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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).

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