On a recent Sunday, I was invited to partake of kosher beet dip and radishes in sage-butter sauce in the enormous Ditmas Park living room of Itta Werdiger Roth, a thirty-year-old Jewish mother and chef who hosts a monthly salon that she calls the Hester. Usually Hester events revolve around food, signature cocktails, and conversation—but that evening featured a private performance by the Bulletproof Stockings, a girl band whose lead singer sounds like a less angst-ridden version of Fiona Apple. As the night wore on, Roth’s guests tossed back cocktails, swayed to the beat, and snapped iPhone pictures. They had the enthusiasm of any normal rock concert-goers, but they looked different. Almost everyone in the all-female crowd wore a long skirt and a sheitel, the wig customarily worn by Orthodox wives.
The band’s keyboardist and singer, Perl Wolfe—a twenty-six-year-old divorcée raised in the Crown-Heights-based Chabad-Lubavitch group, a sect of Hasidim that follows the teachings of the late Menachem Mendel Schneerson—wore a blue dress with a vintage pattern that looked straight off a rack at Beacon’s Closet; the drummer, Dalia Shusterman, a Modern Orthodox-born widow in her mid-thirties, had on dark red lipstick. They could have been typical Williamsburg denizens except that their long dresses with elbow-length sleeves conformed to the Jewish code of tznius, which means modesty. Because the musicians in Bulletproof Stockings are members of Chabad, they will not perform for mixed-gender audiences, which is in accordance with Jewish law. While not all of their songs have overtly religious themes, Wolfe told the Times of Israel that all her lyrics “are inspired by Torah and by Lubavitch’s version of Hasidic faith,” and a knowing ear will recognize traditional Hasidic melodic structures in the songs.
How I, a Wasp, ended up in a Chabad woman’s living room listening to Wolfe belt out the Lubavitcher Moshiach anthem—a musical prayer for the coming of the Messiah—is a longer story, though one I share with other Gentiles and secular Jews who identify as spiritual seekers. My own quest has led me to a subset of devout Jewish men and women who struggle to reconcile their faith in a demanding God with their heretical embrace of creative freedom. For the Bulletproof Stockings, this marriage of faith and creativity results in them observing the rabbinical rule of kol isha, which forbids men from hearing women sing. They do not, however, attempt to restrict the larger audience that hears their music—and their work is readily made available to anyone as MP3s and in YouTube videos. This, along with their professed love of “goyishe” bands like Radiohead, earns them censure from some members of their community, as is evident by the myriad seething comments on the Lubavitch Web site CrownHeights.info, where the story from the Times of Israel was reposted: “Sadly it’s the women,” writes one disapproving scribe, “who have been dragging the name of Lubavitch throu [sic] the gutters.”
The BPS concert wasn’t my first encounter with the alternative Jewish art scene. That took place about two months ago, when I met three young filmmakers—the director Jesse Zook Mann and the producers Saul Sudin and Evan Kleinman—whose work introduced me to what they call, “the underground Jewish community.” Though only Sudin grew up religious and maintains an observant lifestyle, all three found themselves drawn toward Judaism while working in the entertainment industry, and this drive to explore their heritage led to the making of their first full-length movie.
“Punk Jews,” their documentary, is an hour-long film on deviance and devotion which premieres at the Manhattan Jewish Community Center on December 11th. It opens with a young man standing on a nondescript city rooftop. His curly brown payos dangle; a crocheted white kipa rimmed with Hebrew letters is perched atop his head; tzitzit (prayer fringes) stick out from beneath his button-down. Then, with arms outstretched and face uplifted towards the firmament, he starts to bellow: “Here’s how you bring light into the world. You get up in the morning, and you scream GOD!”
The young man on the rooftop, Yishai Romanoff, is the twenty-six-year-old lead singer in a punk-rock group called Moshiach Oi!. The second word in the band’s name alludes both to the eponymous British punk rock movement of the nineteen-seventies (associated, often incorrectly, with neo-Nazi movements) and the Yiddish “oy,” which is perhaps the most concise expression of angst in the history of language. Two of the band’s four musicians belong to a fringe group of Breslov Hasidim, the Na Nachs, who chant their Kabbalah-based mantra—“Na nach nachma nachman meuman”—as often as possible, to hasten the coming of the Messiah. (“Na nach nachma nachman meuman” also makes for a catchy punk chorus.)
“Punk Jews” follows the quartet from a rowdy concert at the Upper West Side’s Carlebach Shul, to an impromptu street gig, to the basement of a member’s home in Long Beach, Long Island. “We call this place Camp Shabbos,” the guitarist Menashe “Mike” Wagner tells the camera.
Romanoff, Moshiach Oi!’s founder, was born on Long Island and grew up there in an Orthodox family. His father was a Jew by birth; his mother, a convert. He attended yeshiva, where he learned to “hate Judaism and hate Jews,” he says. “The rabbis were full of themselves and always telling people what to do.” His teen-age rebellion included a love affair with punk rock and a fling with drug abuse, but eventually, with the help of Mike Wagner, Romanoff ditched the drugs (but not the punk) and re-embraced his faith. He is now devoted equally to the rigorous strictures of shtetl Judaism and to the lawless ethos of punk rock. On Monday nights, for example, Moshiach Oi! records songs or writes lyrics at Camp Shabbos; on Thursdays, they meet to study the teachings of Rabbi Nachman of Breslov, the eighteenth-century Hasidic sage, at an organic food café. And, of course, starting at sundown on Fridays, they rest. Though some see their music as “sacrilegious,” Romanoff scoffs at the notion, seeing it instead as the most appropriately enthusiastic way to hasten the coming of Moshiach. “You’re supposed to feel it,” he says when discussing prayer. “You’re supposed to be on fire for it.”
When I recently met with Saul Sudin—in the Boerum Hill apartment he shares with his wife, Elke, an elfin painter who makes a few cameos in the film—he told me that all the film’s subjects “come from very different backgrounds,” which is something of an understatement. Kal Holczler, a sex-abuse survivor from New Square, New York, a modern shtetl in Rockland County, is the founder of a nonprofit (now defunct) that taught Orthodox mothers what to do if they suspect a child is being sexually abused. Amy Harlib, also known as the Amazing Amy Yoga Yenta, is a former martial artist and contortionist who narrates her performances in Yiddish and English. The Sukkos Mob, a performance group, features Shane Baker, a Midwestern Gentile actor described in the New York Times as “one of the most prominent proponents of Yiddish theater, language and culture in New York.” Y-Love, a black hip-hop artist and Yeshiva graduate who converted to Judaism as a teen-ager. In the movie, he discusses the racism endemic to Borough Park: “Moses himself couldn’t get an apartment [there],” he tells Sudin.
And yet despite the disapproval they often face from their peers and neighbors, most of the film’s subjects, with the exception of the performers in the Sukkos Mob, remain observant Jews. One reason that they can do so is because of the strength of the artistic Jewish subculture and the acceptance they find in that arena. While certain Jewish communities—most notably the Satmars of Williamsburg—remain vehemently opposed to any cultural fluidity, others, like Chabad Lubavitch, are increasingly open to free expression and commingling with outsiders, making it easier for groups like the Bulletproof Stockings to thrive. Another reason that these artists can remain religious and inventive might lie in the roots of Judaism itself, a faith that began with one rogue who decided to shun the mainstream of his time and live by new, strange rules. As Sudin says, “I see the Abrahamic tradition itself as being very punk.”
All three of the filmmakers behind “Punk Jews” at one time played in punk bands, and this is partly what drew them to their subjects. In the vibrant scene around the edges of orthodoxy, which Sudin calls “a colorful gray area,” they could feel comfortable asking questions about their faith that would be considered inappropriate, or even heretical, by a rabbi. Can you be Jewish if you don’t belong to a synagogue or keep kosher? What if you spend more time listening to punk than learning Torah? It was particularly fortuitous, then, that Y-Love brought them to Chulent, the unofficial headquarters of this peripheral community.
“Chulent” is a potato-and-bean-based stew served on Shabbat, but it is also a weekly lecture-series-cum-party for anyone on the Hasidic spectrum. The filmmakers don’t give its location, though it is not difficult to reach Isaac Schonfeld, the man in charge, and secure an invite. A business consultant from Borough Park, Schonfeld launched Chulent by simply allowing neighborhood misfits to convene in his electronics store late at night—and he has kept it alive for more than ten years since. He has never strayed from his observant Hasidic Jewish lifestyle but has a soft spot for those who struggle with it. When asked by the “Punk Jews” filmmakers why he does what he does, he says, “We have no agenda, but we’re trying to do is provide community in a space for people to explore themselves and to explore ‘the other.’” The event changes venues frequently, mostly due to noise complaints from neighbors, and on one occasion, it was readmitted to a synagogue only to be kicked out a second time.
On a recent Thursday night, acting, he said, “as a doting Jewish grandmother,” Schonfeld mingled with the regulars in the cavernous Ditmas Park Jewish center that Chulent now calls home. The scene was one that could never have been replicated in an Orthodox shul, where men and women are kept separate and women are forbidden to sing. Here, hasids in sable hats rubbed shoulders with female artists wearing jeans and wool beanies. A statuesque blonde video producer for Vice Media chatted up Shulem Deen, the founder of the Web site Unpious.com, which features personal essays and journalistic pieces focussed on Hasidic culture. I recognized some familiar faces from the film, and while many people told me that they thought the community was growing, it was impossible to tell. What is clear, though, is that many are seeking to change the status quo in their old neighborhoods; one Chulent attendee wrote me a few days ago saying that he had attended a demonstration in Williamsburg protesting community support of Nechemya Weberman, a Satmar man currently on trial for allegedly sexually harassing a religious teen-ager whose parents had sent her to him for counselling.
Asked to define his level of observance, a man with a pockmarked face and ratty hair, who declined to give his name, told me, “I’m not as religious as I was yesterday.” This dappled sheep is the type of congregant that Schonfeld is happy to have into his fold. “Convention is constricting,” he tells the filmmakers of “Punk Jews.” “Convention is anti-growth.”
Kelsey Osgood is a writer who lives in New York. She has written for The Baltimore Review, The American Reader, and New York Magazine.
