Joel Dinerstein

writer & professor
race, music & cool

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Lost Classics of Jewish Literature - - - my new series

January 03, 2026

The first book of my new series, Lost Classics of Jewish Literature, is out: Samuel Ornitz's Haunch, Paunch, & Jowl (1923), a novel first published with the subtitle, “A Novel of Gangsters and Politics.” The novel provides a panorama of the first generation of Jewish immigrant life on New York's Lower East Side through a cohort of young men and two women: the struggles between religion and secular success, socialism and capitalism, tradition and modernity. Marketed as a real-life autobiography, the novel became a best-seller as an exposé of political corruption.

This novel of ethnic politics has been misinterpreted for a century, at first repudiated by rabbis for its irreverence towards Judaism, and more recently by Jewish literary scholars for its savvy, corrupt pro-capitalist protagonist, Meyer Hirsch. I wrote the new introduction through extensive archival research on the author: Samuel Ornitz was a lifelong labor activist and social reformer later blacklisted — and imprisoned — as one of the Hollywood Ten during the McCarthyist era. Ornitz clearly intended for Meyer Hirsch to be a negative example of assimilation for Jewish immigrants, yet Hirsch's compelling voice and choices still speaks American truths about poverty, social mobility, and identity politics.

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.