‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Jews’ by Michael Billig, Five Leaves Publications, Nottingham, 2000, £7:99, ISBN 0-907-12353-8

Keith Kahn-Harris

[Essay review pubished in Manna 69, 2000(published under the name Keith Harris)]

If recent intellectual history has taught us anything, it is that the practice of writing is all too often the practice of exclusion.  The writing of history in particular, is a process that is prone to the marginalisation of certain groups from historical narratives.  In recent years, feminist and post-colonial writers have begun to reinsert those who are not white males back into history.  Such critical forms of historical writing involve a continual process of reflection on how history has been written and to whose benefit. 

It might seem as though Jews are less prone to being excluded from the writing of history than other groups are.  Jews have long formed an important (if problematic) part of historical narratives.  Yet both Jewish and non-Jewish writers have been less than comfortable in writing Jews into certain kinds of histories.  This is particularly the case regarding the histories of ‘low’, ‘popular’ cultures.  Perhaps through a desire to escape the historical label of ‘degenerate’, Jews have been reluctant to explore their presence in the histories of those activities that are less than ‘respectable’.

Michael Billig’s ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Jews’ shows no reluctance to celebrate the Jewish contribution to popular culture.  Popular music is hardly an area that is known for Jewish achievement, either within or without the Jewish community.  During the birth of Rock ‘n’ Roll in America the 1950s and 1960s (the period and the country that Billig focuses on), the mainstream Jewish community was not keen to associate themselves with this kind of music.  Subsequent histories of Rock ‘n’ Roll have preferred to focus on the relative contributions of black and white artists rather than on Jews.  A history of Jews in Rock ‘n’ Roll thus subverts both Jewish and non-Jewish constructions of the genre.

Billig wisely avoids the ‘Jewish Chronicle’ approach to Jews in Rock ‘n’ Roll – the anecdotal ‘outing’ of Jews who happened to be involved in the music.  There will always be Jews present in most activities, but finding them hardly tells us anything about anything.  Instead, Billig constructs a more substantial narrative, arguing not only that significant numbers of Jews played a crucial role in the development of Rock ‘n’ Roll, but that the role that they played was intimately connected to their Jewishness. 

In the main, the role that Jews played in the development of Rock ‘n’ Roll was not as performers.  Moreover Billig argues that despite the substantial presence of Jews within the music industry as managers or as record label bosses, the main role that Jews played in the development of Rock ‘n’ Roll was not within the music business.  Rather, the book focuses on the substantial numbers of Jewish songwriters and record producers.  Jews were disproportionately pushed into this position through a kind of double marginality.  Right up until the 1960s, the music industry was an attractive career option to Jews who were frequently excluded from more prestigious professions.  Yet Jews were generally excluded from being Rock ‘n’ Roll performers as they did not fit into the dominant image of either white or black masculinity.  Ever since the days of Tin Pan Ally in the 1930s, many Jews had worked as song writers and producers within the music industry.  In the 1950s and 1960s, Jewish song writers and producers such as Lieber and Stoller, Goffin and King, Phil Spector and Doc Pomus, whilst barely known at the time, wrote for some of the most popular performers of the day and in doing so played a crucial role in the development of Rock ‘n’ Roll.

Billig’s argument is that these Jewish songwriters and producers contributed something vital to Rock ‘n’ Roll’s development precisely because they were Jewish.  This is not to say that they contributed anything in terms of ‘yiddishkeit’ – none of the people Billig talks about were especially observant or fascinated with their Jewish heritage.  What Jews offered Rock ‘n’ Roll was a way of translating a sense of the ‘familiar but apart’ into mainstream popular music.  The Jews who went on to contribute to Rock ‘n’ Roll were in a unique position in American society.  To grow up Jewish and working class in the 1930 and 1940s was neither to face the wholesale oppression that Black people did, yet neither were Jews wholly assimilated into American society – they were marginal, but not too marginal.  The Jewish experience provided a means of mediating between black and white experience.  They were able to translate the threatening ‘otherness’ of black popular music in terms that were understandable to white audiences.  For the relatively brief period that Billig talks about, Jews and blacks were able to cooperate, creating new musical fusions and drawing on parallel histories of oppression, in ways that huge numbers of white youth were able to identify with.

The portrayal of Jews as a kind of linchpin in black-white dialogue is tremendously hopeful and exciting one.  Yet as the author himself acknowledges, the period in which this was achieved was relatively brief.  By the mid to late 1960s, the black-Jewish alliance fragmented rapidly.  The rise of separatist black music and the increased assimilation of Jews into American society meant that a uniquely Jewish mode of cultural translation was no longer possible.  Billig’s book has less to say about the history of Jews in Rock ‘n’ Roll since the 1960s.  He does devote a chapter to the work of Lou Reed, Paul Simon, Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen.  Although the status of these artists as Jewish outsiders has at times been an important component in their work, their tendency to efface their Judaism appears to have been stronger.  The author makes a striking comment regarding Leonard Cohen.  Whilst Cohen’s novels and poems are shot through with his Judaism, the presence of Judaism is far more muted in his music.  Similarly, Billig argues that whilst yiddishkeit has entered western culture through the novels of authors such as Roth, there is an almost total absence in Rock ‘n’ Roll.

‘Rock ‘n’ Roll Jews’ is a valuable study that forces both Jews and non-Jews to rethink many of their assumptions about the role of Jews in contemporary western culture.  Popular culture is a space in which complex cultural tensions are negotiated in often far more thoroughgoing ways than in ‘respectable’ cultures.  A Jewish presence in such negotiations contributes something unique to both Jewish and non-Jewish cultures.  Yet in restricting his study primarily to America in the 1950s and 1960s, Billig does not follow through the more complex implications of his argument.  What his book identifies is a rather piquant dilemma.  He shows that Jews can produce culture and art distinctively as Jews but without any explicitly Jewish content.  This is not an unfamiliar argument (although it is regarding Jews in popular culture) – few would argue that the Jewish backgrounds of Freud, Wittgenstein and Marx did not impact on their work in some way, even if they talked relatively little about Judaism in their work.  The problem is that if the distinctive Jewish contribution to western culture relies in some way on being an ‘outsider’, what happens when Jews become more assimilated?  When Jews become comfortable in contemporary societies, a distinctively Jewish presence in art and culture becomes obscured, regardless of how many Jews work in the culture industries.  In conditions of assimilation, ‘Jewishness’ can only be present in art and culture if it is ’worked on’ and made explicit.  This is less of a problem in the ‘high’ arts, where there is a long tradition of explicitly Jewish production.  It is far more problematic in popular culture where the Jewish contribution has taken a more submerged form.  Popular music, despite the presence of substantial numbers of Jews working in the industry, has become to all intents and purposes Judenrein ever since Jews lost that culturally productive outsiderdom that Billig identifies.

This is not necessarily a loss to the non-Jewish world.  Popular music is diverse and creative enough not to necessarily ‘need’ a Jewish presence.  It is however a massive loss to the Jewish world.  Popular music provides one of the most effective means through which young people construct identities in an insecure world.  It provides a focus for autonomous youth cultural activity that pioneers new forms of sociality.  Jewish young people are just as attracted to popular music culture as non-Jews are.  However, there is virtually no space for young people to use popular music in the construction of Jewish identities.  This is all the sadder since music plays a crucial role in Jewish youth movements.  Yet the music that is played in guitar-led sing-songs tends either to be popular music with no explicitly Jewish content or Jewish music that draws only tangentially on western popular music.  The work of Debbie Friedman or Mah Tovu has indisputably added to Jewish youth work practice, but it remains utterly removed from the popular music that Jewish young people listen to outside a youth work setting.  A dangerous split thus opens up between ‘Jewish’ music – listened to for Jewish purposes in Jewish contexts – and other forms of popular music – listened to ‘for fun’.  It is as though one’s identity as a Jew and one’s identity as a music fan can never coincide.

Yet there is an alternative that is as yet barely explored within the Jewish community.  Asian youth in Britain have created new forms of music that combine cutting edge forms of popular music such as rap and reggae, with ‘traditional’ forms of Asian music.  Artists such as Asian Dub Foundation and Talvin Singh have pioneered new ways of constructing Asian identity – forms of identity that are caught between Asian and British, black and white.  Similar projects have begun to take place within the Jewish community.  Musicians and bands such as Zohar, Wally Brill and Oi Va Voi combine Jewish musics with contemporary dance music to create rich forms of cultural hybridity.  In Israel there is a long tradition of playing with Jewish themes in music.  In my own research on Heavy Metal in Israel for example, I encountered a band called Orphaned Land who mix ‘Death Metal’ music with Mizrachi music featuring instruments such as the Oud.  Such new forms of music escape any binary opposition between ‘Jew’ and ‘non-Jew’, instead providing the fluid cultural translation and hybridity that Billig identifies in early Rock ‘n’ Roll.

Writing Jews back into the history of popular culture and popular music is not simply a matter of academic curiosity.  It is precisely in these ‘low’ cultures that crucial questions are asked regarding Jewish identity – how far should we articulate our Jewishness? in what contexts?  for what purpose?  In writing ourselves back into the cultural histories that in the past we might have been uncomfortable with, we can explore how these knotty questions were dealt with in the past and this may sensitise us to those spaces in which these questions are being addressed in the present.