Joel Dinerstein

writer & professor
race, music & cool

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Being Cool in the Cold War

January 03, 2022

The World War II Museum in New Orleans commissioned an essay for their website, "The Origins of 'Cool' in Post-WWII America." In it, I explore the emergence and etymology of cool at the convergence of several factors: Black culture and anti-racism, Stoicism and existentialism, a cool aesthetic of restraint and the cultural politics of jazz. Signposts of postwar cool come from Ralph Ellison, Simone de Beauvoir, and Jack Kerouac, while its cultural avatars include Miles Davis and Frank Sinatra, Lester Young and Billie Holiday, Humphrey Bogart and Duke Ellington, Marlon Brando and Elvis. This essay is an accessible (and free!) distillation of key aspects of my Cool theory. Thanks to the World War II Museum for the opportunity.

Joel Dinerstein is a professor of English at Tulane University, where he also holds a Sizeler Professorship in Judaic Studies. He is the author of a forth-coming memoir of his immi-grant Jewish family, The Last of the Ellis Island Jews (2026), and the founding editor of a new series, Lost Classics of Jewish Literature (UNO Press). His work focuses on compara-tive racisms through cultural resistance, whether anti-Semitism or anti-Black racism. His recent work emerged from two classes: (1) Jews & Race; (2) The History of Cool.

Dinerstein is a cultural historian and a renowned expert on the concept of cool, as featured in his TED Talk, “Why Cool Matters.” He published the first history of the concept in The Origins of Cool in Postwar America (2017), a work that shifted the paradigm of cool back to its origins in jazz, film noir, and existentialism, and away from its dismissal as a superficial tool of marketing. Dinerstein curated American Cool (2014), a popular culture and photography exhibit at the National Portrait Museum, and co-wrote its catalogue of 100 cool icons. His corporate study, Coach: A Story of New York Cool, is now a collector’s item.

Dinerstein is also a jazz scholar. His first book was an award-winning theory of jazz and industrialization — Swinging the Machine: Modernity, Technology, and African American Culture Between the World Wars (2003) — and his most recent book is a short narrative history of jazz’s emergence in five urban Black neighborhoods, Jazz: A Quick Immersion (2020). He was a jazz DJ for a decade on WWOZ-FM in New Orleans, and he is currently a consultant to the New Orleans Jazz Museum.