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New York institute examines Jewish roots of punk music

Who knew? Punk is Jewish.

Or at least these fellows are: Tommy Ramone, Chris Stein, Lenny Kaye and Handsome Dick Manitoba, four New York godfathers of punk who packed an auditorium on Thursday night at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research to excavate the unlikely roots of the rebellious and stripped-down 1970s rock genre replete with fascist trappings.

“People don’t associate punk rock and Jews,” acknowledged Ramone, born Tamas Erdelyi in Budapest.

He is the sole survivor of the Ramones, whose other members — Joey, Johnny and Dee Dee — he joined in taking the same stage name.

Yet the connection is indisputable, Steven Lee Beeber wrote in his 2006 book Heebie-Jeebies at CBGB’s, subtitled A Secret History of Jewish Punk.

“The shpilkes, the nervous energy of punk, is Jewish,” Beeber wrote. “Punk reflects the whole Jewish history of oppression and uncertainty, flight and wandering, belonging and not belonging, always being divided, being in and out, good and bad, part and apart.”

Punk’s New York origins as a do-it-yourself, three-chorded return to music basics — and a fashion style and attitude — were no accident, said Richard Bienstock, a senior editor at Guitar World magazine who curated the forum.

“It’s New York,” he said, “and anything that starts here, there’s a good chance Jews are involved.”

So there they were onstage, “Loud Fast Jews,” as YIVO billed them: Ramone, 60; Stein, 59, of Blondie; Kaye, 62, of the Patti Smith Group; and Manitoba, 55, né Richard Blum, radio host and lead singer of the Dictators.

The program raised some eyebrows at the Jewish institute, said YIVO cultural director Harold Steinblatt, a former Guitar World editor. But Manitoba dismissed concerns.

“You can do what you want with your own people,” he said. “It’s the law of the playground.”

And if at times the byplay seemed to take on the zaniness of Spinal Tap — one questioner misheard Kaye’s reference to “the germination of punk” as “the German nation of punk” — there was also a serious issue in contention: How did Jewish punk rockers defend their use of Nazi symbols and other shock imagery?

It was a complex matter, said Ramone, who had family members who were killed in the Holocaust.

“To bring forbidden things, horrible things, and make art of it was basically an artistic thing,” he said. “There’s an aesthetic effect when you take your deepest fears and try to get a grasp on it and try to make humor out of it.”

Manitoba conceded doubts.

“I cried at Schindler’s List,” he said. “I don’t like to think I caused pain with Master Race Rock.”

But the Dictators’ stage persona “has nothing to do with Nazis or people’s pain,” he said.

Instead, he said, it had everything to do with snotty young New Yorkers.

“Sometimes, using forbidden imagery makes it your own,” Kaye said. “Punk rock really took a lot of symbols and turned them on their back.”
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