We are pleased to announce the release of a new book by Jeremy Dauber, the Atran Professor of Yiddish Language, Literature and Culture at Columbia University and Director Emeritus of the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies.
Mel Brooks: Disobedient Jew (Yale University Press Jewish Lives, 2023) is a spirited dive into the life and career of a performer, writer, and director who dominated twentieth-century American comedy.
Mel Brooks, born Melvin Kaminsky in Brooklyn in 1926, is one of the great comic voices of the twentieth century. Having won almost every entertainment award there is, Brooks has straddled the line between outsider and insider, obedient and rebellious, making out-of-bounds comedy the American mainstream.
In Mel Brooks: Disobedient Jew, Jeremy Dauber considers Brooks’s extensive body of work, illuminating the man behind Your Show of Shows, Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, and Spaceballs. Dauber argues that Brooks has seen the most success when he has found a balance between his unflagging, subversive, manic energy and the constraints imposed by comedic partners, the Hollywood system, and American cultural mores.
Dauber also explores how Brooks’s American Jewish humor went from being solely for niche audiences to an essential part of the American mainstream, paving the way for generations of Jewish (and other) comedians to come. This is a book for anyone interested in movies, humor, American culture, or Jewishness.
The book is available for purchase through Yale University Press.
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