Joel Dinerstein

writer & professor
race, music & cool

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The Last of the Ellis Island Jews -- A Brooklyn Memoir

June 20, 2026

New book alert! On August 1, I will publish a memoir of my immigrant Jewish family, tragicomic story of a working-class Brooklyn family that illuminates both the vitality of 20th Century neighborhood life and the social turmoil of white flight. Here’s the official overview:

As a child of immigrants born to parents in their mid-40s, Joel Dinerstein has a unique perspective on four generations -- from his grandparents escaping Russia’s pogroms to his parents’ embattled marriage to his older Boomer siblings (split between feminist and Republican politics) to his own hippie hopes. Yet The Dinersteins fit no paradigm of Jewish success due to a father with rage and gambling problems, so the four siblings escape early to the Brooklyn streets.

The Dinerstein family set the stage for a primer of ethnic Jewish culture through a comic set of iconic scenes: a selfish Seder, a chaotic Bar Mitzvah, a videotaped bris, an allergy attack at Dachau, a staring contest with The Rebbe. As a white teenager attending majority Black public schools, Joel’s experience of racism led to his academic career as a scholar of race and music.

Perhaps most of all, The Last of the Ellis Island Jews is a chronicle of lost worlds. Readings and events to come!

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 brand-new memoir of his immigrant Jewish family, The Last of the Ellis Island Jews (2026), and the editor of the series, Lost Classics of Jewish Literature (UNO Press). His work focuses on comparative racisms through cultural resistance, whether anti-Semitism or anti-Black racism. His recent work has emerged from three of his classes: (1) The History of Cool; (2) Jews & Race; (3) American Jewish Literature.

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.