The death of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Norman Mailer has cast attention back on some of his early essays, including “The White Negro,” an influential piece that first appeared in Dissent magazine in 1957. Written during a period he described as "the years of conformity and depression," Mailer's essay focused on the hipster—"the urban adventurer. . .who drifted out at night looking for action with a black man's code to fit their facts"—as a hero capable of providing the antidote to America's stultifying postwar culture.

"The White Negro," and the hipster lifestyle it details, remind us that white Americans have looked to blacks not only as a group upon which they could project the negative aspects of their society, but also as an object of longing: Whites fantasize that the African American embodies the expressiveness and sensuality with which they as whites have lost touch in their self-styled "march toward progress." Bristling under the confines of postwar culture, Mailer admired the hipster as white man who, like his imagined black counterpart, could free himself from "the sophisticated inhibitions of civilization," divorce himself from society, and relinquish "the pleasures of the mind for...the pleasures of the body."

Although Mailer did not explicitly mention his Jewish background in "The White Negro," the essay was undoubtedly shaped by the symbolic importance African Americans and their culture have long held for American Jews. Mailer himself was a product of the urban streets where Jewish youth of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s often listened to "race records," formed their own jazz bands, and occasionally made evening excursions to Harlem and other African American neighborhoods. Not only were many of the leading white interpreters of African American music during the interwar period Jewish, but so was the original hipster, Mezz Mezzrow (né Milton Mesirow), a clarinetist who declared himself a "voluntary Negro" and devoted himself—in his own words—to "hipping the world about the blues the way only Negroes can."

Because the black experience reminded American Jews strongly of their own pre-immigration past, they tended, more than any other American ethnic group, to see black culture as tool with which to work out the pressures and contradictions of the Americanization process. In a world where young Jews often faced the indignities of social discrimination and felt daily pressure to conform to the mores of white society, exploring black culture could provide a sense of freedom from those strictures. This experience foreshadowed to some extent what Mailer later described in "The White Negro," although it should be noted that most young Jews of the interwar period were not nearly as transgressive as Mailer's ideal hipster. Because they ultimately desired acceptance from the majority society, acculturating Jews tended to dip into black culture in temporary ways that did not threaten—and often even enhanced—their status as white.

Though Mailer favored a more radical break with white mainstream culture than did earlier Jews who flirted with blackness, in some ways his vision was less radical than a newer variation on the theme of the "white Negro" that has emerged in the last several years: the Jewish hipster. Organized around a host of cultural media ranging from Jewcy.com to Heeb magazine to the (hopefully) still emerging "Jewxploitation" film genre, the Jewish hipster movement has marshaled black culture as a weapon in its fight to make Jewishness relevant for a generation so well accepted that it yearns to be different. The bevy of musicians who are producing Jewish reggae and hip hop albums today are perhaps not as revolutionary as Mailer in their political commitments, but today's Jewish hipsters are much more willing to put their Jewishness front and center.

Assuming Mailer's "white Negro" was Jewish (after all, the essay appeared in Dissent), Jewishness was the one aspect of his personality he did not feel free to assert. Instead, he remained a closeted Jew who substituted a black persona for his own identity in order to protest postwar conformity, just as the young Jews of the interwar years used jazz and "slumming" adventures as a cover for their own distinctiveness. By contrast, the Jewish hipster of today uses the cultural cache enjoyed by blackness to argue that Jewishness is similarly "cool" and different.

Yet the way in which contemporary Jews continue to draw on black culture in order to assert themselves suggests just how powerful the black-white divide remains as an organizing principle in American culture. Despite the willingness of Jewish hipsters to be "out" as Jews, they find they still need to speak the language and wear the style that mainstream America recognizes as different. Perhaps one day Jews who want to be recognized and legitimized as different will no longer have to turn to black culture in order to invest Jewishness with the heft needed to be taken seriously in a "multicultural" world.