Introduction

A young man in black trousers and an untucked white dress shirt paces in front of his three-piece band crowded onto a small stage in a darkened nightclub, waiting for them to tune up. Not an unusual scene in music venues around the world, except that hanging from four corners around his waist are tzitzit, ritual fringes, and on his head is an oversize white knit kippah topped with a pom pom and the Hebrew words “Na Nach Nachma Nachman Meuman” woven around the edge. A full beard and sidelocks frame his face as he holds the microphone close to his mouth. “This world is nothing,” he shouts, “There’s only Hashem, people. Wake up!!” Meet Yishai Romanoff of the Jewish punk band Moshiach Oi!, one of the stars of the documentary Punk Jews, directed by Jesse Zook Mann and produced by Evan Kleinman with the help of Saul Sudin. Yishai grew up in an Orthodox home in Long Island, went astray in his teens, and returned to Judaism on a mission, making a name for himself in the New York club circuit playing songs influenced musically by the Dead Kennedys, Bad Brains, The Germs, Circle Jerks, and the like, but with words borrowed from the songs and writings of the Bratslav Hasidim, followers of the charismatic nineteenth-century Hasidic mystic, Nachman of Bratslav. On YouTube you can see Yishai regaling audiences with his mash up of the Ramones’ “Blitzkrieg Bop” and the Bratslaver song embroidered on his kippah. He calls it “Blitzkrieg Nach.”