Oy Oy Oy Gevalt! Jews and Punk by Croland Michael;

Author:Croland, Michael;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ABC-CLIO
Published: 2016-03-02T16:00:00+00:00

PUTTING THE “MOSH” IN MOSHIACH

Although most Jewish punk groups explored their Jewishness primarily through cultural identity, some punk rock bands espoused sincere religious messages.

Around 2001, a group of Orthodox teenagers came together in Miami, Florida, under the name 7Seventy. Guitarist Josh Braham recalled that he and his bandmates were “trying to reconcile” the musical styles they appreciated with the religious messages they found meaningful.114 The band’s performances included a bar mitzvah, Rosh Chodesh (beginning of the Jewish month) celebrations, and backyard shows. Braham had not heard of any other Jewish punk bands when 7Seventy formed, but he learned about Yidcore shortly afterward. He said the religious content of 7Seventy songs was “absolutely genuine,” as opposed to Yidcore’s “mockery.” Braham did not want 7Seventy to be too edgy anyway, out of fear that he would get expelled from his yeshiva (religious school).

In 2004, guitarist Menashe Yaakov Wagner co-founded White Shabbos as a Jewish response to the Dropkick Murphys and Flogging Molly—a folk-punk band with a Jewish message at the center. White Shabbos failed to get JDub interested, so Wagner started his own label, Shabasa Records, which focused on what Wagner called message-oriented, Torah-centric, alternative, rebel music.115 The title of White Shabbos’s 2004 album, Shabbos Holy Shabbos, was a takeoff on Sabbath Bloody Sabbath by Black Sabbath, whose name White Shabbos also spoofed. It included psalms as well as songs about Shabbat, the teachings of Rav Avraham Kook, and the coming of Moshiach (the Messiah).

Wagner went on to play in every Shabasa band. After Yishai Romanoff, Wagner’s bandmate from another Shabasa group, started Moshiach Oi! in 2008, Wagner and two other musicians from Shabasa bands joined.

The band’s name requires some explanation. Moshiach means “Messiah,” and Jews believe that Moshiach has yet to come. For Moshiach Oi!, Moshiach could not come soon enough. As the title of one cover song proclaimed, “We Want Moshiach Now,” and as another song postulated, Moshiach was “coming for dinner.”116,117 Originally, Romanoff hoped “to help bring Moshiach by screaming ‘Oi!’”—a slogan in the vernacular of both Jews and punks.118 More recently, he explained the “Oi!” as an exclamation point for emphasis: “It’s, like, Moshiach Oi! You know, like, we want Moshiach Oi! Like, now! Like, in your face Moshiach!”119

Romanoff grew up Orthodox, but as a teenager, he strayed to punk rock and drugs and flirted with atheism, Buddhism, and Satanism. In 2008, when Romanoff was in his early 20s, he cleaned up his act and embraced Orthodox Judaism again. To do so, he had to create his own soundtrack:

One of the hardest humps for me to get over in becoming religious was that I thought that if you became religious, you had to listen to Jewish music. And I hated Jewish music. . . . That actually almost kept me away from becoming religious. . . . When I started to become religious, I realized that now that I believed in God and the Torah, it was hard for me to identify with most of those old punk songs because most of them were completely opposing messages.

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