During the eighties, I was one of many American Jewish kids raised by Israeli parents as a left-wing Zionist who also identified with the rebellious subculture of American and British punk. My attempts to link the two movements often met with bewilderment from my parents--they wondered what was so Israeli about punk's harsh music, politics, and style.

It turns out that the eighties already saw punk infiltrating Israeli culture. San Francisco filmmaker Liz Nord offers the best response to the surprised reactions she gets when she describes Jericho's Echo, her documentary-in-progress on today's Israeli punk scene: "I know--who knew?"

So what's there to know? The twenty-seven-year-old Nord came to the punk scene while growing up in a culturally conscious and denominationally searching Jewish family in Syracuse, New York. "Though I hadn't been to Israel at the time," she notes. "I had a grounding in Judaism with Israel as a crucial element. Then there was the punk community going on in my life, with music and artists, and all my friends doing all these crazy, wonderful things."

Nord's work with the independent Negative Progression record label got her connected with the well-known Tel Aviv pop-punk band Useless ID. "Suddenly it was like, wham, maybe these two things--punk and Israel--can converge in some way." She first formulated the film as a documentary focused on Useless ID, but by the time she arrived in Tel Aviv to start shooting, she saw the entire Israeli punk scene as a burgeoning and relevant reaction to the country's general state of existential crisis.

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Nord found a range of nuance to the punks' generally anticlerical, anti-authoritarian stance. "Some of them definitely identify as Jewish, and some of them are really glad that Israel's a Jewish state, even though they don't practice the religion. Other kids said that Judaism is what's ruining the country, that it's the religious that keep fucking it up for everyone."

But Nord doesn't see Israeli punk as necessarily anti-spiritual. "I sense that their scene is a way of expressing their emotions about what's happening both on the ground and within. When you go to a live small-scale punk show, there's definitely a high spiritual energy."

The dozen or so bands that appear in Jericho's Echo run the gamut of punk substyles and attitudes. Poppier bands like Useless ID and Beer 7 (from Be'er Sheva) appeal to the scene's more escapist wing, while the crunchier Chaos Rabak represents the growing, mostly Russian proletarian olim (recent immigrant) street punks.

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But it's political--mostly anarchist and leftist--bands like Va'adat Kishut and Nikmat Olalim (named after a Jewish terrorist gang) that reflect Israel's new breed of anguished activists. Made up of politically conscious teens, these groups get harsher in their anti-authoritarian rhetoric as their members reach eighteen, the age of compulsory military service, which leaves many of the punks too burnt out to continue in the scene.

Nord notes that many of the new bands will stick around for longer because of an increasingly common phenomenon--their members are risking permanent social stigma by seeking insanity deferments from psychiatrists, a drastic move which will effectively cut off other possibilities. "I found it odd that the government was willing to stamp all these ID cards psychotic and let supposedly insane people roam the society," she says.

Nord even features the right-wing nationalist band Retribution as a foil to Israeli punk's generally progressive slant. Surprisingly, according to Nord, they're able to insist on the reality of proactively defending the country without explicitly pandering to Arab-bashing sentiment.

Jericho's Echo offers many other similarly compelling tableaux from this virtually unknown community. Kids relate that suicide bombings have robbed the scene of both band members and fans. In one sequence, a car full of young haredim (ultra-Orthodox Jews) drives up to a punk show, and the initial tension is relieved when one of the students emerges to embrace his brother, a member of one of the bands, who he's come to watch perform. With scenes like these, Nord shows these kids facing their need to connect as humans in an impossible situation.

Nord now faces her own need to fund Jericho's Echo's unavoidable technical costs. With the film now a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) project, Nord seeks to maintain the momentum generated by donations from the global punk scene. "Kids from all over have made little donations, which shows that there's a community building around the project. Now we're at a stage where we have to find a big chunk of money to bring the project up to broadcast standards." (Interested parties can find out more about the project and how to donate at http://www.jerichosecho.com.)

"Who knew" indeed. "I think the movie breaks stereotypes of the ideal Israel," says Nord. "There's an underside, there's poverty, not everything is great. My movie exposes both those situations and some truly excellent things that people need to know about."

Music editor Ron Nachmann is a journalist, editor, and culture worker living in San Francisco.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Tikkun Magazine