Joel Dinerstein

Joel Dinerstein is Professor of English at Tulane University and holds a Sizeler Professorship in Judaic Studies. His latest book is a memoir of his immigrant Jewish family, The Last of the Ellis Island Jews (2026). He is also the founding editor of a new series, Lost Classics of Jewish Literature (UNO Press). His work focuses on comparative racisms through cultural resistance, whether anti-Semitism or anti-Black racism.

Dinerstein is a renowned expert on the concept of cool, as featured in his TED Talk, “Why Cool Matters” (2015). He published the first history of the concept in The Origins of Cool in Postwar America (2017), a work that shifted the paradigm away from the dismissal of cool as a superficial tool of marketing. He was the Curator of American Cool (2014), a popular culture and photography exhibit at the Smithsonian's National Portrait Museum, and he co-wrote its catalogue. His corporate study, Coach: A Story of New York Cool (2016) is a collector’s item.

Dinerstein is also a jazz scholar and cultural historian. 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 is currently a consultant to the New Orleans Jazz Museum, and he was a jazz DJ for a decade on WWOZ-FM, the Jazz and Heritage station of New Orleans.