The Jazz Age witnessed a convergence of social and aesthetic changes that informed the political, social and literary relationships between African-Americans and Jews. Coming into close contact with each other for the first time, African-Americans and Jews struggled to comprehend and represent the other group as their own perceptions and representations of themselves and the other group began to inform representations of 'the other' in popular culture I see the Jazz Age as a transitional period where artists, particularly Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston and Fannie Hurst, struggle with their own sense of identity politics as the attempt to 'create' and represent themselves and 'the other' to a wide audience. It is my assertion that the 'New Negro' ethos and continued Jewish assimilation allowed these writers to enter a 'third space' of representation that, unlike W. E. B. DuBois' notion of the 'color-line,' does not 'fix' either the artist of 'the other's' identity, but rather allows for multiple movements that challenged these representations. The patronage system that allowed Hughes and Hurston to survive financially while writing in their early years, also restricted their artistic goals, as did conflicting notions of what constituted 'legitimate' African-American art. In their differing representations of Jews both as a social symbol and a religious group, Hughes and Hurston attempted to work out their own identity politics and, in Hurst's case, engage in a project of 'hybridizing' Judeo-Christian and African/Caribbean originary myths For novelist Fannie Hurst, ambivalent about her own identity as an assimilated Jew, representations of immigrant Jews and African-Americans allowed her to 'write' herself away from being identified too closely with stereotypes of Jews in order to be seen as more 'American.' In exploring these writer's representations and interpretations of 'the other,' I hope to interrogate notions of national and cultural identity and posit the Jazz Age as a time when possible representations of 'the other' informed each group's creation of itself