at this link<\/a>.<\/p>\n\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
St. Pete Catalyst: It was always my understanding that punk started in England, and then became something different in America. Guess I was misinformed. Can you address that?<\/p>\n
Steven Lee Beeber: There\u2019s always been debate about where England got it from. It\u2019s always been part of the argument that the Ramones, the New York Dolls and other bands \u2013 pre-punk band liked the Stooges and the Velvet Underground \u2013 all of that is American. Even Malcolm McLaren, who was behind much of the Sex Pistols\u2019 image and attitude, was someone from England but who got that from New York.<\/p>\n
I guess it depends on what you call punk: Pre-punk, beginnings of punk. But the Ramones pre-date the Pistols and the rest of those bands.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
A lot of people believe that the class distinctions in England, the joblessness and the F-you attitude of England\u2019s youth in the \u201870s was at the root of all this. I think what you\u2019re saying is that it was a cross-pollination.<\/p>\n
Sure, and I think it depends what era of punk we\u2019re talking about. Like hardcore wasn\u2019t really about class. The political dimension of punk, with working class rage, I guess you could say is England, but even in the States, a lot of those bands were from lower middle class to working class homes. And were rebelling against the hopelessness of New York City at the time. And the recession in general.<\/p>\n
But my idea is that it gets back to the Holocaust, in large part, but also to Jewish culture in general, originally.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
What\u2019s your general thesis in the book? What are you telling us?<\/p>\n
Lenny Bruce encapsulates so much of what\u2019s punk. He\u2019s funny, he\u2019s a social critic, he\u2019s liberal, he\u2019s nasty, he\u2019s street-tough, inappropriate, he\u2019s \u2026 The Jew. He\u2019s an outsider.<\/p>\n
He is very much part of that Jewish tradition of the social critic who says what everybody isn\u2019t supposed to say. Bob Dylan kind of goes along with that.<\/p>\n
But, with all of that said, Jewish history is always been one of that displacement, that attempt to speak truth to power from outside. And the Holocaust was such a pivotal moment, not just for Jews, but for western civilization. So much of punk, when you look at it, is referencing Nazi Germany.<\/p>\n
It was such a trauma to western culture, it shook the very values of what we thought we were about.<\/p>\n
In the \u201850s, you\u2019ve got sci-fi, and the bomb and Godzilla, all that part of World War II in the modern era. In punk, you\u2019ve got the first kids to really come of age after the Holocaust. In New York City, the trial of Adolf Eichmann aired every day on TV, in its entirety. Tommy Ramone and Joey Ramone, all the kids who would go on to make punk, were watching that growing up.<\/p>\n
And it was the first time the public in general, Jews included, really became aware of what happened in the Holocaust.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
So how did Joey Ramone become the lead singer and the public image of the Ramones?<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/Beeber-punk-book-201x300.jpg\")
Tommy (Ramone) was really the mind behind the Ramones. He was the son of Holocaust survivors; he was a Jewish immigrant. Which he basically kept secret, even when I met him, he only reluctantly said it.<\/p>\n
It was in part his own paranoia about being Jewish. Antisemitism. And the other guys in the band, Dee Dee and Johnny, were like, Joey\u2019s the drummer. He\u2019s not going to be the singer. That\u2019s ridiculous! He\u2019s a freak.<\/p>\n
And Tommy said, that\u2019s the point. That we are like a bunch of freaks. He said he saw it as an art concept, almost like an Andy Warhol kind of thing. Where these were the kind of kids he grew up with, wearing the kind of clothes they wore, street guys who were the outcasts. And that\u2019s what they all were, where they were from. Tommy and Joey were both Jewish, and that was a very Jewish area. And with their sense of humor, you could say it was a pretty Jewish sense of humor.<\/p>\n
If you look at rock, at least before that time, it wasn\u2019t really funny. One of the big things about punk, especially in New York, was that it was funny. With a lot of jokes. The Dictators were all about jokes.<\/p>\n
They were five Jewish guys passing as Italian \u2013 which is another classic New York Jewish tradition.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
What do you want people to take away from your talk?<\/p>\n
A lot of the things that we\u2019re told are Jewish are also punk. One doesn\u2019t think of that \u2013 they think, at least when I was growing up, the \u2018nice Jewish boy,\u2019 Barry Manilow, Paul Simon \u2026<\/p>\n
The punks were rebels, they were truth-tellers, people who were reacting to the Holocaust in a way that was kind of re-defining what a Jewish person was seen as, not a victim but in fact the one who triumphed in the end. Who can make fun of the Nazis. Who can mock them onstage.<\/p>\n
And turn the whole idea, in rock \u2018n\u2019 roll in general, of the underdog being the hero. It wasn\u2019t the \u201ccock rocker\u201d like Robert Plant \u2013 the big stud \u2013 it was the \u201cweirdo\u201d like Joey Ramone.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Florida Holocaust Museum is sponsoring a talk March 22 by Steven Lee Beeber, author of The Heebie-Jeebies…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":191113,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[202,204,203,199,201,200],"class_list":["post-191112","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-st-petersburg","tag-st-pete","tag-st-pete-headlines","tag-st-pete-news","tag-st-petersburg","tag-st-petersburg-headlines","tag-st-petersburg-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191112","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=191112"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191112\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/191113"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=191112"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=191112"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=191112"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/Steven-Lee-Beeber-177x300.jpg\")
<\/p>\n