Book Launch! Thursday, Sept 17 @ Octavia Books

I’ve waited until after Labor Day weekend to schedule and announce the official launch of my memoir, The Last of the Ellis Island Jews, at Octavia Books in New Orleans on September 17. Today I’m sharing a 1973 photo of myself and my much older siblings and, as well, my two favorite (and most informative) blurbs.

"A terrific memoir of lost worlds, lost possibilities, informed by an ever-present vision of a better world. In short, it is a very Jewish book. Dinerstein tells how the multi-racial, multi-ethnic Brooklyn he was raised in led him to become the scholar of race and music he is today. But his main focus is on Jewish family dynamics…. Through a chronological series of deftly animated vignettes that blend comedy and cruelty, a strong note of mourning is balanced by wit and shtick. Through dark passages his love for his mother and sister shines. Despite his wry deprecations, this is a story of love – of what holds Jewish families together against all odds – a lesson rooted in an old world that needs remembering today."

------- Rodger Kamenetz, Author of The Jew in the Lotus

"Dinerstein’s rich portrait of familial love and dysfunction is set in a world both near and surprisingly far from our own. Written with verve and compassion, The Last of the Ellis Island Jews captures the loopy charm of a vibrant ethnic scene: a tragicomic Jewish family, the grit of old school Brooklyn, and a young man trying to figure out family, faith, and race -- with rock-and-roll as his intermittent guide. Mourn what is lost and celebrate what is triumphant: this uniquely American sense of place and belonging is not coming back."

------- Jefferson Cowie, Pulitzer-Prize winning historian of Freedom's Dominion

My Memoir Is Out In The World!

The Last of the Ellis Island Jews was published on August 1, and I’ve been promoting it in interviews and podcasts. My favorite is by Susan Larson of The Reading Life, a staple of New Orleans’ NPR station, WWNO-FM. Due to her probing questions, I spoke as much about the craft of writing as about my crazy Jewish family and the lost world of Jewish Flatbush. Susan retired just last week, and I was lucky enough to be one of her final interviews. Listen here:

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

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!

Lost Classics of Jewish Literature - - - my new series

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.

Being Cool in the Cold War

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.

My short narrative history of jazz!

My short narrative history of jazz is now in the world, a story told through the music’s development in the Black neighborhoods of five American cities: New Orleans, Chicago, Kansas City, New York and Los Angeles. Jazz hides in plain sight at the birth of global culture.

Jazz is the original musical revolution that led to swing, soul, rock, funk, R&B, and hip-hop. The music’s history combines art, race, rebellion, and freedom into a veritable microcosm of American culture at its best and worst. God Bless America’s music critic, Ann Powers (NPR), for this blurb:

“Waltz for Debby,” from the Jazz Beauty playlist.

“It's hard to throw your arms around a universe, but Joel Dinerstein does so with grace and great insight in this essential guide to America's art form. Designed with maximum musical interaction in mind, it guides the reader by offering multiple views on jazz history —its relationship to cities, to Black migration, and to politics; its sonic evolution in streets, clubs and concert halls; its many personalities, from legends like Louis Armstrong and Miles Davis to central but less famous figures like Ben Webster and Hamid Drake. "Jazz is everywhere," Dinerstein declares. This kaleidoscopic little book proves that. A great addition to the shelf for a newcomer to the music or anyone who wants to enrich a lifetime of listening.”

And you can read it in an afternoon.

Dig in!

White Supremacy and the #ChineseVirus

A disease has spread to all human populations for the first time in human history.

President Trump’s continual attacks on China have a racial component encoded in his use of the phrase, “the Chinese Virus.” In fact, the hashtag #ChineseVirus is still used twice a minute by his Twitter followers. I wrote this piece on Medium.com to focus on how racism works for the president within a global context.

Can Joe Biden Ever Be (Made) Cool

Since young people made Bernie Sanders and #TheNotoriousRBG cool, can it happen for Joe Biden? A difficult task, surely, but someone should be working on it — after all, it’s only the free world that’s at stake.. So I published my first piece on Medium.com on the possibility of a Biden brand.

Camus, Bogart, and Being Cool

Albert Camus' The Plague remains a bestseller during the pandemic in part because Dr. Rieux, the protagonist, provides an object lesson in being cool. I refer to cool in its original meanings as they came out of post-World War II culture: to be stoic, resilient, and uncomplaining; to survive with dignity and style in the face of uncontrollable larger forces. Dr. Rieux serves people for no reward and knows he may catch the disease — and die from it — at any time. This is the situation of our medical workers right now.

Camus was often told he looked like Bogart and enjoyed the compliment. To the French, Bogart was the global avatar of existentialism in cinema. “The raison d'etre of his existence was in some sense just to survive," the French film critic Andre Bazin wrote in tribute. "Distrust and weariness, wisdom and skepticism: Bogey is a Stoic.” And to be a Stoic is the ancient philosophical analogy for being cool. In a key scene in Breathless, Jean-Paul Belmondo stares at an 8x10 glossy of Bogart (right) as if asking, "How can I ever be as cool as Bogart?"

The current analogy for Dr. Rieux would be Governor Cuomo. No matter his political and personal weaknesses, he has been the essence of cool in leadership: reserved but compassionate, straight ahead with no guff, comfortable in his own skin. The suit is not a great look: maybe he should wear a fedora and raincoat to every briefing.

Joni Mitchell wrote a song about this original meaning – called "Be Cool”, of course -- and how each person should aspire to this ideal balance of good and bad, of virtue and vice, of fire and ice. “Don’t whine,” she sings, “you’re nobody’s fool,” because—

If there's one rule to this game
Everybody's gonna name
It's be cool

Albert Camus in Paris, ca. 1946

The Plague was also an allegory of the Nazi occupation of Paris, figuring the Nazis as an invasive disease that must be cast out by the hard work and discipline of a superior system of ethics (like cool, for example). This allegory might also apply to our current political plague but there will be no vaccine. We can only be cool and keep our eyes open for the main chance to restore our democracy.

The Myth of the Caucasian Race

Last week, I had an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times, "The Pernicious Myth of a Caucasian Race." Many readers were surprised to find that “Caucasians” were simply invented by one German anthropologist in 1795 -- so I was gratified that the piece was widely-read and widely shared. And there were only two trolls on email and three on Twitter! The piece is drawn from my current project on the origins of racial ideas in America.

New Orleans Musical Culture

I gave a talk on New Orleans music and culture last week to a group of visiting CEOs from San Diego and I was surprised to find they were compelled by a common gentrification narrative. The spike in housing costs (and other expenses) since Katrina will soon displace a century's worth of musical continuity. Harry Connick, Jr., Branford Marsalis, and Habitat For Humanity led the city to establish Musicians Village, which subsidizes some 70 or so musicians. Yet the engine for New Orleans’ continual rejuvenation of American music has always been the mentor-apprentice relationships in historical African-American neighborhoods: in musical families, in brass bands, in high school marching bands. You can read about the process in interviews in Talk That Music Talk. Connick (mentored by James Booker) and Marsalis (family band) represent two examples of this tradition, but even transplanted musicians find a supportive community across racial lines.

Gentrification is a bulldozer, not a generator of culture. So why was this group of CEOs compelled by our city’s story? Perhaps because New Orleans is the last non-generic city in America. Our musical culture is understood as irreplaceable and non-reproducible, in contrast to the nation’s gentrified upscale neighborhoods. Will our musical culture survive? I am not optimistic.

Jazz cool in the new millennium

Dublin’s Phoenix magazine features a monthly playlist and I was honored to create one aligning the current UK jazz resurgence with the US fusion of jazz and hiphop. Dig in here to hear the Sons of Kemet and Ashley Henry grooving alongside Kamasi Washington, Esperanza Spalding and the living New Orleans tradition. Sequencing the set made me nostalgic for my 10-year stint as the Monday morning jazz DJ on WWOZ-FM in New Orleans — but not for those 5am wake-ups.

Illustration by James Boast in The Phoenix.

Cooling the planet down

This is the best activist slogan for climate change I’ve seen — admittedly, I’m biased — and it seems to have originated as an ad campaign from Stonyfield Yogurt. If so, good on them. And so it shall be my new mantra, as phrase and image: to visualize this Cool Earth rising. Happy 2019 from New Orleans.

MSNBC & LL Cool J Present: The Story of Cool

MSNBC presents a three-episode documentary, The Story of Cool, over the next three Sundays (starting on July 1). I show up in the first episode to tell the origin story. LL Cool J exec-produces and his presence connects icons of cool such as Ice Cube and Shepard Fairey with CEOs and cultural critics. The trailer hits some good keynotes: cool as "the perfect balance between substance and style," cool as "authenticity." American cool is a vernacular tradition of rebellion so let's finally reject the ahistorical analysis of Thomas Frank and Malcolm Gladwell -- cultural critics for whom cool is only a consumer process. Selling cool may work for the early adolescence set (say, 11-16) but during the crucible of self-creation -- between 17-25  -- no one really believes buying something makes you cool. 

How the Light Gets In

I am on my way to the How The Light Gets In festival in Hay-on-Wye (UK) to give a talk on "The Secret History of Cool" and, as well, to serve on a panel debating the meaning of rebellion within consumer capitalism. Nice timing as it follows Tulane's graduation, for which I donned a fedora and shades when I couldn't find my cap. My friend and Tulane photographer Sally Asher caught me congratulating the newly-minted MA Jamal Cuthbertson and I like the look enough that I will probably keep it in the years to come.

And I tip my hat to the HTLGI people: Leonard Cohen possessed a rarefied cool worthy of having a "philosophy and music festival" named after his most hopeful turn-of-phrase.

African-Americans invented cool

African-Americans invented cool as a stylistic defiance against racism during World War II. This is simply well-documented social, historical, and linguistic fact. To be cool in the 1940s referred to the ability to be relaxed in one's own style in any environment, an act of courage and mental strength for any Black person during the Jim Crow era. Whether meaning high praise ("Cool!"), vetting someone to others ("she's cool"), or referring to a relaxed state of mind ("I'm cool, man") -- our modern usages all began in jazz culture. Jazz fan Jack Kerouac caught the new word at clubs and wrote of his "theory of cool" to Neal Cassady in 1950 and William Burroughs registered this "new word in the hipster vocabulary" in Junky (1952).  By the time The Jazz Lexicon came out in 1963 -- the definitive dictionary of jazz jargon -- Robert S. Gold called cool "the protean word" of jazz culture. There were two pages of citations from magazines and a page each for "uncool" and "cool it," as well as for "hip" and "unhip." Jazz was the dominant subculture of the post-World War II era in NYC and jazz musicians' slang became the first rebellious code of cool. 

                           from The Jazz Lexicon (1963)

Jazz legend Lester Young was the first to spread this underground gospel of cool. To be cool meant you would not Uncle-Tom  -- i.e., produce a fake smile -- to show white Americans you knew your place. Young then added stylistic markers to defy the white gaze: a personal, impenetrable slang; wearing sunglasses at night; inhabiting a smoky alcohol haze for insulation. Both black and white jazz musicians put on their shades, torqued up their slang, smoked dope or shot heroin, and became cool cats. Within a decade, sociologists began writing about cool, Norman Mailer became obsessed with the concepts of hip and cool (in his Village Voice columns on "The Hip and the Square") and Leonard Bernstein registered its presence in national consciousness with "Cool" in West Side Story (1957). White appropriation and dilution of "cool" and "chill" continues, then as now. (Read more in chapters one and five of The Origins of Cool in Postwar America.)

From Bogart to Brando and Dean -- The Cool Podcast

How is it that Bogart and Robert Mitchum and Barbara Stanwyck are cool and yet so are their opposite numbers, Marlon Brando, James Dean, and Elvis? I discuss this key aspect of my Cool book on Mark Lynch's podcast, Inquiry, on WCIN. The short answer: these icons spoke to different generations. Bogart, Mitchum and Stanwyck were exemplars of surviving with dignity and style -- of existential cool -- and represented the generation that grew up in the Great Depression and fought WW2. For those too young to fight and for the youngest Boomers, Brando, Dean and Elvis embodied an edgy, eroticized badboy masculinity that subverted the monolithic image of the good father from 50s sitcoms, organization men, and that great daddy-o, POTUS Dwight Eisenhower. They were rebels for adolescents (at first), representing the hollow middle of an affluent consumer society. And that's what made Jim Stark here (on the right) "tick ... *like a bomb.*"

Best review so far

By far the most comprehensive review of my arguments in The Origins of Cool has been novelist Benjamin Markovits' engaged analysis in the Times Literary Supplement (TLS). Markovits aptly refers to a generation's icons of cool as akin to cultural kites:

Kendrick Lamar, 2017

"There is a lot to be said for 'cool theory' as a way of talking about art and books. Dinerstein uses his cast of actors, writers and musicians as kites that show which way the cultural winds are blowing. 

"'What’s cool' is a question of taste … whereas coolness depends on the interaction of a contemporary audience.

"That is why jazz matters so much here -- jazz improvisation is supposed to offer an immediate expression of what the audience (in a club) is feeling. It responds, as it were, to market forces, and fame works in a similar way."

We used to call such artists emblems of the zeitgeist (literally, the "spirit of the times"), but that word has become a cliché and fallen out of favor. That's why cool – the word -- remains the password to an American mythos: it is the exclamatory term invoked when pointing to innovative artists groping for a new cultural pattern of individuality for a given audience with consequences for social change.

The cover of Miranda Lambert's The Weight of These Wings (2016).

Kendrick Lamar (above) is one such cultural kite -- Black Lives Matter supporters chant his songs on marches -– and Miranda Lambert is another, for her embodiment of a new female country persona (right). Both have galvanized new audiences into being by publicly wrestling with the winds of change. Such artists should not be conflated or confused with celebrities – e.g., Justin Bieber, Selena Gomez -- who are more commodities (whats that are cool) than windsurfers.

The Origins of Cool in the NYTBR

In a quick, evocative notice in the NY Times Sunday Book Review, reviewer John Williams quoted two definitions of cool and then half-praised my "nerdy and convincing arguments." He then connected the instability of the postwar period to our historical moment and, in referring to the influential personae of Bogart, Kerouac, Billie Holiday, Elvis, and Brando (left), he wondered: "When have we needed their relaxed calm more?"

Passing the Page 99 Test

Book blogger Marshal Zeringue challenged me to take the p.99 test and The Origins of Cool passed the mystical test with flying colors. The reader lands on my analysis of This Gun for Hire and a definition of noir cool. Although often derided as a "pulp existentialism," noir cool was instead a stylish stoicism, a state of thoughtful calm conveyed by artistic expressions of stylized resilience. As for the early noir This Gun For Hire, it featured the first pairing of Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake (left) -- looking here like the Hollywood goddess of Night  -- and caught the soon-to-be Greatest Generation's youthful desire for the new cool register represented by Ladd-and-Lake's low-key eroticism.