A specter is haunting American Jewry—the specter of young urbanites in their twenties and early thirties whose identity consists almost entirely of the assurance that it is cool to be Jewish. A 24-year-old Brooklyn-ite captured the tone of the new cultural trend when he offered this self-description in the pages of Jewish hipsterism’s in-house journal, Heeb magazine: “I’m Jewish and I’m having a good time. What more do I need?”
Too callow to be a philosophy and yet something more than a style, Jewish hipsterism is not a social movement in the usual sense. It is not a cause, and does not demand either converts or collective action. It is, instead, “an alternative vision for alternative Jews,” as one said in a letter to Heeb; an umbrella term for the cultural preferences of some American Jews belonging to what is sometimes called “Generation Y” and at other times called “the Millennials” (because they attained their majority around the year 2000).
To qualify as hipsters, young Jews must seem to be in the know. They must express a preference for what is new and contempt for what is mainstream. They might listen to the latest indie rock or follow an irreverent stand-up comedian; they might read the newest alternative comics; they might search out trendy nightclubs or the never-ending dance-and-drug parties known as raves; they might take Xanax on special occasions or Adderall to get them through the day; they might wear American Apparel T-shirts with ironic slogans like “One fish, two fish, red fish, Jew fish” or “Shalom, motherf––––r.” What these cultural pursuits have in common is a mock spirit of revolt that overlays, thinly, a thoroughgoing conformism.
For, whatever their other cultural choices, hipster Jews agree about politics. Indeed, politics is the one thing they are never ironical about. If their opinions are not quite as fashionable as their taste in music and clothes, they assume much the same form. Arabs are “America’s persecuted minority of the moment,” which makes them cool. “Green is the new black”—being environmentally conscious is cool. Barack Obama is cool. Having a Jewish president would be cool. Jews and evangelicals getting in bed together to bomb Iran, as the comedian Sandra Bernhard put it in a recent interview with Heeb—not cool.
Where the young Jews differ from the other hip members of their generation and from earlier Jewish youth movements is that they are not alienated, either from Jewish culture or from the secular world. Hipster Jews do not find it particularly hard to be Jews. In fact, they are the first generation of young Jews to feel unquestioningly at home in the popular culture. The tensions between Jewish tradition and modern society—not to mention the terrors of anti-Semitism—have passed them by. They have grown up in an age that celebrates difference and “hybridity” and rejects demands for purity and authenticity. They find it cool to be Jewish because it is cool to be different.
Judaism, of course, has emphasized difference at least since the plague of the firstborn, which God sent, in the language of the King James Version, to put a difference between the Egyptians and Israel. But where Judaism affirms the difference of the Jews’ calling and obligations (Sabbath, food, marriage), Jewish hipsterism celebrates difference as an end in itself. Hipster Jews are different only to the extent that difference is a means to a deeper commonality—a commonality with the multiculturalist ethos. From this angle, to be Jewish is not to be set apart from all other people, but to be analogous to them. It is the equivalent of being black or Latino or gay or Native American. It is to march in a parade, stride for stride, with other minorities also marching under minority banners.
In their more reflective moments, hipster Jews claim that they want to reinvent Jewish identity—to reboot Jewish culture, in an expression that is popular with them. But because they are largely strangers to Jewish tradition, their movement is merely the latest manifestation of the desire, familiar to students of Jewish history, to rewrite Judaism in line with the current fashions.
Although the term hipster came out of the jazz scene around the Second World War, it was given currency by Norman Mailer, whose 1957 essay “The White Negro” described the hipster as the young “urban adventurer” whose marijuana habit and search for kicks were motivated by the knowl-edge that he lived with “instant death by atomic war, relatively quick death by the State as l’univers concentrationnaire, or with a slow death by conformity with every creative and rebellious instinct stifled.” The new hipsters also want their “resistance to the mainstream” to be understood as a political response to the world they have inherited.
“The political climate we grew up in was one of supreme hypocrisy,” writes Cameron Russell, a Columbia undergraduate, on her blog. “One president nearly got impeached for a superficial sex scandal and then another later broke international laws to preemptively start a war without UN support and was reelected to serve two full terms without so much as a breath of legal retribution.”
Hipster Jews are offended by George W. Bush. “Too much bad faith,” writes Anthony Lappé in an article on Oliver Stone’s W., “too much blood spilt, too many My Pet Goat, killer pretzel and ‘Insurgency? What insurgency?’ moments for any self-respecting historian to conclude that his two terms as leader of the free world were anything other than an utter failure.”
They are scandalized by public indifference to global warming. “Here we are,” Harvey Pekar says in a Heeb comic strip, “our civilization brought to the brink of the abyss by global warming. It’s already the cause of so many problems. But the public doesn’t recognize the scope of its influence. Instead, they elected Bush, a man who thinks the world is flat, twice.” Their conception of political action is the Great Schlep, a campaign organized last fall by the comedian Sarah Silverman, who urged young Jews to travel to Florida and convince their grandparents to vote for Barack Obama. “Use threats,” she advised. “If they vote for Barack Obama, they’re going to get another visit this year. If not, let’s just hope they stay healthy till next year.”
The genesis of the Jewish hipster movement can be dated with some exactness—to the winter of 2002, when the first issue of Heeb was published. Funded by a seed grant of $60,000 from the Joshua Venture, a nonprofit group backed by Steven Spielberg and Charles Bronfman, Heeb caused an immediate uproar, receiving much welcome attention in the bargain, by taking its name from an anti-Semitic slur. Jennifer Breyer, a 25-year-old student at Columbia University’s journalism school who founded the magazine, said the name was widely used by Jews her own age. “Instead of calling each other Jews, they would call each other Heebs as a term of endearment,” she explained.
Thus, with a single word, Heeb separated itself from mainstream Judaism and announced the arrival of a new Jew. (For a while it was subtitled “The New Jew Review,” a phrase that was, tellingly, a riff on a 1970s children’s television program called The New Zoo Revue.) Breyer described her target audience by reflecting again on the Jews of her experience:
For some . . . being Jewish was the main-course brisket on their identity dinner tables. Everything they do, everyone they know, is Jewish. . . . But then, there were people for whom identity itself is more of a dim sum, and their Jewish part like one small, tasty dumpling amid a variety of other yummy treats. I was a dim sum Jew, and so were most of my friends. I had the idea one autumn day to make a magazine for us.
Heeb is the ultimate guidebook for those Jews who subscribe to the ideology that a person is made up of multiple elective identities, which can be put on or taken off at will. For them, Jewishness is never given. It is another choice on the à la cartemenu of personal identity.
The magazine combines the cultural interests of Vanity Fair with the ribald humor of the old National Lampoon. The cover of its “Chosen Issue,” for example, shows film actor Jonah Hill squeezing a lubricant into the hole of a bagel. Regular features include “Jewdar,” which sniffs out celebrities you never guessed were Jewish (and may not be), “Battle of the Schwartzes,” in which readers are invited to decide between two hipsters with the same last name, “Heebonics,” which defines useful funny Yiddish and Yinglish words, and “Honorary Heeb,” in which non-Jews with hipster appeal are profiled. While the editors mock com-plaints by saying “it’s true that Heeb has a strict policy of only conducting interviews with left-wing icons,” the magazine’s interview subjects have little else in common besides pop-culture renown and a Jewish connection, more or less. They include Sarah Silverman, Naomi Klein, Al Franken, Noam Chomsky, the Beastie Boys, Lisa Loeb, Larry Kramer, Naomi Wolf, Judy Blume, Joan Rivers, Las Vegas mayor Oscar Goodman, and Sandra Bernhard, plus non-Jewish academic stars like Peter Singer and Cornel West.
Unlike earlier and more influential Jewish journals, Heeb is not interested in providing an outlet for Jewish thought or introducing Jewish writers and artists to a wider public. None of its contributors has estab-lished an independent reputation, nor for that matter have many other hipster Jews. The movement is not about the creation of art or ideas; it is about self-creation.
The most successful artist to come out of the movement is the 30-year-old Hasidic musician Matis-yahu, best known for his Top 40 hit “King Without a Crown.” Born Matthew Miller into a liberal Westchester family, he became religious in his early twenties. He did not abandon his teenaged devotion to the rock band Phish when he fell under the sway of Shlomo Carlebach, the Hasidic rabbi and singer-songwriter who sought to reawaken Jewish worship with music, and the wordless melodies called niggunim that are part of the Hasidic tradition. In seven albums recorded since 2004—two of which went gold—Matisyahu has developed a style that blends reggae, hip-hop, and funk-inspired rock with traditional Jewish themes. In many ways his music is an almost perfect expression of the movement’s values, even if most hipster Jews will never be as religious as he.
Hipster attitudes toward the Jewish religion range from hostile to ambivalent to revisionist. In a letter to the editor, a young New Yorker related the story of giving a Hasid on the subway platform a copy of Heeb. “I generally avoid contact with religious zealots of any stripe,” he writes, but introducing himself “as a landsman, I suggested this was a part of the American Jewish experience, which he might enjoy.” He imagined the Hasid hiding the magazine under “the tallis in a secret drawer” or nailing it “on a shul door like Luther’s 95 Theses.”
Less aggressive, while still deracinated, is Ami James, an Israeli-born tattoo artist in Miami, who told Heeb that he is regularly asked how he can incise marks on himself, since Jews are commanded not to do so. “My answer to that is, unless you follow the full-fledged Jewish religion,” James said, “observing the Sabbath and keeping kosher, not a little bit of this and a little bit of that—you shouldn’t be telling people what they can and can’t do.”
Danya Ruttenberg, a Conservative rabbi in her early thirties, is a leader of the effort to introduce the concerns of hipster Jews into the tradition. In The Passionate Torah, a collection of eighteen essays on sex and Judaism she has edited, Ruttenberg complains that “Judaism seems out of step with our contemporary ethos.” Postmodernism, feminism, and “queer liberation” have combined to create “a sea change in how we address sex and sexuality.” Jews need to talk “about how to maximize sexual empower-ment between consenting adults,” and they need “to ask questions like, how might new ways of thinking about queer sexuality impact all our understandings about God?”
It is doubtful that many Jewish hipsters will give all that much thought to their “understandings about God.” Their reinvention of Jewish identity places the self, not God or even the Jewish people, at the center. What matters is how one feels about being Jewish, not what being Jewish has historically meant. Rebecca Walker, author of Black, White and Jewish, the “mixed-race” daughter of the novelist Alice Walker and the civil rights lawyer Mel Leventhal, told Heeb: “I used to roll out a complete discussion about being culturally rather than spiritually Jewish—like a whole lot of American Jews my age—but these days, I just don’t care to expend a lot of energy proving I belong somewhere. If you get it, cool. If not, go police someone else’s identity.”
That ominous verb—“police” —is telling. The shift from external authority to individual control over Jewish identity is the hallmark of the hipster movement. Traditionally, a Jew was a Jew by virtue of a dual relationship: a vertical relationship with God, the concrete image of which is the law handed down to Moses, and a horizontal relationship with the Jewish people, which takes shape in history.
Since Walker enjoys neither of these relationships, just how is she Jewish? By virtue of radical personal autonomy. Like other hipsters, she does not see Jewish identity as anyone’s business but her own, or one’s own. She is Jewish because she chooses to be, and if tomorrow she chooses not to be, well, who can gainsay her choice? This conception of Jewishness is about as contrary to the basic precepts of Jewish peoplehood as it is possible to get. Jews do not choose; they are chosen. And though they may surrender their political or social status as a member of the Jewish people, their chosenness—their calling and obligations—is nothing so trivial that it can be changed at will.
Oblivious to this defiance of traditional norms, Jewish organizations are falling over one another to attract hipster Jews. The Jewish Establishment has always preferred to target the unaffiliated, seeing in them a wondrous target of opportunity—a new programming challenge. Hoping to make Judaism a fount of fun instead of a moral imperative, official Jewish institutions arrange Vodka Latke and Jewltide bashes on Hanukkah, “all-night multimedia arts experiences” on Shavuot, interfaith Seders, thirty-minute Seders, Slow Food Seders, Downtown Seders (“artists, performers, celebrities participate in a unique interpretation of the story of Passover”), kabbalah study groups, Jewish food conferences, Jewfusion weekends.
The efforts are doomed to fail, not only because efforts to target the unaffiliated have always failed, and not only because such efforts represent an evacuation rather than a revitalization of Judaism, but because they thoroughly mistake the distinctive character—the special place in history—of Jewish hipsters. In its rejection of the normative religion and its separation from the historical community, the hipster movement is the latest attempt to reconfigure Jewishness along secular lines.
In every generation, it seems, the secular temptation must be indulged. Hipster Jews are little different from their predecessors. They want to break free of traditional constraints, throw open the gates of Jewish culture to new ways of thinking, and encourage Jewishness to express itself in whatever happens to be current. Where they differ is in having no interest at all in wresting control of the community. They demand only control over themselves, over their own identity—to live for themselves alone without any concern for communal opinion.
If the secular temptation is familiar in Jewish history, so too is its outcome. In an exchange of letters two years before the publication in 1976 of his bestselling nostalgic paean to Jewish secularism, World of Our Fathers, the literary critic Irving Howe wrote sadly to the historian Lucy S. Dawidowicz: “We secularists lost the battle through no fault of our own.”
Dawidowicz replied that he was wrong. “The fault,” she said, “was that the secularists valued secularism and socialism over Jewishness and Jewish continuity.” The Jewish content of what the secularists “wanted to transmit . . . to their children was too meager to be meaningful to sustain any Jewish identity, since it lacked the original grounding in Jewish traditional life that the first generation of Jewish secularists had had.” In this sense, hipster Jews are so estranged from any grounding in their ancient tradition that they do not even know how radically their views betray the Jewish life for which they clearly, if vaguely, possess a deep residual hunger.
