Jewish Punks Embrace Nazi Rhetoric and Imagery

May 14, 2008

by Michael Croland  

“Just where are the limits of taste and irony here? And what should they be? Must a depraved crime always lead to such depraved artistic responses? Can such art mirror evil and remain free of evil’s stench?”

—James E. Young, “Looking Back Into the Mirrors of Evil”¹

A half-heeb from Holland, Guy Tavares hoped to use his musical—Cohen, Blood, Speed, and Sperm—to talk about multiracial, swastika-worshipping, drugged-out punks.² When the film failed to materialize, Tavares salvaged the score for the most logical venue for a Jewish punk using Nazi symbolism: a punk rock band.

“We love to take the piss of both Nazis and anti-Nazis—les extremes se touchent [the extremes touch each other]!” says Tavares, frontman of Johnny Cohen and the New Age Nazis.³ The group, which disbanded in 2004, features controversial but catchy lyrics such as “A-D-O-L-F P-A / Adolf was a piss artist / OK!” and “We are [expletive] Neo-Aryans, the rock ‘n’ roll master race.”^4,5,6

Tavares’ band, which also goes by the name Johnny Cohen and the Jewish Defense League, is not the first Jewish punk band to flirt with Nazi rhetoric and imagery. Tavares was inspired by fellow Dutch punk-rockers The Jiddische Hitlerjugend [The Yiddish Hitler Youth], and the punk scene’s connection between Jews and Nazi symbols dates back to punk’s early days.⁷

In the Beginning

Since its origins in the 1970s, the punk scene has prominently featured many Jews. Many of those Jews and their bands have had a striking fascination with Nazi symbolism. The first well-known punk in France was Serge Gainsbourg (a Jew by the name of Lucien Ginzburg), whose album Rock Around the Bunker featured song titles like “Yellow Star” and “SS in Uruguay” and lyrics such as “We’re gonna dance the Nazi rock.”^8,9 Similarly, “Master Race Rock” appeared on the debut album of New York’s The Dictators, a mostly Jewish band hailed as pioneers of punk rock.¹⁰ Even New York’s The Ramones and England’s The Sex Pistols were in on the act.

The Ramones exemplify what Australian cultural studies professor Jon Stratton has identified as the “Jew/Nazi dyad in punk bands.”¹¹ Stratton contends that many glam and punk bands contained a Jewish member and “a member who was fascinated by the Nazi era.”¹² In addition to Jews Joey Ramone (Jeffry Hyman) on vocals and Tommy Ramone (Tamas Erdelyi, who was born in post-WWII Hungary and lost most of his family in the Holocaust) on drums, The Ramones included bassist Dee Dee Ramone (Douglas Colvin).¹³ The band’s lineup was a recipe for conflict.

How is it that a band conceived of by a Jew (Tommy) and fronted by one (Joey) could be protested by an anti-racist organization for “fascist ideology”?¹⁴ The son of a U.S. soldier stationed in Germany, Dee Dee spent much of his youth there.¹⁵ He developed a fascination with Nazi regalia, which he searched war fields for and sold to visiting American soldiers as souvenirs. Dee Dee changed the name of the song “Animal Hop” to “Blitzkrieg Bop,” in addition to changing Tommy’s line “They’re shouting in the back now” to “Shoot ’em in the back now.”¹⁶ In the Ramones song “Commando,” a lyric Dee Dee came up with was to follow “the laws of Germany,” whereas Tommy’s lyric was to “eat kosher salami.”¹⁷ To his credit, Dee Dee did help Joey write the song “Bonzo Goes to Bitburg,” which criticized President Ronald Reagan’s scandalous visit to a German military cemetery.¹⁸

In Everett True’s biography of The Ramones, Hey Ho Let’s Go, Tommy commented that he was “very disturbed” by the Nazi overtones in Dee Dee’s lyrics and said he was “sure it must have hurt us tremendously.”¹⁹ True notes that Seymour Stein, The Ramones’ record executive, also was not pleased. “You can’t throw away 20 years of Jewish upbringing in Brooklyn, nor would I want to,” Stein said in Hey Ho Let’s Go.²⁰

Although there were no Jews in The Sex Pistols, the group essentially had a “Jew/Nazi dyad” structure. Bassist Sid Vicious infamously wore clothing with swastikas. And the band’s Jewish manager, Malcolm McLaren, was enamored with the swastika—a symbol used by many in the punk scene for purposes including rebellion, shock value, the nihilistic negation of meaning, and a way to demonstrate that the evil of the Nazis was still alive.^{21,22,23,24,25} The Sex Pistols song “Belsen Was a Gas” is an offensive, juvenile song about the Holocaust and a musical depiction of the Nazi imagery touted by Vicious and McLaren.²⁶

How significant was McLaren’s influence on punk? As Paul Taylor wrote in Impresario: Malcolm McLaren & The British New Wave, “Malcolm McLaren didn’t invent punk. All he did was envisage it, design it, clothe it, publicize it and sell it.”²⁷ McLaren picked up many ideas about punk from his involvement in the brewing New York punk scene in the early 1970s, and he sold punk fashion at his London store, Sex, in the mid-’70s.²⁸ The store sold patches and shirts with swastikas, SS handkerchiefs, and Gestapo buddy rings.^29,30 That’s not what most people would expect from a bar mitzvahed boy who attended a private Jewish school for six years.³¹

“Malcolm was in awe of the symbolism,” said a former Sex employee in Jon Savage’s England’s Dreaming.³² “Not just the swastika, but a lot of artifacts from that era. The Nazi Youth badges. They were extremely rare. He had a lot of rings, including gold SS wedding rings, which weren’t for sale because they were originals.”

Why? Two Jews, Four Opinions

Tavares doesn’t think it’s all that unusual that Jewish punks play around with the Holocaust. To begin with, he knows who the butt of Johnny Cohen and the New Age Nazis’ jokes are. “When Nazi skins come to our shows, they understand it’s them who are being ridiculized!” says Tavares.³³

Tavares finds the style of humor inherent in Jewish punks’ Holocaust rhetoric consistent with longstanding Jewish traditions. “That typical self-irony of the ‘Judenwitz’ exists for centuries and is of course a way of dealing with all the hardship of anti-Semitism. You can cry about it, but you can also laugh it away,” says Tavares.³⁴ Jefferson Chase—author of a book about Judenwitz, a genre of Jewish humor that relied heavily on irony and was popular in 19th century German Jewish literature—has noted that “the very mode of discourse that was most attractive to [leading Judenwitz writers] turned out to be precisely that which provoked extreme unease and hostility among all those anxious in the face of change.”³⁵ Chase’s assessment of Judenwitz makes it sound like a cousin of punk.

According to author Steven Lee Beeber, the lens to view all this is neither comedy nor seriousness, but rather camp.³⁶ In The Heebie-Jeebies at CBGB’s: A Secret History of Jewish Punk, Beeber refers to essayist Susan Sontag’s analysis of camp art, and he applies it to Jewish punks’ use of Nazi imagery—under the banner “concentration camp.”³⁷ Art that depends on irony, camp, and deliberately bad taste may offend for the sake of shock, but it is not meant to hurt. Sontag calls camp “the sensibility of failed seriousness,” and Beeber says that bands using concentration camp “were making clear the ‘failed seriousness’ of [Nazi] symbols and the risks.” Sontag professes that camp says that in addition to good taste and bad taste, there is “a good taste of bad taste.” Beeber says that in accordance with concentration camp, there’s also “the bad taste of so-called good.” Sontag claims, “Camp is a solvent of morality. It neutralizes moral indignation, sponsors playfulness.” Beeber contends that concentration camp is an example of “reveling in tearing down the symbols of oppression.” If one accepts Beeber’s assessment of concentration camp, Jewish punks’ Holocaust rhetoric is amoral, not immoral.

There may be a psychological explanation for some Jewish punks’ skewed worldview as it pertains to the Holocaust. In The Heebie-Jeebies at CBGB’s, Beeber noted that quite a few of the Jewish punks he interviewed remembered from their childhood that a Holocaust survivor—with number identification tattooed on his or her arm—worked at the neighborhood candy store.^38,39 In the book, Beeber explains: 

It’s the ultimate irony, in other words, the intersection of the bitterest individual with the sweetest innocent memory of childhood. … To put it otherwise, the Holocaust survivor terrifying the children as she hands them caramels and pixie sticks symbolizes a certain kind of New York experience. … She’s a contestant in a freak show about the world’s horrors, a flip-side to the fun in the Ramones’ blitzkrieg bop. A punk rock nightmare.

Some Jewish punks may have trouble viewing the Holocaust in a typical manner because their personal connections to it were bittersweet and distorted.

Jewish punks have kept the tradition alive with Holocaust commentary that ranges from entertaining to empowering, with plenty of ambiguity in between. In the animated video for “They Tried to Kill Us. They Failed. Let’s Eat!,” Australian band Yidcore portrayed Adolf Hitler as “Pigler” and glorified his destruction into a sausage by Jewish concentration camp prisoners (portrayed as factory-farmed chickens).⁴⁰ While hardcore band Sons of Abraham generally takes a tongue-in-cheek approach to Jewish shtick, it’s hard to know what the band was aiming for in the song “What Brings May Flowers?,” which features the screamed lyrics “We sit in the death camps to sort out the past!”⁴¹ Legendary punk quartet NOFX, which features two Jewish members, has awkwardly commemorated the Holocaust in the songs “Re-gaining Unconsciousness” and “Zyclone B Bathhouse.”⁴² And NOFX fantasized about the notion of tough Jewish skinheads in “The Brews.”

California-based Jewdriver has taken the Jewish skinhead joke to another level. Jewdriver, which features Jews on vocals and guitar, is a Jewish parody of iconic neo-Nazi skinheads Skrewdriver.⁴³ Although some of the band’s songs have nothing to do with Skrewdriver, Jewdriver’s “Our Blame Is Goyim Glee” and “Hail the Jew Gong” are nonsensical parodies of Skrewdriver’s hate-filled songs “Our Pride Is Our Loyalty” and “Hail the New Dawn,” respectively.^44,45 Jewdriver’s singer goes by the stage name “Ian Stuartstein,” a takeoff on Skrewdriver frontman Ian Stuart. The liner notes for a Jewdriver album quip that Stuartstein found the band’s drummer “sitting in the middle of a Star of David painted in the blood of Adolf Hitler and [SS officer Josef] Mengele.”⁴⁶

On a parody Web site of the parody band, a mock site for the international skinhead group Blood & Honour, the site’s creator included fictional song titles for a non-existent Jewdriver album.⁴⁷ Examples include “Sieg Heil, Unserem Führer, Sharon!,” “I Was Killed in a Gas Chamber, so Give Me $100000000!!!,” “Skinheads Jerusalem,” and “Jew Pride.” Some of these song titles are appalling and presumably wouldn’t be performed by a Jewish band, yet others are right on target. Where does one draw the line?

“We are not a tribute band nor a cover band [for Skrewdriver], we are a parody band. Anyone that thinks Jews could cover or tribute a Nazi band really must be out of their minds,” commented Stuartstein on a Jewish music blog.⁴⁸

But is it so crazy to think that Jews could pay tribute to a Nazi band? When some Jewish punks deal with the Holocaust in a playful and edgy manner, isn’t it only a matter of time before they fall over the edge, justifying their artistic statement as empowering, nihilistic, rebellious, or shocking? Many Jews would say that any playful take on the Holocaust crosses the line. But in the world of punk, where it’s cool to break the rules and discuss the taboo, just about anything is fair game.

Michael Croland runs heebnvegan.blogspot.com, a Jewish blog about animal protection issues. He has written about Jewish punk for the Forward and New Voices.