This article was produced as part of (JR)’s Teen Journalism Fellowship, a program that works with Jewish teens around the world to report on issues that affect their lives.
Peering at the stage through cigarette smoke tinted purple by the overhead lights, I glimpsed a figure stepping forward. Behind him, across the wall, the words “FREE PALESTINE” clawed out of the chaos: white letters pressed over layers of paint, peeling stickers, and smears of green. The words rose out of the noise of the wall, insistent, impossible to look past.
Clutching a cloth garment, whose angular geometric patterns I immediately recognized, the figure announced, “This scarf means a lot to me, to us,” as he tied the keffiyeh around his neck. Movement ripples through the crowd — heads nodding, the collective exhale of people who feel, in this moment, unimpeachably righteous.
The keffiyeh itself was not what unsettled me. It was the assumption stitched into that word: us.
We are below street level in a New Jersey basement venue where people gather to sing, dance, and listen to visceral, outspoken punk music. The walls sweat. The floor shakes. It is, in every physical sense, a place built for the dispossessed. It promises radical inclusivity and liberation for the marginalized — a promise I want to believe. But my instinct knows better.
Raised on the mournful sway of klezmer and the raw dissonance of Russian post-punk, a culturally alternative Jew by upbringing and instinct, I have always been drawn to the creativity of counterculture. Growing up in a predominantly Christian community in suburban New Jersey, I found in the subculture a space for freedom and creative expression. Its defiance of authority, challenge to dominant narratives, and habit of building community at the margins naturally resonated with my life as a Jew in the Diaspora.
Jews and countercultural movements have historically recognized each other. In the early days of punk, Jewish producers, musicians, and creatives led the way. The Ramones — whose founding members Tommy and Joey were both Jewish — essentially invented the American punk template at CBGB, while Seymour Stein, the Jewish founder of Sire Records, signed them alongside Talking Heads and the Pretenders, quietly building the backbone of the entire movement. Richard Hell, born Richard Meyers to a Jewish family, is widely credited with originating the torn-clothing aesthetic that became punk’s visual signature, and Lou Reed — raised Jewish in Brooklyn — laid the sonic and lyrical groundwork at the Velvet Underground.
The rawness of their emotions was not unfounded — their generation came of age in the shadow of the Shoah, inheriting not only unthinkable loss, but also the collapse of the ideals that were supposed to have prevented it. When humanity failed so profoundly, nihilism crept in. Punk gave that grief a body.
What the punk generation understood instinctively, and what Oct. 7 forced the world to confront, is that enlightenment is never permanent; it must be continually sought. When Jewish lives were endangered, the bastions of enlightenment did not rise to their side in solidarity.
A band performs at The Barby, a punk, hard-core and garage band club in South Tel Aviv, April 14, 2023. (Gabi S./Wikimedia Commons)
The weight of that failure is difficult enough to carry in the abstract. It became much heavier for a 16-year-old, watching friends refuse to talk about Oct. 7 and hearing “Zionist” spat out like poison. What unsettled me most was how quickly grief could be turned into something socially inconvenient. Without my friends saying anything, I got the impression that my feelings about the war had no place here — they were too heavy, too out of step with the mood around me.
Punk taught me that silence is always a choice. Both Jews and punks know that silence well: the kind of silence imposed by those who decide whose pain is permitted. It is that dynamic—the conditional welcome, the tolerance with an expiration date — that defines the experience of Jews in countercultural spaces today.
I encountered a silence that was harder to name: not indifference, but the silence of people who had already decided that my grief did not fit their narrative. My instinct was to research, read, and write with the same compulsion that had always driven me toward journalism. In a post-Oct. 7 world, writing became my way of refusing silence, of embodying something at once deeply Jewish and deeply punk.
E.L., a local Jewish punk, told me that at times he was concerned for his safety. “I am fairly sure that I have been in spaces where I would have been harmed if people knew that I am a Zionist,” he said. He described being in venues surrounded by chants of “Death to Israel.” As a result, he has decided to “keep [his] Judaism away from punk.”
“While I think they’d go well together, due to safety reasons, I have to keep it out,” he added.
Jews have hidden their identities before — during the Inquisition, under Soviet repression, across centuries of exile in which visibility meant vulnerability. Punk, too, has its own tradition of coded language and camouflage. To conceal, in both worlds, has never been the ideal, but it has often been the only option.
As Steven Lee Beeber, author of “The Heebie-Jeebies at CBGB’s: A Secret History of Jewish Punk,” wrote: “Punk reflects the whole Jewish history of oppression and uncertainty, flight and wandering, belonging and not belonging, always being divided, being both in and out, good and bad, part and apart. The shpilkes, the nervous energy, of punk is Jewish.”
The answer may lie not in abandonment but in reclamation: drawing on our own radical traditions, remaining at the center of these contested spaces, and recognizing that the punk spirit of questioning, resisting, and creating has always been part of our DNA.
Reporting this piece has brought me closer to both the scene and to my own Judaism — proof that turning toward something, rather than away from it, can be its own form of clarity. In the conversations I sought out, the shows I attended, and the stories I chose to follow, I found myself not just documenting a community but reckoning with my place in it.
So, what does the punk ethos offer Jews like me today? I believe it catalyzes innovation for exploring new ways of existing within those spaces as both a Jew and a punk.
My Judaism has often found its truest expression not in doctrine, but in belonging. It was in a synagogue that I discovered the profound comfort of shared spiritual life; it was in a music venue that I was first invited to inhabit myself fully, to speak without words in the way I moved through the world. Both spaces offered the same essential gift: the freedom to exist without apology, to bring my whole, unguarded self into a room and be received.
My identity within these spaces is sustained through connection — through finding the kindred spirits who understand that to be fully Jewish and fully punk is not to live in contradiction, but in completion.
These two parts of me do not compete; they compose. Punk did not give me easy belonging, and Judaism did not ask me to dilute myself to find it. What they share is more demanding than comfort: a refusal to disappear. If there is a conclusion to draw, it is not that these identities resolve neatly, but that they hold — under pressure, in friction and in motion. That, in the end, is why I remain in both.
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The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of (JR) or its parent company, 70 Faces Media.
