Book Review

The Heebie-Jeebies at CBGB's:

A Secret History of Jewish Punk

by Steven Lee Beeber

Manhattan’s Lower East Side at the turn of the twentieth century housed a large population of Jewish immigrants, most of them living in tenements. By the 1970s, the Lower East Side, due to low rents and high crime, became a haven for artists and musicians. The streets there were rough and the music that grew out of that atmosphere came to be known as punk rock. The center of this scene was a biker bar named CBGB, owned by a Jewish man named Hilly Kristal. Few historians or journalists have drawn a direct connection between the old Jewish slums and the first wave of punk so Steven Lee Beeber does just that in The Heebie-Jeebies at CBGB’s: A Secret History of Jewish Punk.

From the beginning, Beeber, a Jewish writer himself, defines what he considers to be the essence of Jewishness and then proceeds to demonstrate how this cultural trait had a direct influence on the rise of punk and the form it took. He starts by naming comedian Lenny Bruce as the patron saint of Jewish punk. Bruce embodies this essence which Beeber describes as being coarse in mannerism, ironic, transgressive, socially progressive, culturally hybrid, and humorous with an eye towards sharp social observation and critique. Lenny Bruce was all about pushing the boundaries of convention in order to hold a mirror up to society regardless of how uncomfortable that could be. This got him into a lot of trouble. According to Beeber, this attitudinal stance is characteristic of Jewish Americans and he proceeds to examine the ways in which this essence manifested in the punk scene of the 1970s.

Before getting to the musicians, the author covers the influence of Jews behind the scenes in the likes of rock journalists, business owners, band managers, song writers, and record producers. Managing culture from the wings and in the background is another characteristic that Beeber brings up as a trait of American Jewishness. It is the kind of thing that idiot conspiracy theorists will cite as evidence that sinister Jews run the world and the author does not examine this at all. It is safe to say that the Jewish author of this book isn’t suggesting anything of the sort though.

The chapter on Lou Reed, lead member of the massively influential Velvet Underground, establishes another aspect of Jewish-American identity, that of the outsider, a trait that fueled the energies of punk in a potent way. Lou Reed himself was a chronic outsider, being unable to relate to his Jewish family as well as the larger American society. His struggles with being bisexual made his outsider status that much more prominent and painful too since his parents made him get shock therapy to cure him of his possible homosexual tendencies which were considered a mental illness in the 1960s. Reed was young at the time and actually not entirely sure if he really was gay, making it all that much worse. While in The Velvet Underground, he felt he had found some acceptance as a member of Andy Warhol’s Factory scene, but the other people there belittled him for being Jewish. It’s no surprise that Lou Reed earned a reputation for being prickly and stand-offish in the 1970s. And here a sub-theme to this book gets introduced since anti-Semistism and Jewishness ran along parallel lines as punk developed into a full-blown genre of rock.

Other early chapters bring the Jewish traits of punk out into the open as Beeber writes about synth-punk pioneers Suicide with their intimidating and confrontational musical stance, Boston’s Jonathan Richman who also brought a heavy element of anxiety into his outsider brand of rock, and Lenny Kaye who worked as a journalist and guitar player for Patti Smith. But the theme of the book really comes out in its full strength in the chapters on The Dictators and The Ramones.

The almost all-Jewish Dictators, fronted by Handsome Dick Manitoba, began as a joke band. The lyrics on their first album were full of self-effacing humor and macho posturing that was calculated to both celebrate and overcome the stereotype of Jewish men being nerdy intellectuals by embracing lowbrow culture and hyper-aggressive street gang toughness. They wanted to prove they were more like Meyer Lansky and less like Woody Allen without letting anyone forget that underneath it all, they were a bunch of Jewish comedians anyhow. Outside of the punk scene in New York though, no one seemed to get the joke.

The Ramones did something similar. Drummer Tommy Ramone, the son of Hungarian Jewish immigrants, formed a band with Johnny and Joey Ramone. The latter was the older brother of Johnny’s high school friend. Joey was Jewish himself, overly tall and skinny due to a congenital bone disease that made him both awkward and intimidating. He also suffered from mental illness, making him the ultimate example of punk in the Jewish sense as Beeber describes it. But there was a strange contradiction at the heart of The Ramones; while Tommy and Joey were both Jewish, Johnny and Dee Dee were political conservatives who collected Nazi memorabilia. The connection between punk’s Jewishness and its parallel tendency towards anti-Semitism and Nazi fetishism is taken up in a later chapter. Beeber comes up with some plausible, if underdeveloped, explanations for why Jewish punks and Nazi fetishists could ironically exist in the same space while holding the punk scene together. He sees The Ramones as emblematic of this condition even though he never examines it from the other side, making no commentary on why the punks who wore swastikas saw no problem in socializing in a music scene with such a heavy Jewish presence.

After that, this book begins to fall apart. The chapter on Richard Hell is weak. After Beeber contacted Hell and asked him for his input, Hell told him that even though he had a Jewish father, he didn’t identify as Jewish since he was raised in a secular family without any emphasis on his ethnic background. Beeber can’t accept this as he sets out to prove that there is some kind of Jewishness present in Hell’s music. It feels like Beeber wrote the whole chapter to berate Hell for not honoring his ancestry. Hell himself doesn’t deny being Jewish or even feeling ashamed of it; he just isn’t interested in it and can’t relate to it. Beeber can’t just let him be what he is and delves into Hell’s artistic archive in search of something Jewish to prove that Hell really does have a Jewish essence. At this point, Beeber’s concept of Jewishness becomes arbitrary and petty.

The chapters on Chris Stein of Blondie and Jewish women in punk are even worse. Chris Stein is an interesting case because he is Jewish but also collects Nazi memorabilia. Beeber mentions this briefly but spends most of the chapter writing about his wife Debbie Harry who he insists on calling a shiksa. Without any in-depth explanation as to why Stein’s marriage to a non-Jewish woman is of any importance to this narrative, the chapter doesn’t amount to much.

The chapter on women is spotty too. He writes about Genya Ravan whose band wasn’t connected to the punk scene. Her only real contribution to punk involved her producing the first Dead Boys album. When they showed up to the studio wearing swastikas, Ravan, a survivor of the Holocaust, lectured them about how offensive that was and those nasty boys obediently took them off before they started recording their album Young Loud and Snotty. He also writes about Helen Wheels who was a minor player in the CBGB scene. Then Beeber brings Madonna into the discussion even though she was neither punk nor Jewish, but he applauds her because she did become fascinated with the kabbalah in her later years. Then the Riot Grrl movement gets a few paragraphs , even though none of those musicians were Jewish. He says they were honorary Jews because of their punk attitude though. And this is a problem I have with political correctness. The author feels he is obligated to include a chapter on women just because that is expected of authors these days, but Jewish women didn’t play a prominent role in the early days of punk so we get a sloppy chapter that doesn’t mean much of anything as a result. It would have been better, and more honest, to just accept that early punk women weren’t Jews and leave the useless chapter out.

Then there is a passage about punk in England. The Jewish band manager Malcolm McLaren and influential fashion designer Vivienne Westwood get good write ups. Sid Vicious’s Jewish girlfriends Nancy Spungeon also gets her story told right up until the murder.

So is The Heebie-Jeebies at CBGB’s a glass that is half empty or half full? I’d prefer to say it is both at the same time. Half of the chapters are well-written and half aren’t. I think Steven Lee Beeber made a mistake in his approach by trying to state a thesis and then following up by defending it. The result is an attempt to twist information to make it suit his argument which doesn’t always work. Things get pretty messy when he writes about Jewish punks that don’t quite fit into his theory. Also he doesn’t comprehend that non-Jews and members of other ethnic groups might share the same qualities of Jewishness that he outlines. I can accept that Jewish attitudes had a lot to do with the directions that punk went in, especially in regards to the outsider status, sense of humor, and social commentary. Beeber obviously wrote this out of a sense of pride in his heritage and he is entitled to that, but the result is some valuable insights alongside a lot of dreck. More importantly, it provides a new angle on understanding Jewish cultural history as much as it does a new angle on punk, particularly in the greater New York City area. I think the book works better as an homage to the oversize presence of Jews in rock and roll and American counter-cultures though.

 

Book Review

Hasidism: A New History

by David Biale et al

     If you’ve ever been to New York, be it upstate, downstate, or in the city itself, you have no doubt encountered Hasidic Jews at some time. Due to their distinctive clothing they are hard not to notice. Sooner or later, curiosity gets the better of us and we start to wonder who these people are and what they are all about. Answers are not always easy to come by. There are not many books written about the Hasidim and your average person isn’t well informed. Therefore, the acclaimed Jewish historian David Biale and a team of seven other scholars put together this 800 page cement block of a tome called Hasidism: A New History. Despite its size, it is an accessible book that should answer a lot of questions that any curious person might have about this enigmatic community.

As it should, this historical account begins with the founding of the movement. In the 1700s, there was a Jewish scholar named Israel Ba’al Shem Tov who lived in the Polish-Lithuanian Federation encompassing what is now Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine. Israel Ba’al Shem Tov was a scholar of the kabbalah and a tsaddik which is something like a Jewish shaman. His practice emphasized trances, ecstatic prayer, singing, dancing, and the experience of devekut, a mystical union with God. He actually had no intention of starting a religious movement. He was simple a scholar who, at various times in his life, attracted other like-minded scholars of The Torah and other Jewish texts. Many of these scholars returned to their communities and shared their newfound knowledge with others and groups, known as Hasidim, began to form into courts around each tsaddik. The tsaddiks were elevated to the status of rebbes, which, if I understand correctly, are strong authority figures who guide their court’s beliefs, practices, and lifestyles. Membership in these Hasidic communities was initially limited to men only. Each Hasidic court operated independently of the others and they all varied from one another on matters of doctrine and ritual. Sometimes this led to conflict between competing Hasidic courts.

Another source of conflict came from other members of the Eastern European Jewish communities who came to be known as the Mitnaggdim. Since most of the Hasidim were illiterate, they never wrote down their own history so what we know about them came from the Mitnaggdim who wrote books and pamphlets in opposition to the new movement. Therefore it is up to the scholar to sort out what is fact and what is derogatory propaganda. When the Mitnaggdim characterized the Hasidim as a bunch of drunken, Dionysian revelers, we can’t dismiss the allegation entirely. Since the Hasidim practiced devekut through singing, dancing, and ecstatic ritual prayer, you can say that Hasidim valued experience over intellectualism. The Hasidim were not necessarily anti-intellectual; it is just that they valued communal ritual practice over scholarship and attention to Jewish law which is what differentiates them from other strains of Orthodox Judaism to this day.

As time went on, the tsaddiks got older and passed their leadership roles down to their sons so that dynasties were formed. These dynasties were named after their places of origin so when we hear names like Chabad-Lubavitch, Chernobyl, Ger, Belz, and others we can trace back the lineage to the location and rebbe of its first court.

The authors characterize the nineteenth century as the Golden Age of Hasidism. That was the time when the movement spread outside of Poland-Lithuania into Russia and the Austro-Hungarian territories. As they gathered momentum, they picked up new members along the way. The Hasidim were primarily rural people who survived by farming. With the invention of the railroad, pilgrimages to visit Hasidic courts became more frequent and these annual journeys became the high points of many adherents’ lives. All the while, the borders of the Hasidic community were porous so that some Jews attended the courts without being full-fledged members. Some Hasidim moved from court to court, sometimes belonging to two or more at the same time. Gentiles sometimes found themselves attracted to the courts as well and were known for seeking out medical aid, the blessing of talismans, or simple spiritual advice from nearby tsaddiks.

Of course, this burst of energy led to an eventual decline as Modernism set in. Impoverished Jews were forced to move to cities to live where they encountered more cosmopolitan ideas including socialism, anarchism, Zionism, and reformed Judaism. The Hasdic courts were decimated, but what remained became a bulwark of anti-modernity and a haven for traditional, and some would say reactionary and backwards, forms of Judaism.

Then came the two World Wars and the Holocaust. The authors don’t dwell too long on the Holocaust and for good reason. We all know what happened there and giving fine details about that nightmare wouldn’t lend much of value to the intentions of this history. What they do go into in great detail is how the Holocaust effected the Hasidim, the ways in which it influenced their self-concept as a religious movement, and what it did to change the structures of their communities. Of other great importance is the mass emigration of Hasidim to America and Israel. The most surprising thing to be learned from this book is that many Hasidim, even those who live in Israel, are anti-Zionist. The reasoning behind this is sufficiently explained but still a little hard to grasp for those of us who are outside the community. The experience of their immigration to America is entirely different. Not only are they now forced to live as an anti-modernist movement in a modernist society, but it is a multicultural society as well, a fact that has hurt and helped the Hasidim in many ways. But at the end of it all, the authors demonstrate how the American experience has been a great blessing to the Hasidim because it is the place where they have been able to thrive unlike any other place they have been in the world.

What is really impressive about this book is that it is so easy to follow. With eight different authors, you would expect it to vary in quality and style from chapter to chapter, but that just isn’t the case. The writing is consistent in its pacing and clarity all the way through. Even some of the more esoteric aspects of things like the kabbalah, theodicy, and devekut are explained with enough skill to make them comprehensible to those of us who aren’t so familiar with what they are. The tone is also as neutral as possible; the authors don’t exoticize the Hasidim like a species of strange animal nor do they judge them. They simple describe them and leave it at that. The biggest problem with the book is that it doesn’t provide enough of an insider’s point of view. As a reader, it made me feel like I was voyeuristically watching the Hasidim from a distance through a pair of binoculars. But this is a history book and not a work of social science. To get a better understanding of the experience of Hasidic ritual and practice, I found some good documentaries on the internet to supplement my reading. Some of the Hasidim are incredibly talented musicians and singers.

If you are not a member of the Hasidic community and you want to know what these people are all about, Hasidim: A New History is possibly the best place to start. Not only is it informative about who the Hasidim are, but I think it also goes a long way in explaining what it might be like to be an ethnic or religious minority in America. In conclusion, while I can’t speak for the Hasidim themselves, I do think they could benefit with a little more outreach to other Americans outside their community. It is true that some members of Chabad-Lubavitch are making some attempts at this, I know because I have spoken with a couple of them myself, but we are living in dangerous times when anti-Semitism is on the rise and the Hasidim mark themselves out visually as an American Other. This makes them a prime target for scapegoating by the more ignorant members of our society. As the Crown Heights Affair of 1992 proved, sometimes being the Other in America is not so easy. We should all make an effort to tolerate those who are different from us, but sometimes you have to be the one to initiate that first step. In the end I get the impression that the Hasidim are just a bunch of harmless, regular people like the rest of us. They just happen to live by a different set of rules. Besides, they dedicate their lives to the experience of joy. Shouldn’t that be a part of all our lives anyways?