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It might come as a surprise that American punk rock is inextricably tied to Jewish identity. But it starts to make sense in a New York minute. In the early and mid-1970s, artists like the Ramones, Lou Reed, Patti Smith, Blondie, Richard Hell and the Talking Heads circled the nascent punk scene at seminal New York City club CBGB. And as Steven Lee Beeber shows in his meticulously researched book, The Heebie-Jeebies at CBGB's: A Secret History of Jewish Punk, many of those musicians -- including Reed, Joey and Tommy Ramone, Chris Stein (co-founder of Blondie) and Richard Hell -- happen to be Jewish. "Punk reflects the whole Jewish history of oppression and uncertainty, flight and wandering, belonging and not belonging," Beeber writes. "The shpilkes, the nervous energy, of punk is Jewish."

That shpilkes is the Heebie-Jeebies of Little Richard's song, hence the title of Beeber's book. Beeber interviewed some 125 sources in compiling this exhaustive study of the punk movement's roots in Jewish culture. He identifies Lenny Bruce as punk's patron saint, Lou Reed as its godfather and the Ramones as, perhaps, the apotheosis of Jewish punk.

Tommy Ramone's two responses to Beeber are telling. When the author first tells Tommy that he never knew he was Jewish, Tommy jokes, "No one bothered to ask." The second time they meet, Tommy frostily asks, "Are you trying to out Jews with this book?" Some sources willingly discuss the Jewish roots of the movement. On the other hand, Richard Hell of the Voidoids simply declined to be interviewed, saying he refused to be "defined" by his Jewishness. This refusal prompts a minor crisis of conscience in Beeber, who considers whether he is being reductionist in his approach to punk. What does he decide? Well, he wrote the book, didn't he?

Beeber's most eyebrow-raising argument is his claim: "No Holocaust, no punk." Beeber examines various instances where punk rockers incorporated Nazi imagery. For instance, he writes, "The Stooges' embrace of Nazi imagery was based on economic resentment and a simple desire to align themselves with the darkest, most frightening and shocking forces imaginable." Beeber attributes the adoption of Nazi symbolism in punk rock to several sources: the desire to shock, the need to rebel, but also -- in the "camp" way punk bands used Nazi symbols -- the intention of disrespecting Nazism by mocking the "failed seriousness" of these same symbols. So songs such as the Dictators' "Master Race Rock" or the Ramones' "Blitzkrieg Bop" are not disrespectful of Jews, but a joke -- perhaps unsophisticated and in poor taste -- mocking Nazism.

Beeber could be accused of over-intellectualizing punk rock. After all, most of these bands barely knew how to string together three chords. But he ultimately makes a convincing case that if there were no Heebie Jeebies, there just might not ever have been a CBGB.