"Punk is Jewish"

You don't believe?

Read "Punk is Jewish."

In this history of the jarring music that rose from New York's battered Lower East Side in the 1970s, that opening line comes across, at first, as overreaching, even absurd. Yet by the end of this agile, well-researched book, author Steven Lee Beeber's proclamation seems not only obvious, but something of an understatement.

It's not just that punk pioneers such as Lou Reed , Blondie's Chris Stein , and half of the legendary Ramones , Joey and Tommy, were Jewish, or that the celebrated (and recently shuttered) Bowery dive CBGB, punk's original home, was owned by Hilly Kristal, a fellow Jew. Punk, Beeber exhaustively argues, was infused with a singular Jewish sensibility forged by hardship, perseverance, and a potent cocktail of optimism and cynicism that gave the music -- and the larger cultural movement -- its twitchy swagger.

"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," Beeber writes in the introduction to his book "The Heebie-Jeebies at CBGB's: A Secret History of Jewish Punk."

"The shpilkes , the nervous energy, of punk," he contends, "is Jewish."

Even those unfamiliar with that Yiddish word can understand what Beeber means if they've ever heard such abrasive anthems as Richard Hell & The Voidoids' "Blank Generation," or watched clips of the spontaneous combustibility of punk musicians. Propelled more by attitude than ability, their songs weren't just two- or three-minute spurts of bratty rage, but the defiant rhythm of a fierce heart shaped by displacement, prejudice, and what Beeber calls a self-conscious identification "with the sick and twisted."