Revising Punk Rock’s Jewish Influence

Jewish punk rockers Handsome Dick Manitoba, left, Chris Stein, second from left, Tommy Ramone, second from right, and Lenny Kaye, right. Journalist Richard Bienstock is third from left.

Jewish punk rockers Handsome Dick Manitoba, left, Chris Stein, second from left, Tommy Ramone, second from right, and Lenny Kaye, right. Journalist Richard Bienstock is third from left.

by Eric Herschthal
Staff Writer

The list of books about the Jewish influence on punk music isn’t terribly long. In fact, there’s probably only one: Steven Lee Beeber’s “The Heebie-Jeebies at CBGB’s: A Secret History of Jewish Punk,” published in 2006. In it, Beeber argued that the Jewish identity of many of punk rock’s founding members — two of the Ramones, Chris Stein of Blondie, Handsome Dick Manitoba (originally Richard Blum) of the Dictators — heavily shaped the music. The artists’ nervous energy, their outsider status, their ironic humor and theatricality all bore a deeply Jewish mark. Or as Beeber put it in the book’s first sentence: “Punk is Jewish.”

So when YIVO Institute for Jewish Research hosted a near sold-out panel last week featuring Stein, Manitoba, Tommy

Ramone and Patti Smith’s lead guitarist Lenny Kaye, Beeber’s absence was more than a bit conspicuous. Harold Steinblatt, director of cultural affairs at YIVO and organizer of the event, said that he had considered having Beeber as a moderator, but then decided against it because he did not entirely agree with his argument. “If you have him as a moderator,” Steinblatt said in an interview before the event, “then it becomes a validation of the book one way or another.”

And thus, a chord of controversy was struck in Jewish punk history.

While Steinblatt applauded Beeber’s effort, he thought he made his case too strongly. The Jewish influence on punk was clearly a phenomenon worth discussing — hence the panel — but the varieties of Jewish experience for each musician made broad generalizations difficult. “I think their Jewish identity informed their music,” Steinblatt said, “but I don’t think it’s clear-cut on how.”

In a separate interview, Beeber admitted that he made his case more forcefully than he would have liked at least in part because he had to sell it to a publisher (Chicago Press Review, in his case). And he agreed with Steinblatt’s point about making broad conclusions — “It’s not like every punk in New York had the same relationship to his Jewishness,” he said.

Hurt feelings aside, it’s not clear that the panelists shared Beeber’s conclusions either. The most ardent non-believer was Chris Stein, who is, fittingly, an atheist. “I’m proud of my parent’s being red,” he said, explaining that he was raised by ardent communists in Flatbush, Brooklyn. When Lenny Kaye, who also served as the moderator, asked Stein if he saw a connection between the rituals of a rock concert and Jewish religious practices, Stein noted wryly, “I would hope that rock-and-roll is pre-Judeo-Christian.”
But maybe that answer proved another point: that the same ironic sense of humor informs both the Jewish and punk aesthetic. Beeber’s book traces that comedic trope back to Lenny Bruce, and then follows it through to the most controversial aspect of many punk bands: their use of Nazi imagery. The Jewish Lou Reed had an iron cross shaved in his head; the Dictators, whose members were mostly Jewish, named a song “Master Rock Race”; the group Blue Öyster Cult (note the umlaut), founded by Eric Bloom, studded their lyrics with Nazi allusions.

The bands took a lot of heat for it back then, and judging by the panel’s question-and-answer period, still do. In his book Beeber argues that using these images was the Jewish artists’ subtle way of mocking Hitler’s failure to destroy Jews.

But at least for Tommy Ramone, the Nazi allusions were sorely misguided. At the event, he talked about being born in Hungary, in 1949, with the name Tamas Erdelyi. Many of his family members were killed in the Holocaust, while he fled Hungary with his parents at the onset of the 1956 revolution, eventually settling in Forest Hills, Queens. He was sent to two different yeshivas, but said, “I didn’t really fit.” And so, like many punk musicians, he found a community at the club whose name is synonymous with the genre, CBGB’s, the iconic East Village spot founded, of course, by another Jew, Hillel “Hilly” Kristal.
Ramone, a drummer, brought up Beeber’s book, saying that while he initially was skeptical of the project when Beeber contacted him for an interview, he eventually acquiesced and actually liked the final product.

Lenny Kaye covered much of the same territory as Beeber’s book, adding strictly musical parallels too: “I mean, ‘ma-neesh-ta-nah’ has a really great hook!” he said. But in a separate interview, Kaye was more cautious in his endorsement. “I don’t want to make more of it than it is,” he said of the Jewish-punk link.
Kaye argued that punk was borne from outcasts who went searching for an identity, not ones with identities already in hand. And if punk’s arty intellectualism somehow mirrored a Jewish kind, braininess was not the point of his music at least. “As a musician, I try to cut through the rational part of my mind,” he said. “I’m not an intellectual player.”

The panel’s star though was unquestionably Manitoba, the most outspoken about his Jewish sense of self. He talked about his famous Jew-fro (which, if still it exists, lies buried beneath a black bandana), vacations in the Catskills, Russ & Daughters pickles and his love of baseball, “the most Jewish thing about me.”

If there was one clearly defined way Manitoba’s Jewishness influenced his music, he said, it was through his showmanship. He even jumped into a little Jackie Mason routine when Kaye posed the question about rituals: “Should we go up? Should we go down? No wait,” he said about how he used to react to chants for an encore.

But again, Chris Stein denied the connection, while at the same time seeming to prove it. From behind his black sunglasses, which he kept on the entire time, he said, “I’m really hard-pressed to say that my Jewishness has anything to do with my music,” adding, “It’s another fact about people who tend to analyze the s--- out of everything.”

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