I caught up with Somerville writer Steven Beeber, author of Heebie-Jeebies at CBGB’s: A Secret History of Jewish Punk. This study of the intersection of Punk Rock and Jewish culture must make for a very interesting read. I don’t know if any Punk Rock dirges have made it into a hymnal yet or can be interpreted through Talmudic Law … but hey, as the Bard wrote, “Ah, Sweet mystery of life.”

Doug Holder: How has living in Somerville been for your writing life. Do you think it is a good place for creatives?

Steven Beeber.

Steven Beeber: Somerville is an excellent place to be a writer. I’ve heard it said that there are more writers here per capita than anywhere else in the country. I’m not sure that’s true – I’m not a statistician – but I do know that in a field that can often be lonely and isolating, that there is a genuine community here, which is so important. It’s not Paris in the ‘20s, maybe, but the cafes are plentiful and the gatherings regular, so it isn’t far off. Also, my wife and I both have writing “sheds” in our backyard, so that’s yet another plus. On a more serious note, it should be said that the institutional support from the city itself is amazing. The Somerville Arts Council, among other institutions, is pivotal to providing not just support, but a forum in which writers can reach an audience.

DH: How in the world is Jewish culture reflected in, of all things, Punk Rock?

SB: Jewish culture, as opposed to Judaism the religion, is deeply embedded in Punk, especially the original version of Punk that came out of New York City. Needless to say, New York is home to many Jews, and this was especially true in the 1950s and ‘60s, the period during which the Punks came of age. The character of Jewish culture – ironic, humorous, attuned to the injustices inflicted upon the marginalized – is all but synonymous with Punk. Add to that a preoccupation with neurosis, anxiety, and, above all, Nazis, and you have all the ingredients to birth a new rock movement. Ultimately, I would say that Punk was a reaction to the Holocaust by the first generation that was raised in its aftermath.

DH: Did the Ramones, John Zorn, Lou Reed, the Dictators, etc., ever talk extensively about their Jewish background in regard to their music?

SB: Only John Zorn did before I approached them about my book. His Radical Jewish Culture movement took the unspoken elements of NY Punk to an explicit level, which makes sense since he is categorized as Post-Punk more than Punk. But in regard to the others, all of them did speak about their backgrounds extensively on record for my book.

Tommy Ramone (born Tamas Erdelyi), for instance, was raised in anti-Semitic Hungary until coming to NY as a child, and his idea for what became the Ramones bore all the hallmarks of his conflicted feelings about being an outsider. In many ways, Tommy was the mastermind behind the band, the original manager who insisted that they look and behave a certain way, the one who came up with their signature drum sound and joined the band because no one else could be taught to play it, the one who, most pivotally, insisted against the other members protests, that Joey be the lead singer. While Dee Dee and Johnny felt that Joey was the opposite of what a rock star should look like, Tommy knew that it was this very quality that made Joey perfect. As I say in my book, this look was about as Jewish as it could be, to the point where Joey could have passed for an anti-Semitic caricature in the official Nazi newspaper Der Sturmer.

In regard to The Dictators – all of whom were Jewish – the lead singer, Handsome Dick Manitoba, and the original songwriter, Richard Meltzer, were especially forthcoming about the connection, though others such as the producer, Sandy Pearlman – of “Mo cowbell” fame – and lead guitarist and band founder, Andy Shernoff, were clearly influenced by their backgrounds.

Lou Reed, of course, wrote indirectly about his Jewishness from the beginning and more explicitly about it near the end. The Black Angel’s Death Song, from the Velvet Underground’s debut, appears to be about the killing fields of Holocaust-ravaged Poland, and Egg Cream, from one of his last albums, extolls the magic of that “Jewish elixir” that was so much a part of his New York Jewish boyhood. Reed also took part annually in the gathering known as The Downtown Seder, a hip Passover gathering organized by the Knitting Factory founder Michael Dorf, in which Reed would read from the traditional Four Questions the one attributed to the Wicked Child.

Many other members of the Punk scene also spoke at length about their Jewish backgrounds, including, among others, Lenny Kaye of The Patti Smith Group, Tuli Kupferberg of The Fugs, Alan Vega of Suicide, and Punk manager and impresario, Danny Fields, to whom Legs McNeil dedicates his oral history of Punk, Please Kill Me. My book, The Heebie-Jeebies at CBGB’s: A Secret History of Jewish Punk, contains profiles based on extensive interviews with almost every early Punk rocker of importance.

DH: The Punk Rock scene originated in the Lower East Side of New York City, once the home of many Jewish immigrants in the early part of the last century. This was fertile ground for the Jews starting out in America. How did this neighborhood help to birth this new genre of rock music?

SB: I actually published an essay about this very subject in a collection called Jews: A People’s History of the Lower East Side. In it, I posited that the LES was pivotal to the burgeoning Punk scene. Hilly Kristal – born Hillel Kristal on a Zionist Socialist collective in New Jersey – chose that location for CBGB, the club that became ground zero for the scene.

Tuli (Naphtali) Kupferberg of The Fugs and Lou Reed of The Velvet Underground both performed there regularly during the late ‘60s when future punks such as Chris Stein of Blondie religiously went to see them. Tuli remained there most of his life, and Richard Hell (Richard Meyers) fled there from anti-Semitic Lexington, Kentucky as a teenager. I could go on, but the bottom-line is that many of those who laid the groundwork for Punk and many of those who brought it to fruition, both lived and worked there, and even if they didn’t, they were influenced by its volatile mix of gritty urban drama and theatrical liberal schmaltz. It’s no mistake that CGBG was within spitting distance of Ratners, Katz’s and the Second Avenue Deli.

DH: I am Jewish, and have a weakness for the Concord, Grossinger’s style of Jewish Borscht Belt humor. How did this play out in this music scene?

SB: The Borscht Belt is at the heart of everything. The Punk rockers as teens idolized Lenny Bruce, who began in that world before becoming too risqué to continue there. But other Borscht Belt comics, while tamer on the surface – at least in terms of four-letter words – still held the same attitudes as Bruce and dealt with them in the same way. So much of Borscht Belt humor is a coded attack on the mores of polite society, a sendup of the stuffy, hypocritical world in which Jews found themselves.

Think, in an earlier era, Groucho doing his number on society doyenne Margaret Dumont. At the same time, this humor was also self-directed, a way of defusing the attack through self-deprecation that at times hinted at genuine internalized self-loathing. Jerry Lewis and his arrested development act, Henry Youngman and his “take my wife, please.” Groucho himself and his, “I wouldn’t belong to any club that would have me as a member.” Remember too, though, that Groucho is also renowned for his reply to a restricted club that denied his half-Jewish daughter admittance: “If she keeps out of the water from the waist up, maybe you could let her in the pool?”

DH: I don’t know if my old Rabbi would agree with your thesis. Has the book been used for serious study in the Jewish academy?

SB: Yes. But I wouldn’t say it’s limited to the Jewish academy. I have been asked to speak on the topic at conferences and universities around the world, and in fact am pretty well known in Germany. You know the phrase, “I’m big in Japan?” I often say I’m big in the other former Axis power.