Bennett Cerf and the Publishing House He Built

Registration is required. How did Jews revolutionize the twentieth-century publishing business and connect books to Broadway, Hollywood, and TV, and how did that business become the one we know now? At midcentury, Bennett Cerf knew everyone, and everyone knew him: the witty, beloved panelist on What's My Line? whom TV brought into America's homes each week. But they didn’t know that the handsome, driven, paradoxical young man of the 1920s had vowed to become a great publisher and, a decade later, was. With his best friend and lifelong business partner Donald Klopfer, and other young Jewish entrepreneurs like the Knopfs and Simon & Schuster, Cerf remade the book business: what was published, and how. In 1925, he and Klopfer bought the Modern Library and turned it into an institution, then founded Random House, which eventually became a home to Truman Capote, Ralph Ellison, Ayn Rand, Dr. Seuss, Toni Morrison, James Michener, and many more. Join YIVO for a discussion with Gayle Feldman about her book Nothing Random: Bennett Cerf and the Publishing House He Built, in a discussion moderated by Jonathan Brent. Gayle Feldman has written for Publishers Weekly for forty years, including as a senior staff editor; since 1999, as U.S. correspondent for The Bookseller, she has analyzed the American book business for U.K. readers; and she has contributed features and reviews on books and culture to The New York Times, The Nation, The Daily Beast, and other publications. She is the author of You Don’t Have to Be Your Mother and Best and Worst of Times. She received a Public Scholars award from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Jonathan Brent is the Executive Director of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York City. From 1991 to 2009 he was Editorial Director and Associate Director of Yale Press. He is the founder of the world acclaimed Annals of Communism series, which he established at Yale Press in 1991. Brent is the co-author of Stalin’s Last Crime: The Plot Against the Jewish Doctors, 1948-1953 (Harper-Collins, 2003) and Inside the Stalin Archives (Atlas Books, 2008). He is now working on a biography of the Soviet-Jewish writer Isaac Babel. Brent teaches history and literature at Bard College. This online event will take place on Zoom at 1:00pm ET. (What time is that for me?) Download Zoom » Zoom FAQs For questions about this program, please contact: [email protected]