This article was produced as part of JTA’s Teen Journalism Fellowship, a program that works with Jewish teens around the world to report on issues that affect their lives.

Peering at the stage through cigarette smoke tinted purple by the overhead lights, I glimpsed a figure stepping forward. Behind him, across the wall, the words “FREE PALESTINE” clawed out of the chaos: white letters pressed over layers of paint, peeling stickers, and smears of green. The words rose out of the noise of the wall, insistent, impossible to look past.

Clutching a cloth garment, whose angular geometric patterns I immediately recognized, the figure announced, “This scarf means a lot to me, to us,” as he tied the keffiyeh around his neck. Movement ripples through the crowd — heads nodding, the collective exhale of people who feel, in this moment, unimpeachably righteous. 

The keffiyeh itself was not what unsettled me. It was the assumption stitched into that word: us. 

We are below street level in a New Jersey basement venue where people gather to sing, dance, and listen to visceral, outspoken punk music. The walls sweat. The floor shakes. It is, in every physical sense, a place built for the dispossessed. It promises radical inclusivity and liberation for the marginalized — a promise I want to believe. But my instinct knows better. 

Raised on the mournful sway of klezmer and the raw dissonance of Russian post-punk, a culturally alternative Jew by upbringing and instinct, I have always been drawn to the creativity of counterculture. Growing up in a predominantly Christian community in suburban New Jersey, I found in the subculture a space for freedom and creative expression. Its defiance of authority, challenge to dominant narratives, and habit of building community at the margins naturally resonated with my life as a Jew in the Diaspora.

Jews and countercultural movements have historically recognized each other. In the early days of punk, Jewish producers,........

© The Jewish Week