with the Association of Jewish Lawyers of the Argentine Republic and the local Holocaust Memorial Foundation.

The Supreme Court said the objective of the review is to discern “whether the material contains crucial information about the Holocaust and whether the clues found can shed light on still-unknown aspects, such as the global Nazi money trail.”

The discovery follows the declassification earlier this month by the Argentine government of more than 1,800 files on Nazi escape via “rat-lines” to South America. Argentine President Javier Milei ordered the declassification of the documents after a meeting with leaders from the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

Ramona Sarsgaard, daughter of Jewish actress Maggie Gyllenhaal and Peter Sarsgaard, was reportedly one of the more than 70 pro-Palestinian protesters arrested at Columbia University last week.

During the protest on May 7, demonstrators occupied the school’s main library for several hours, with some vandalizing it, until Columbia’s acting president, Claire Shipman, authorized the NYPD to come in and conduct a mass arrest.

Sarsgaard, who is a freshman at Columbia, was given a ticket for criminal trespassing during the library occupation, according to the New York Post. The university has since suspended more than 65 students involved in the protest. It is unknown whether Sarsgaard was included among those suspended.

The library protest was organized by Columbia University Apartheid Divest, the school’s main pro-Palestinian coalition.

This is a developing story.

Hamas has released Edan Alexander, an American-Israeli citizen, back to Israel under a deal reached with the United States.

The release, conducted Monday evening in Gaza, may inaugurate a new phase in the hostage crisis that has consumed Israel since Hamas attacked on Oct. 7, 2023, taking 251 captives and opening the war in Gaza.

“I’m very happy to announce that Edan Alexander, an American citizen who until recently most thought was no longer living, thought was dead, is going to be released in about two hours,” President Donald Trump said at a press conference Monday morning. “He’s coming home to his parents, which is great news.”

Israeli media reported at 6:30 p.m. local time that Hamas said it had transferred Alexander to the Red Cross after 584 days in captivity. He was handed over to the Israeli military, which brought him to Israel. There, he was due to meet his parents Adi and Yael Alexander, as well as other family members, and will undergo medical examinations.

“It’s an out of body experience, it’s very exciting, we couldn’t sleep all night,” Adi Alexander said in a phone interview broadcast on Israeli Channel 12. “I saw the picture, he’s handsome, standing on his feet. That’s what’s important… He’s a little pale, thin, but a tall boy. This is my boy.”

He vowed to keep advocating for the rest of the hostages held by Hamas.

Hostage releases have happened before, but this was the first that was arranged directly between the terror group and the United States — without Israel’s knowledge or involvement. It is also the first time Hamas has released a living male Israeli soldier on active duty. And it means that, as of now, for the first time in more than a year and a half, there are no living Americans who are still held hostage in Gaza.

Alexander was born to Israeli parents living in Tenafly, New Jersey, and enlisted in the Israeli military. He was serving as a soldier on the Gaza border when he was taken captive in Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack at age 19. Alexander, Channel 12 reported, acted as an English-language interpreter between other hostages and their Hamas captors.

Crowds waited in tense anticipation in the hours ahead of Alexander’s release, in Israel, Tenafly and elsewhere. His impending release was announced over the weekend and came as a surprise. It is unclear what Alexander’s release means for the future of the war in Gazam and for the 58 other hostages still held there — up to 23 of whom are thought to still be alive. In recent days Trump has said that three of the hostages thought to be living had died.

Israel announced on Monday that it was sending a negotiation team to Qatar on Tuesday to continue negotiations over the remaining hostages. Israeli media also reported that following the deal for Alexander’s release, Israel would let humanitarian aid into Gaza for the first time in two months.

“If confirmed, Edan’s release must mark the beginning of a broader agreement to secure the freedom of all remaining hostages,” the Hostages and Missing Families Forum, a group representing relatives of most of the hostages, said in a statement ahead of Alexander’s release. “We pray that this is not just the beginning of Edan’s return, but of the return of all 59 hostages. No one should be left behind.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was not party to the negotiations over Alexander, vowed that the war would continue. He recently said that achieving a military victory in Gaza was more important than returning the hostages, even as polls show that most Israelis believe the opposite.

“Israel has not committed to a ceasefire of any kind or the release of terrorists but only to a safe corridor that will allow for the release of Edan,” Netanyahu said in a statement on Monday. “We are in the midst of critical days in which Hamas has been presented with a deal that would enable the release of our hostages. The negotiations will continue under fire, during preparations for an intensification of the fighting.”

At Hostages Square in Tel Aviv, a space dedicated to awareness and advocacy for the captives, a crowd waited for news of Alexander’s return to Israel. There, Ruby Chen, the father of Itay Chen, an American Israeli whose body is being held by Hamas along with those of three other U.S. citizens, praised Trump and compared him favorably to Netanyahu.

“The prime minister needs to learn what leadership is, and what prioritization is, from the American president,” Chen told Israeli Channel 12. “I hope the prime minister understands what leadership is, what it is to see what’s really important. We’ve always felt that the U.S. administration, the current and former one, have given us the feeling they’re doing everything to bring the hostages home.”

The release comes as Trump embarks on a trip to the Middle East. Reports emerged on Monday that Alexander and his family would fly to Qatar — a patron of Hamas and key player in hostage talks — to meet with Trump, who will visit the Gulf nation.

Trump currently has no plans to visit Israel on the trip. The talks with Hamas are one among a number of steps the White House has taken in the region that have raised Israelis’ anxieties that their country is being frozen out of Trump’s plans for the Middle East. Over the weekend, shortly before the announcement of Alexander’s release, Mike Huckabee, the U.S. ambassador to Israel, downplayed reports of a rift between Netanyahu and Trump.

The call went out over email, text and WhatsApp on Sunday night: Come to Huyler Park in downtown Tenafly at 5 a.m. to celebrate — Edan Alexander was coming home.

Born and raised by Israeli parents in Tenafly, Alexander, 21, joined the Israel Defense Forces after graduating from Tenafly High School. He was taken hostage by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023, while serving near the Gaza border, along with 250 others. Now, the United States had negotiated his release, in a move that shocked both Israeli officials and his friends and family in New Jersey.

“Yes, it’s early. And yes, it might be a little cold. But we are strong, united, and our love will warm us all,” said the message, which urged parents to let their children participate in the gathering at the cost of going to school: “Let them experience a morning they’ll remember for life.”

By 5 a.m., the time that initial reports suggested Alexander could be freed by Hamas, which has held him hostage in the Gaza Strip for 584 days, the suburban New Jersey park was packed with friends of his family, members of the local Israeli expat community and hundreds of local residents and officials.

A massive screen and audio system, set up overnight by local companies, broadcast Israel’s Channel 12, where reporters were offering a play-by-play of the preparations for Alexander’s release, the first of any male soldier captured on Oct. 7. At times, the screen showed a broadcast from Tel Aviv’s Hostages Square, where a similar broadcast showed the crowds in Tenafly.

“We almost, like, created a Hostages Square here in Tenafly,” said Orly Chen, a local community member who is from Israel. “And when, God willing, he’s going to come back to Tenafly, there’ll be a really nice and warm welcome here.”

As the sun rose, the crowd thickened. The mayor of Tenafly — whom Chen said had helped to coordinate security — was there, as was Josh Gottheimer, who represents the town in Congress and is running for governor. So was Assi Berman Dayan, a founder of the New York division of the Hostages and Missing Families Forum and a Tenafly resident.

Local rabbis turned out alongside their congregants, and children came with their parents. Some people brought camp chairs, while many were wrapped in Israeli flags. At one point, men and boys donned prayer shawls and tefillin to offer morning prayers outside Tenafly’s N.J. Transit station. Cafe Angelique, housed in the old train station, opened with its menu that includes Israeli delicacies such as Jerusalem bagels, shakshuka and hummus. And a giant yellow banner reading “Welcome Home Edan” was unfurled.

In Israel, the IDF was preparing to receive Alexander, who marked two birthdays in captivity, in a quiet handover at the Gaza border, without any of the theatrics that Hamas had employed when releasing dozens of hostages earlier this year during a temporary ceasefire. (Hamas fears the United States’ wrath, Saudi media was reporting.) Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was emphasizing that any diminished army operations in Gaza were meant only to allow for Alexander’s safe passage. And the families of up to 23 other living hostages were fretting over whether Alexander’s release, as joyous as it would soon be, would reduce U.S. pressure for the war to end and their own children to be freed.

In Tenafly, many families are Israeli or have a strong connection to Israel. The future of the war would matter to them in ways large and small. But for Monday, at least, the focus was only on their local son, who survived the unthinkable and one day in the future would be strong enough to come home, where an entire town would be prepared to embrace him.

“We are so blessed,” Chen said. “We are really so blessed to have such an amazing, amazing community.”

Danielle Elkins contributed reporting from Tenafly.

President Donald Trump and Hamas have announced that Edan Alexander, the only U.S. citizen among the living hostages remaining in Gaza, will go free after the Trump administration negotiated his release.

“I am grateful to all those involved in making this monumental news happen,” Trump said in a post on Truth Social late Sunday. “This was a step taken in good faith towards the United States and the efforts of the mediators — Qatar and Egypt — to put an end to this very brutal war and return ALL living hostages and remains to their loved ones. Hopefully this is the first of those final steps necessary to end this brutal conflict. I look very much forward to that day of celebration!”

A New Jersey native, Alexander, 21, joined the Israel Defense Forces after graduating from high school and was captured while serving near the Gaza border. His parents attended Trump’s first address to Congress in January.

The surprise announcement represents a relief for Alexander’s parents and a blow for the other hostage families, as it means the United States will soon have less of a concrete stake in the plight of the Israelis seized by Hamas when it attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.

Einav Zangauker said in a video that her son Matan, who was captured from his home on Oct. 7, was being held with Alexander. If Matan is left alone, she said, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will have “transformed into the Angel of Death” for his refusal to make a deal with Hamas to free the hostages.

The father of Nimrod Cohen, another soldier abducted while serving near the Gaza border, said that while he was relieved to hear that Alexander would go free, the news of a U.S. deal constituted a “ringing slap in the face.” His family had never sought a second citizenship and now felt abandoned by their government, he reportedly said.

The announcement about Alexander was first made Sunday night by Khalil al-Hayyah, a Hamas leader in Gaza, who said the release was a signal that the group is ready to “immediately start intensive negotiations” toward an end to the Israel-Hamas war. He said Hamas had been in direct contact with U.S. negotiators.

Al-Hayyah did not offer a timeline for Alexander’s release, but the Trump administration reportedly believes he could be released on Monday. Alexander’s parents, Adi and Yael, were on their way to Israel Sunday night after being surprised by the news by Steve Witkoff, Trump’s Middle East envoy. Adam Boehler, Trump’s hostage negotiator, was accompanying them, the Times of Israel reported.

The direct negotiations with Hamas, first revealed in early March, represented the first in a growing string of indications that the United States and Israel are not moving in lockstep. Those signs have grown in advance of Trump’s Middle East trip, which does not include Israel, though his ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, this weekend batted down concerns that Trump was sidelining Netanyahu or Israel.

Netanyahu released a terse statement in response to the announcement, which Israeli media said he had not been briefed about before it was made.

“The US has informed Israel of Hamas’s intention to release soldier Edan Alexander as a gesture to the Americans, without conditions or anything in exchange,” Netanyahu said in the statement. “The US has conveyed to Israel that this is expected to lead to negotiations for the release of hostages according to the original Witkoff framework, which Israel has already accepted.”

He added, “Israel is preparing for the possibility that this effort will be implemented. In accordance with Israel’s policy, the negotiations will be held under fire, based on the commitment to achieve all of the objectives of the war.”

Netanyahu has recently said that returning the hostages, of whom 59 remain from 251 taken Oct. 7, is not the primary goal of the war. Instead, he says, removing Hamas from power is. The deal comes as Israel is poised to embark on a large-scale offensive to conquer and occupy Gaza.

Witkoff reportedly told hostage families this week that the United States believes Israel is prolonging the war despite a U.S. assessment that additional progress is unlikely, Israel’s Channel 12 reported.

If Alexander is indeed freed, there would be at most 21 living hostages remaining in Gaza. There are four U.S. citizens among the 35 hostages Israel says are dead. Trump said this week that three more hostages are thought to be dead — corresponding to the number of hostages that have not been confirmed dead but for whom there have been no signs of life since Oct. 7.

Pope Leo XIV spoke directly about Gaza in his first Sunday address since being elected on Thursday, marking his first public comments as pope about the 19-month-old war between Israel and Hamas there.

“I am deeply pained by what is happening in the Gaza strip,” he said, according to translations of the speech, delivered in Italian at the Vatican. “May a ceasefire immediately come into effect. May humanitarian aid be allowed into the civilian population and may all hostages be freed.”

He also decried the war in Ukraine and praised the ceasefire, announced Saturday, in a conflict between India and Pakistan.

The speech — in which Leo proclaimed, “Never again war!” — and other moves by the new pope are being closely watched by supporters of Israel, many of whom felt alienated by Pope Francis’ response to the war in Gaza.

Francis also called for the release of the hostages, whom Hamas abducted from Israel, in his frequent calls for a ceasefire. But he also suggested that Israel could be guilty of “genocide” in Gaza and attended the inauguration of a nativity scene at the Vatican that positioned baby Jesus on a keffiyeh, or Palestinian scarf; last week, the Vatican announced that he had willed his popemobile to the children of Gaza.

On Thursday, after Leo called for peace in his first public address as pope without mentioning Gaza, Rabbi Noam Marans, the American Jewish Committee’s director of interreligious and intergroup relations, emphasized that such calls are standard fare from the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica. “All popes want peace,” he said.

The U.S. ambassador to Israel denied that a rift was widening between President Donald Trump and Israel or its prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, following concerns that the president was sidelining the country in his Middle East policy.

“He spent more time with the prime minister of Israel than he has any other world leader, so I would just say to people, ‘Relax, calm down, Donald Trump loves you, there’s no doubt about that, he’s got your back,'” Mike Huckabee told Israeli Channel 12 on Saturday night. “He is the same Donald Trump that, four years as president, did more for Israel than any other American president.”

Huckabee made the rounds of Israeli TV stations Saturday night after recent U.S. actions — including its ceasefire with the Houthi terror group in Yemen and its negotiations with Iran and, reportedly, Saudi Arabia — have appeared to exclude Israel or catch its leaders off guard. Trump will also not be visiting Israel when he comes to the Middle East this week.

Huckabee defended some of those actions, and did not rule out the possibility of an Israeli strike on Iran. “We respect Israel, it’s a sovereign nation, they have a responsibility to do what is best for their people,” he told the i24 network when asked about reports that the United States stopped Israel from bombing Iran.

Regarding the U.S. deal with the Houthis, he said Israel and the U.S. do not have veto power over each other’s decisions. He added that if a Houthi missile hurts an American citizen in Israel the United States would intervene.

“We don’t expect that Israel has to get our permission. This isn’t a game of Mother May I,” he told Channel 12. “The United States isn’t required to get permission of Israel to make some type of arrangement that would get the Houthis from firing on our ships.”

Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas, was an outspoken supporter of Israel, and its West Bank settlements, before entering the ambassadorship last month. Responding to the wave of anxiety from Israelis, he replied directly to an activist who suggested that Trump may be betraying Israel.

“If Trump signed a nuclear deal with the saudis without demanding normalization with Israel, if he agreed to a ceasefire with the Houthis without demanding they stop attacking Israel, and if he is indeed trying to cut ties with Israel, I will be the first to admit that I was duped,” tweeted Hillel Fuld, an Israeli advocate and tech consultant, on Friday.

“For now, I call fake news and I hope I’m right. If I’m not, and these rumors, even one of them is true, wow,” Fuld added. “This would be a historic back stabbing of Israel, maybe the worst by any president in history.”

On Saturday, Huckabee replied, “Because I follow [Fuld] I will jump in ease some minds. All the nonsense about @POTUS & @IsraeliPM is from ‘sources’ who don’t put their name on it. I will put mine. The partnership is STRONG. What’s broken is credibility of fake news.”

Then he was on to batting down another report, this time in the Jerusalem Post and elsewhere — that Trump was about to announce recognition of a Palestinian state, something Netanyahu and much of Israel’s parliament staunchly oppose.

“This report is nonsense,” he tweeted about an hour later. “@Israel doesn’t have a better friend than @POTUS!”

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 portrays “the ultimate diasporic Jew,” a curator of tribal memory. Friedan brought something of the Jewish prophet and liberator into her role as the founding mother of second-wave feminism, as she herself once boasted: “I would not be the first in the history of the Jews to play the role of a visionary or a prophet, a female Moses leading women out of the wilderness,” she said in 1987. 

In Denby’s telling, Bernstein’s is the most complex and nuanced Jewish identity: The conductor and composer shared the liberal politics and Zionism of so many of his generation’s Jews, along with an outsider’s ambition to storm the gates, the self-criticism that is a byproduct of Jewish guilt, and, perhaps above all, a “rabbinical desire to teach anyone who would listen.”

Even Mailer, who in a long career almost never wrote about his upbringing as a Brooklyn Jew and seemed to have run headlong from whatever was expected of a “nice Jewish boy” — sobriety, fidelity, conformity — was distinctly Jewish in his rebellions. (Denby unpacks the notorious, and to many unforgivable, incident when Mailer stabbed and nearly killed the second of his six (!) wives in a drunken rage.) “A psychoanalyst would say,” writes Denby, “that by fighting middle-class Jewish habits so hard, he was in his way reaffirming them.”

Denby describes the factors that made this Jewish expressiveness and astounding fame and influence possible. Children of immigrants who had gotten a toe-hold in the middle class raised their expectations for their children. (Denby, who grew up in Manhattan and got his degrees from Columbia University, writes that it never occurred to his second-generation parents that he would follow them into the garment business.) After the Holocaust, antisemitism began to fade as an impediment to Jewish ambition. By 1956, he writes, quoting the economist Simon Kutznets, the income for Jewish families was about 20% higher than the U.S. median.

Denby also writes about new media that brought his four subjects unthinkably large audiences: television, the long-playing record and the mass-market paperback book.

Economics, technology and freedom met with a distinct Jewish sensibility. “There’s nothing more acrid in Jewish manners or more contemptible than someone who has wasted his life, particularly someone with gifts,” said Denby. “There was a kind of cultural impatience derived from Jewish history and liberated by America.”

But considering that three of his four subjects are long dead and Brooks is nearly a centenarian, there is something elegiac and nostalgic about “Eminent Jews” — not unlike “History of the World, Part II,” the TV series produced by Brooks, and “Maestro,” the Bernstein biopic, which both came out in 2023. 

Denby’s book arrives as a new wave of antisemitism — from the right and the left — has unsettled Jews and left them doubting the security they took for granted. On the left that was these four figures’ milieu, Israel has gone from being a darling to a pariah. Jews are still overrepresented in the arts, politics and academia, but there is a sense that they aren’t as prominent as they were in the days of the New York Intellectuals — the mid-century tribe of mostly Jewish writers and critics — and the Jewish giants (Bernstein among them) who dominated Broadway. 

Observers have lamented a dip in Jewish enrollment at the Ivies. In 1967, shortly after the abolition of antisemitic quotas, JTA reported that the student bodies at Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania were 40% Jewish, while those at Dartmouth, Princeton and Brown hovered between 13 and 20%. In 2023, Hillel reported that Jewish enrollment at Columbia was 22.5% and at Penn 16.5%. That same year, Princeton’s student body was 9.3% Jewish and Dartmouth’s was 8.8% (Brown even rose a bit to 23.9%). 

Those are still estimable percentages for a tiny minority, but combined with falling Jewish achievement in high school science competitions like the  Regeneron Science Talent Search (formerly known as the Westinghouse Science Talent Search) and the Physics Olympiad, they have some observers lamenting that the Jewish century is over. 

On May 18, the Center for Jewish History in New York will host a day-long symposium, “The End of an Era? Jews and Elite Universities.” Its website says the event was inspired by “the recent surge of antisemitism on American college campuses,” referring to the backlash against Israel and Zionists, especially after Oct. 7, 2023. “I’ve watched the rise — and now the erosion — of a historic bond between American Jews and the universities they helped shape,” Martin Peretz, the symposium chair and the ardently pro-Israel former publisher of The New Republic, said in a news release. 

In an Atlantic  essay last year, “The Golden Age of American Jews Is Ending,” Franklin Foer argued that Jews are no longer enjoying an “unprecedented period of safety, prosperity, and political influence.” Instead, he writes, the “Golden Age of American Jewry has given way to a golden age of conspiracy, reckless hyperbole, and political violence, all tendencies inimical to the democratic temperament. Extremist thought and mob behavior have never been good for Jews.”

And it’s not just pro-Israel hawks and liberal centrists who see signs of Jewish decline. Peter Beinart, writing from the perspective of a Jewish left that is challenging the very premises of Zionism, argues that Jews who support right-wing figures because they are more pro-Israel than than those on the left are complicit in undermining the open societies in which Jews have flourished. “We don’t have to ally with MAGA thugs because racists are Israel’s most reliable friends,” he writes in a new book, “Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza.” 

Others are writing about the Golden Age in ways that draw a stark distinction between the epic Jewish and immigrant energies of the last century and the inevitable complacency and self-satisfaction of this one.

Last month, in the New York Review of Books, feminist writer Vivian Gornick, 89, wrote of her time at the City College of New York, when it was an engine of Jewish working class and middle-class achievement. The Jewish students at City College were “in fact no more intellectually gifted than the sons [and after 1951, the daughters] of any of the other immigrant cultures,” she writes. “They were, however, famously the progeny of a culture that characterized itself as the People of the Book, fiercely motivated by an inherited reverence for learning coupled with a passion for either getting on in the world or changing the world.”

Similarly, literary scholar Ruth Wisse, in a lively online class on the New York Intellectuals that she has been teaching for the conservative Tikvah Fund, seems to quietly lament what America, and its Jewish community, has become. “By the 1940s Jews were not only writing the patriotic songs of America and making Christmas movies, but definitively interpreting America to itself… and interpreting Jewishness to themselves as well,” she says in the course introduction. “It was a very exciting time in our intellectual life, and we will see how it evolved, and also we will think about whether we can ever hope to see its likes again.”

Denby thinks it is too soon to draw such conclusions, and notes that Jews, who make up 2.4% of America’s population, still have “an extraordinary influence on economics, politics, on the public discourse.” Some of that influence, he notes, may not even be something they desire: He worries that the Trump administration’s battle with universities, with the stated aim of fighting antisemitism, is turning the Jews into the “heavies” in the culture wars. 

He also wonders what his three deceased subjects would have made of Donald Trump — especially Mailer, who found his own voice covering the political upheavals of the 1960s and who, Denby writes, anticipated “the great divide between rural and urban America, between the aggrieved and the elite.” 

Denby is confident that Jews will continue to flourish, especially if they heed the lessons of Mel Brooks. Denby suggests (and got Brooks to agree) that the “Inquisition” skit — in which the torture of Spanish Jews is staged as a Hollywood musical comedy — has an implict message: Despite the suffering they endured, Jews need to put aside their fears and self-pity and forge ahead. 

“If the book has a message, it is, ‘be not afraid.’ These four were not afraid of anything,” said Denby. “It might not be the Golden Age the way it was in the ‘60s and ‘70s, but I would not underestimate the amount of strength in the Jewish community.”