Talk | Mel Brooks: Disobedient Jew (online)

Presented by Jeremy Dauber, Atran Professor of Yiddish Language, Literature, and Culture at Columbia University and director emeritus of its Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies.

Melvin James Brooks (Kaminsky, born June 28, 1926) is an American actor, comedian, filmmaker, songwriter, and playwright.

With a career spanning over seven decades, Brooks is known as a writer and director of a variety of successful broad farces and parodies.[2] A recipient of numerous accolades, he is one of 19 entertainers to win the EGOT, which includes an Emmy Award, a Grammy Award, an Academy Award, and a Tony Award. He received a Kennedy Center Honor in 2009, a Hollywood Walk of Fame star in 2010, the AFI Life Achievement Award in 2013, a British Film Institute Fellowship in 2015, a National Medal of Arts in 2016, a BAFTA Fellowship in 2017, and the Honorary Academy Award in 2024.

Brooks began his career as a comic and a writer for Sid Caesar's variety show Your Show of Shows from 1950 to 1954.[3] With Carl Reiner, he created the comedy sketch The 2000 Year Old Man, and together, they released several comedy albums, starting with 2000 Year Old Man in 1960. With Buck Henry, he created the hit television comedy series Get Smart, which starred Don Adams and ran from 1965 to 1970.

Brooks rose to prominence becoming one of the most successful film directors of the 1970s. His films include The Producers (1967), The Twelve Chairs (1970), Blazing Saddles (1974), Young Frankenstein (1974), Silent Movie (1976), High Anxiety (1977), History of the World, Part I (1981), Spaceballs (1987), Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1993), and Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995).[4] A musical adaptation of his first film, The Producers, ran on Broadway from 2001 to 2007 and was itself remade into a musical film in 2005. He wrote and produced the Hulu series History of the World, Part II (2023).