Punk, and Jewish: Rockers Explore Identity

NYT [see original for additional media]
June 13, 2009
Punk, and Jewish: Rockers Explore Identity
By RALPH BLUMENTHAL

Who knew?

Punk is Jewish.

Or, anyway, these fellows are: Tommy Ramone, Chris Stein, Lenny Kaye and Handsome Dick Manitoba, four New York godfathers of punk who packed an auditorium 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 Mr. Ramone, born Tamás Erdélyi 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 connection there indisputably is, Steven Lee Beeber argued 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,” Mr. 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 at 15 West 16th Street — “Loud Fast Jews,” as YIVO billed them — Mr. Ramone, 60; Mr. Stein, 59, of Blondie; Mr. Kaye, 62, of the Patti Smith Group; and Mr. Manitoba, 55, né Richard Blum, bar owner, radio host and lead singer of the Dictators.

The program raised some eyebrows at the Jewish institute, said YIVO’s cultural director, Harold Steinblatt, a former Guitar World editor.

But Mr. 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 Mr. 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, allowed Mr. 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.”

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

“The sensitivity thing is a difficult subject,” he added. But the Dictators’ stage persona “has nothing to do with Nazis or people’s pain.” Instead, he said, it had everything to do with snotty young New Yorkers “doing it to get attention.”

Mr. Kaye said, “Sometimes, using forbidden imagery makes it your own.”

He added, “Punk rock really took a lot of symbols and turned them on their back.”

Either way, the uglier trappings were not to be taken seriously, Mr. Kaye said. “The Dictators were humorous in some ways.”

Mr. Manitoba rose up in mock protest. “What do you mean ‘in some ways’?” he said.

Like Jews elsewhere, the four represented varying degrees of Jewishness. Mr. Manitoba recalled losing his place reading his portion of the Torah at his bar mitzvah. “After the bar mitzvah?” he said. “I bought a pound of pot.”

Mr. Ramone said he attended a yeshiva of the Lubavitch Hasidim in Brooklyn, “but I really didn’t fit in — there were no girls in the class.”

Mr. Stein, who grew up in Flatbush, Brooklyn, said: “Religious affiliation didn’t mean anything to me and my friends. I’d be hard pressed to think ethnicity has something to do with my music.”

Mr. Kaye said he was “raised traditional,” but later went to synagogue only on the holidays.

“Actually,” interjected Mr. Manitoba in a burst of clarity, “several pounds of pot.”

Many of the 250 in the audience thronged the foursome afterward, soliciting autographs. “This was fantastic,” said Fritz Freidenberg, 49, a musician from Los Angeles wearing the T-shirt of his band, the Bloody Brains. Before the show Mr. Freidenberg had not known of the group’s collective heritage.

“I knew that Tommy was Jewish, that’s all,” he said.

Shari Saffioti, 52, a graphic designer who worked at Max’s Kansas City in the early days of punk, said she was thrilled to learn of the Jewish roots of punk. “Nobody really knew other of us were around,” she said. “We felt like oddballs. It turns out there are so many.”