If I tell you that I was never a hipster, this is not definitive, for the hipster thing to do would be to deny, deny, deny. What might be more convincing is that no one has ever thought I was. Yes, I was a recent college grad living in Brooklyn in the early 2000s. But it was the wrong part of Brooklyn (in and around Park Slope, not Williamsburg), and it was never my preferred aesthetic, and I have not once in my life heard of a band before they were cool.
But I remember hipsters. To understand what they were, you need to start with the fact that their cultural movement was declared kaput in New York Magazine in 2010. This strikes me as accurate, give or take, because something else became the dominant mode from 2008ish until 2023ish, what I call the long 2010s. A something-else that would only take definitive shape as its own subculture circa 2021, with today’s neon-hair-with-mask-and-keffiyeh aesthetic. Hipsters did not cover their backpacks with pins attesting to their political commitments. Hipsters did not have political commitments. Nor were they particularly averse to germs.
Hipsters were into… being hip? It’s remarkable how ephemeral it all was, relative to what would come later. Hipster was things like the Misshapes dance parties, one of which I remember going to with some friends in the early 2000s… with the full knowledge that we, non-hipsters, would be attending a hipster event. But I remember dressing up to look ‘hipster’ to go to it, in a spirit of wanting to look correct for an event, but also of gentle mockery. (Was this meta, and I was playing at hipsterdom… ironically?)
With hipsters, you never knew if they were being serious. Or rather, you were a fool if you assumed they were doing whatever it was in earnest. In her recent reflections on hipster-dom, writer Clare Haber-Harris is right to highlight the centrality, for straight male hipsters, of wearing tight pants—a sartorial choice previously associated (in North America, in the environments hipsters emerged from) with being gay or European. The hipster was not gay. Unless he was. He wearing his jeans like that ironically. More famously, hipsters were big into trucker hats and other ‘white trash’ paraphernalia. They did this as a way of signalling that they lived in big cities and were not in fact members of the white working class, who might don this sort of thing in earnest.
The youth movement that immediately followed hipsters was committed to social justice and antiracism. Were hipsters racist? They were big into heritage-chic, thus the handlebar moustaches and the ironic vintage bar mitzvah shirts. They liked the past, in a way you wouldn’t if you believed the past would have been a terrible time for you. And the food movement values of locavoreism and traceable ingredients. In practice, this often meant eschewing ingredients and restaurants of obvious foreign extraction, and using the fact that the chef was a white guy in a flannel shirt as shorthand for ingredient-vetting.
Mainly, though, they simply weren’t antiracist in the same manner as that which would supplant them. The sincere, ‘woke’ sphere of call-out culture, of acknowledging privilege, none of this was hipster. Overt racism was thought to be obsolete, the provenance of backwater uncles and losers at most, so ironic so-called “hipster racism” posed no real threat. The 2010s would see things otherwise, and call out hipster racism for micro-aggression, and for representing and therefore doubtless endorsing bigotry.
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The ambivalence at the core of hipster lent itself to what would become hipster Judaism. Was hipster Judaism a sincere reclamation of an identity otherwise shunned as dorky? (Hebrew school: dorky. Jewish communal publications: dorky. Parents wanting you to follow traditions: dorky. Eating different foods and celebrating different holidays than everyone else: dorky.) Or was it an ironic embrace of the dorky?
Nowhere was this ambivalence leaned into more than in the very existence of something called Heeb, a 2001-2010 print publication recently brought back to digital life by Mik Moore, a Jewish marketer we recently interviewed on Bonjour Chai. It was slur-reclamation, but not the earnest sort. It leaned into the squirming.
Hipster Judaism was a subset of the hipster movement, but only to a point. It was the intentional result of community efforts—some with significant philanthropic support—to make it cool to be Jewish. But it was also a genuine trend. Jews had cycled into coolness in the mainstream population, associated as we were with Brooklyn, the epicentre of cool. So there were cringe elements, akin to when a Christian youth pastor whips out the guitar and insists to skeptical teenagers that it’s cool to love Jesus. (“I wish Jewlicious (and everybody else) would stop trying so hard to make Judaism seem cool. It’s our heritage, not a vintage T-shirt,” wrote The Forward contributor Gordon Haber 15 years ago.)
Whatever the case, there were no shortage of Jews in the demographic (white, urban, recent college graduates in or aspiring to enter creative professions) that hipsters generally tended to come from. The whiteness was key here: Stuff White People Like, a weblog written by Toronto native Christian Lander—an aspiring sitcom writer seeking opportunities he eventually got in Hollywood—became a viral phenomenon for eviscerating white-hipster interests like farmers markets or… wearing keffiyehs. The late 2000s were such a different time that the keffiyeh post is about hipsters who pair theirs with clothing from American Apparel. There was also, in Brooklyn, the very specific geographic juxtaposition, in Williamsburg, of hipsters and Hasidic Jews.
Jewish hipsters became irrelevant circa 2010, in part because the hipster did generally. But there was also an element of casual appropriation from Black culture that registered (to some) as hipness in the early 2000s (it was an aesthetic continuation of the style of popular white Jewish boys in preppier parts of NYC in the 1990s, who fancied themselves hard-core and inner-city and styled themselves accordingly) and as very problematic (to some) in the period immediately afterwards. The obvious example would be the 2003 blaxploitation parody, The Hebrew Hammer, but it was in everything, it was the “Yo Semite” shirts, it was woven into the entire Jewish hipster movement, which was, among other things, a way for pale-skinned Jews to distance themselves from a whiteness that hadn’t quite fit.
An ode to Jewish hipsters published by SFGate in 2005—which remains possibly the most comprehensive account of the movement, despite coming from a publication in San Francisco rather than the movement’s New York City gravitational centre—includes a tidbit that, let us say, dates things: “Bay Area rappers known as Original Jewish Gangstas offer yet another interpretation of tradition on their ‘Hip Hop Shabbat’ CD and performances that double as Reform Jewish Sabbath services.” It seems somehow telling that the last time @hiphopshabbat updated its Twitter account was 2011.
The same piece by Lisa Alcalay Klug (who subsequently elaborated on these trends in her 2008 book Cool Jew) also includes this rife-with-meaning interview snippet with Yoav Potash, a filmmaker and amateur rapper, explaining the hipster Jewish ethos:
“‘We’re still making fun of being Jewish, but we’re saying, ‘It’s OK to embrace it,’ Potash says. Until recently, he added, if someone was asked if he was Jewish, the answer might have been, ‘I’m Jew-ISH,’ meaning, ‘I’m kinda like a Jew, but maybe I’m not this or not that.’ Now the response is more likely, ‘I’m a big phat Jew.’ As Potash sees it, ‘It’s the same joke but in the other direction.’”
Hipster Judaism was a kind of Jewish pride, but one that leaned into Jewish embarrassment, and that borrowed, for the unironic-pride bit, from African-American culture. It made perfect sense when you think about white-ish Jews who were collectively exhausted from trying to fit into white Christian culture, and looking for external reference points. It also makes complete sense if you remember 2010s outrage cycles why it abruptly went out of fashion for (non-Black) Jews to call themselves “phat.”
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I’m reminded of hipster Judaism whenever I encounter someone who says, sort of uncomfortably, when I say where it is I work, that The Canadian Jewish News is something their grandparents would read. It’s moments like this when I wonder whether hipster Judaism ever made much headway in Canada. (If it had, there’d be a maybe-ironic pride expressed in associating oneself with whatever one’s grandparents were into.)
As a Canadian export, however, it definitely thrived.
When I think of hipster Judaism, I remember the ironic T-shirts (like “Yo Semite” adding a conspicuous space to the name of the national park), the merch, the blogs, but also a broader atmosphere in the culture in New York City and beyond, where overt Jewishness was suddenly chic. A lot of this was imported from Canada, with Montreal Jewry having a certain cachet in U.S. cities. Mile End delicatessen opened in 2010, Black Seed Bagels in 2014, both with Noah Bernamoff behind them. Montreal schmatte enthusiast Dov Charney opened the first American Apparel store in Los Angeles in 2003, selling hipsters base layers (whatever could not be thrifted ironically) and would go on to become the notorious personification of what would come to be called “indie sleaze.” (After the retail chain went broke, Charney’s sweatshop-free manufacturing comeback was accelerated by collaborating with Kanye West, at least until he drew the line at swastika T-shirts.)
Most of these developments were covered on Jewlicious—a website where I contributed blog postings circa 2006, as a New York University grad student—co-founded in 2004 by David Abitbol, a Montrealer who relocated to Jerusalem. It was during that time that I was a very peripheral part of this scene, attending, as I recall, a Matzo Ball singles gathering on Christmas, and several talks at the 92nd Street Y, including one by Bernard-Henri Lévy, as well as at least one (but I think just the one) informal hangout. When I remember who, precisely, I met, I recall a crowd of people whose politics diverge so much today that I cannot imagine them all being in the same room. I also went on a 2007 Birthright Israel trip specially curated for readers of Jewlicious, a concept whose very existence attests to the connections between hipster Judaism and Jewish philanthropy.
But the most popular reflection of this aesthetic would have been Seth Rogen’s role in Knocked Up, which reinvented the Jewish male romantic lead as a stoner—a character also stated as being Canadian, like Rogen himself. As, more to the point, a hipster, not a neurotic. If a 1970s Jewish antihero looked like (as in, was written and performed by) Woody Allen, the early-2000s version wore thick black glasses frames… ironically.
As with all trends, you cannot pinpoint exact beginnings and ends. Adam Sandler’s “The Chanukah Song” strikes me as epitomizing hipster Judaism, but it debuted as a Saturday Night Live bit in 1994. Meanwhile, the fashion for wearing the merch of old-school Jewish delicatessens is more of a 2020s phenomenon: ‘Delicore’ is linked to a multimedia marketing venture called Old Jewish Men of New York, which has accrued plenty of fans based on photos of them in their natural habitats, with ironic apparel to match. But the context is not that of the 2010s, and delicore is arguably more about Diasporic pride (not necessarily in opposition to Zionism) and assertion of Jewish rootedness. Or maybe it’s just that Zabar’s makes nice hats, she types, as an owner of one such lid.
The conditions in which hipster Judaism emerged are not our own. In the early 2000s, the biggest threat to North American Jews was our own sense of Jewish heritage or Jewish communal participation as unhip. Hipster Judaism was in effect a continuity strategy, for a time when continuity was the big preoccupation. The long 2010s saw the great reckoning with Jews’ white privilege or lack thereof, many debates were had. The period we’re now in has Jews politically stranded between an anti-cosmopolitan right (see Adam Gopnik’s discussions) and a watermelon-emoji’d left. 2005, were we ever so young? (I for one have aged two whole decades.)
That said, if 20 years ago marked the peak year for hipster Judaism and analysis thereof, it also saw the pioneering Jewish webzine Zeek publish an essay by Jennifer Blowdryer (nom de plume of Jennifer Megan Baring-Gould Waters) and Alvin Orloff, two seemingly bona fide members of the counterculture who knew whereof they spoke, about “hipster antisemitism.” The piece opens by spelling out the novelty of antisemitism among the young, chic, and progressive: “For years and years, hipsters and avant-garde types (at least here in America) liked Jews… a lot. Jews were the chosen people of hip rebellion: antisemitism was the preserve of bigots in small towns, and genteel stuffed shirts from Connecticut…. All that, we are sorry to have to inform you, has changed.”
The catalyst in this case was not Oct. 7, seeing as 2023 was a way off, but rather Sept. 11, 2001, and the War on Terror, and the tendency of antisemites in the U.S. and beyond to attribute the excesses of the now rather tame-seeming George W. Bush administration to a sinister cabal of neoconservatives hint hint. And… I remember this moment, one that differs from our own less in kind than proportions. Which the two Zeek writers saw coming:
“In the future, this hipster antisemitism is only going to get worse. As the Middle East Crisis (or Middle East Culture, as one wag prefers to call it) gets bloodier and more apocalyptic, and memories of the Holocaust and general Jewish victimhood fade, those who instinctively side with the underdog will become less sympathetic, churning out worse and worse message stickers.”
Points for premonition that proved more hipster than hipster, at least in terms of being ahead of the curve.
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The CJN’s opinion editor Phoebe Maltz Bovy can be reached at [email protected], not to mention @phoebebovy on Bluesky, and @bovymaltz on X. She is also on The CJN’s weekly podcast Bonjour Chai.
