Hi Everyone,

I'm heading back on the road to launch 1.) my new insomnia anthology, "AWAKE! A Reader for the Sleepless" and 2.) the paperback edition of my JewPunk tome, "The Heebie-Jeebies at CBGB's: A Secret History of Jewish Punk."

New Years is here and the time is right for violent resolutions. So let
it be resolved that henceforth and hereon I shall update you more
regularly on the goings on in Jew Punk land – even when these aren't
necessarily Jewish or Punk in nature.

I would like to take this opportunity to officially announce the
formation of my new band, KIKE. Our first single, now in the
works, includes as the A Side, "Allen Ginsberg Up the Ass" ("I felt
my face mashed like potato salad against the wall as Allen stuck his poetry up
my ...") and as the B side "(I Am) The Switzerland of Love." Both metaphorical
explorations of various issues relevant to JewPunks ike yourselves,they're also

Alan Sacks is the original Sweathog. A buttoned-down N.Y. producer who relocated to Los Angeles to be closer to the happenings of the late ‘60s, Sacks helped create Welcome Back Kotter by drawing upon his tough childhood in Brooklyn. We talked to Sacks about the inspiration behind the Jewish Holy Trinity: Kotter, Epstein and Horshack.

How did you create the show, where did it come from?

I was inspired by a couple of things, both of which happened around 1956. That was a pivotal year for me. That was the year "rock n roll" was invented by Alan Freed ...

Another fine Jew.

Yeah, exactly, too bad he's not around to be interviewed. But yeah, Alan Freed came up with that phrase "rock n roll," and all summer long I was listening to him over the airwaves, his top forty countdown on Saturday morning. I'd be in the schoolyard with a lot of my Italian friends, Vinnie Barbarino and Joey Caluchi ...

Wait, did you just say Vinnie Barbarino?

Right.

So the John Travolta character was based on a real person with the same name?

Right ... No wait, his real name was Joey Barbarino.

Oh.

I mean Joey Caluchi. Yeah, Travolta's character was really based more on the other friend I mentioned, Joey Caluchi. You know, Joey Caluchi's other claim to fame is he was the first person ever whacked by Sammy the Bull.

That's great. I mean, that's horrible, but that's great.

(Laughing). And Sammy the Bull went to my elementary school.

So you were saying?

So we would listen to Alan Freed's top forty countdown show, and it would come over these little Motorola portable radios that we had. Well, during that same year, three movies came out in very close proximity to one another: The Wild One with Marlon Brando; Rebel without a Cause with James Dean, and The Blackboard Jungle. These were movies about juvenile delinquents. When we went to see The Blackboard Jungle, it began by showing what today they would call an inner city high school, though it was just a Lower East Side or Brooklyn type of high school; and they had guys dancing over the main titles with each other and suddenly Bill Haley's music came on - "Rock Around the Clock" - and it was the first time we ever heard music beyond those small little radios, we heard this huge music coming over the speakers, this rock n roll, and it became like tribal, we started banging our chairs, you know, throwing things, destroying the theater and they had to shut down the movie. That stayed with me my whole life. So I always thought when I came out here to California, I was going to write and create a television show about that moment, the tough things that I grew up with in Brooklyn.

The other thing that inspired me was a series of films called the Bowery Boys about these east side kids, Leo Gorcey, Huntz Hall, these tough kids from New York.

These were mostly Irish kids, right?

Yeah, mostly Irish kids, but I think Huntz Hall, he might have been Hebrew, I think so, he might have been.

You kind of identified with him when watching it?

No, I didn't, I identified with Leo Gorcey, who was the tough, short leader of the pack, even though he was Irish. Huntz Hall was Jewish, and was played with a big nose, and he was, you know, the goof.

Ok, so you had this idea, and you pitched it to the networks?

It wasn't just my idea. It was also Gabe Kaplan's, who played Mr. Kotter on the show. He had an act all about kids he knew in high school, and I had my experiences with my friends and we combined the two. Like "Epstein the Animal." He was a character in Gabe's stand-up routine. He was the toughest kid in the neighborhood. We liked the idea of having a tough Jew, cause there are some, you know. Gabe's joke was, "This kid was so tough that all the other parents would take their kids off the street one hour a day so Epstein could run out and walk through the streets." So that was kind of what Epstein was based on. But [Michael] Eisner, who was then head of programming at ABC, said I think we should make Epstein half Puerto Rican and half Jewish. My personal feeling about that was I didn't know any half Puerto Ricans and half Jews, I didn't quite buy that idea, but I also knew that he wanted to contribute creatively, so I said, ok, let's go with this. As it turned out it was a great idea, it gave us a wealth of material, a wealth of jokes. And the irony of it is I have a cousin who moved down to Florida and she came to visit about seven or eight years ago, and I hadn't seen her in years, and she'd married a Puerto Rican guy and her last name is Gonzales now, and her children are half Jewish, half Puerto Rican, so in fact I have cousins who are in reality like the fiction that I created.

Kotter lives!

More than even that. I had no idea I was going to become a college professor. I'm teaching now seven or eight years, I forget, and that's accidental, I didn't plan it, I didn't start out to be a teacher, I'm not in retirement, I didn't say ok I'm a teacher now, it just happened, you know. So the irony is I became a teacher and my students love the idea that I created Welcome Back.

So do you divide them into different characters from the show - and do they act like those guys?

No, but they like to think they do, they have a big joke like that. (laughs) But you know, it's funny when you say that because when I went to my high school reunion in Brooklyn, I'd lived in Hollywood so long that when I got there I half-expected it to be this huge event with klieg lights and like a red carpet, that was my frame of reference. As it turned out, there was just the old gym, and the whole school packed in there and I felt out of place. But then, everybody started coming up to me and asking me who they were. "Was I Barbarino?" "Was I Horshack?" They all wanted to know which one was based on them.

Were any of them?

No, because it was mostly from my junior high school. I turned it into a high school for the show.

Did any people actually want to be Horshack?

Errr, I think some people did (laughs). Yeah, I think so.

Who picks Horshack as the person to be?

I think people who are happy being the nerd, you know, the person satisfied about being a goofball. I wouldn't want to be Horshack.

You wouldn't?

No, no, (laughs), he was a goof.

It's funny, because in terms of Jewish identity, he's probably the most interesting character. He seems very Jewish.

But I never wanted him to be Jewish, I didn't want the nerd, the complete nerd to be Jewish, the stereotype, you know. That's the one thing about being Jewish that you get typecast as, and that's not necessarily, you know, who Jews who are. Jews are cool!

But in some ways it seems unavoidable, like maybe you were making fun of that idea. I mean, he's got the name, which sounds kind of Polish-Jewish...

"Arnold, hi, I'm Arnold Horshack."

And the accent, and the nose...

He's Italian, and the accent was Robert Hegyes trying to do Dustin Hoffman in Midnight Cowboy. But, I understand what you're saying and people interpreting that. Still, I always found that a little offensive that people felt that.

I don't mean to be offensive.

No, you're not being offensive at all...

But I got to ask you a couple of things about that, because, one, in Dustin Hoffman you've got ...

Yeah, yeah, right.

...a Jew playing an Italian, I always think Jews and Italians are so alike anyway, it's like...

Right!

...it's like Jews are decaf Italians.

Exactly, that's funny.

So I wonder if on some level Horshack was an unconscious projection of negative feelings of how Jews are seen.

My own negative feelings?

Maybe, or Gabe's. Was he your character more, or Gabe's character?

Gabe's. Though I always thought Gabe himself was a nerd. So maybe it is Gabe. We're analyzing Gabe now! (laughs)

Well, it's easy, you know, what's he gonna say? He's not here. We should call him up and get him on a three-way conversation.

I spoke to Gabe this morning.

Maybe we should check in with him and give him like a little P.S. at the bottom. You know, like "I'm anyone but Horshack." We'll talk about that later. But one other thing about Horshack - I was remembering what I think is one of the final episodes where he gets married...

Yeah.

Isn't there a moment where they need something for him to step on at the wedding, a glass...

Did he step on a glass ... oh, yeah yeah yeah, I remember that now, right.

I think it's something other than a glass because they can't find one. I can't remember now.

I can't remember.

So he must be Jewish.

(Sounding defeated) Right.

Like he came out of the closet at the end of the show...

Well, he wasn't Jewish for the first two years. (Sighs then laughs). You know, Gabe and I have been talking about developing a movie and in the movie we've talked about Horshack coming out.

Of the closet? Not as a Jew, but as gay?

Yeah.

I like it. Because that was the other thing about him you always wondered. He seemed a little too attracted to Mr. Kotter all the time. You know, "Ewww ewwww ewwww, Mr. Kotter!"

(Laughs) Yeah, right.

Interesting. So what about the rest of the Sweathogs? What are they doing?

In my mind? Creatively?

Yeah.

Oh. Well, like I said, Horshack is coming out. He's a beautician. A hairdresser. This past week he was getting married in San Francisco. Not that that matters to me at all. I think that's great. And let's see ... Barbarino ... he's just gotten out of jail. He's written a memoir about the Sweathogs and he's sold the movie rights and he's a millionaire in L.A. And Freddy "Boom Boom" Washington is like, you know, still like one of the cool, ultimate brothers. He's still going to basketball games, still shooting hoops, he's very stylin'. He's a music producer, he's into music, and he's playing keyboards.

And Epstein?

Oh, Epstein, he's like on his fourth wife. And he's a butcher.

Is he still in the neighborhood?

Yeah, he's still in the neighborhood, he's a butcher in Brooklyn.

And the ladies like to drop in?

Oh yeah!

NOFX, But Politics Aplenty: Left-wing Israeli punk band Useless I.D.If recent developments within the Israeli punk scene are any indication, our rock brothers in the Holy Land have reached the “blank generation” stage. Remember the famous words of Richard (Meyers) Hell: “I belong to the blank generation and I can take it or leave it each time”? The nihilism of certain segments of punk, the “nevermind” that Kurt Cobain so eloquently expressed (“a mosquito, a libido … a denial”) during the “year that punk broke” has attained something like a messianic fervor in the Promised Land – and maybe that’s a good thing.

Never a true force in a commercial radio sense, Israeli punk nonetheless has in recent years seemed to express the deepest yearnings of Israel’s cutting edge youth. Whether it was the mass of left-leaning political bands (Nikmat Olalim and Dir Yassin) or the skinhead-like fraction of right-wing groups (Retribution, Lehavoth), political engagement was at the heart of Israeli punk from its beginnings in the late 80s to its heyday a few years ago.

“Israeli punk was DIY in the truest sense,” says Liz Nord, director of Jericho’s Echo: Punk Rock in the Holy Land, a 2005 documentary that chronicled the various factions within the scene and their relationship to the punk Diaspora. “Like the hardcore bands that emerged in the second and third wave of punk here in the 1980s, Israeli punk was politically engaged, mostly on the side of peace and negotiating with the Palestinians. And yet, where the political edge of punk kind of went underground here, it remained an integral part of the Israeli scene almost up until 2000."

But, as Bob Dylan might have put it, they were so much older then, they’re younger than that now. Today, nearly a decade after peace seemed imminent at Oslo and nearly a year since Ariel “The Bulldozer” Sharon uprooted the settlers he’d helped become rooted in the first place, peace seems further away than ever, and Israel’s youthful brigade of punk activists feel fine. Like those Displaced Persons Formerly Known as Settlers, they’ve uprooted their metaphorical concerns and retreated from the political arena as it relates to Palestinians and a two-state solution.

For to say “fuck it” to the whole political process, to reclaim the personal over the political, is an act of political engagement itself. As they said during the Vietnam era, “What if they had a war and nobody came?” Israeli punks have taken this ironic and utopian vision for perpetual peace and turned it into a license for perpetual complacency. Israel has had several wars and the punks haven’t “come.” Rather than protesting the occupation, or marching for binational negotiations—let alone setting these as demands in their songwriting—they’ve decided to carve out their own piece of occupied territory at home. Large swaths of “leftist” punks have joined the growing Squatters Movement in Tel Aviv. This is as hardcore as the desert disciples of The Clash have allowed themselves to get.

“I think everyone has become so discouraged by the ongoing mess and the lack of movement regarding a solution to the occupation that they’ve decided to focus their energies elsewhere,” says an activist organizer who goes by the alias “Cat.”

Three years ago, while working on my book about the New York Jewish origins of punk, The Heebie-Jeebies at CBGB’s: A Secret History of Jewish Punk, I interviewed Cat as he hid from the IDF in the Palestinian town of Nablus (“basically a big refugee camp,” he said). Suddenly, I heard what sounded like firecrackers in the background, some muffled sounds, and then my cell phone went silent. “Cat? Cat?! Are you alright?” There was a pause of about fifteen seconds, and I was just about to hang up, disturbed, when I heard Cat’s voice, much lower now. “Yes, I am ok. It is like this every night. They’re shooting.”

I didn’t have time to ask who was shooting. And looking back now, I realize that wasn’t really the issue in terms of how the music of anarchy has evolved in the holy land. Rather than going off to “fight for an end to the conflict,” Israeli punks have opted to conceive of a kind of mini-Zionism within Israel itself. In fact, the most “punk” thing about them might be how they have passively altered the definition of illegal residence in one region where this has been a perennial source of misery and bloodshed.

The casbah will no longer be rocked; it’ll be dragged into tenancy court.