The Emanuel Manual: Brothers, Rivalry, and Success

In the postscript to former Obama health-care adviser Ezekiel Emanuel’s recent memoir, Brothers Emanuel, he mentions the “cereal question.” As in, what did his mother put in the cereal to create three such wildly successful sons? With Chicago Mayor Rahm and Hollywood super-agent Ari rounding out the famously ambitious trio, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd and hundreds of others have asked the brothers to reveal what went on in the Emanuel household that produced men who believed, as Zeke writes, that if you couldn’t keep up with them, “there was something wrong with you.”

A good chunk of the Emanuel memoir is devoted to the bond among the siblings: Serious Zeke, creative Rahm, and impish Ari. Their father, Ben, a pediatrician, and their mother, Marsha, a medical technician, ran a rowdy yet loving household. “We were not pacifists,” Zeke deadpans. At the family dinner table, where their grandfather (whom they affectionately called “Big Bangah” because he banged the table so force-fully) held court, the boys would call each other schmucks and other Yiddish epithets during heated arguments. They learned “to respect authority and to constantly question and challenge it,” as Rahm said in an interview on NBC’s Rock Center.