Bricolage Jewishness and (Punk Refusals of) the “Blank Generation,” Talk by Jessica Schwartz at Sonic Representations of Jewishness on Screen and Off at UCLA, April 19-21, 2026.

This talk centers on Richard Hell and the Voidoids’ 1970s “Blank Generation” aesthetics (song, film, and message) to trace how a disidentificatory punk style moved from the United States via Hell
through mixed Jewish actors such as the UK’s Malcolm McLaren, who based the Sex Pistols’ “Pretty Vacant” on “Blank Generation.” Following this pivotal movement through sonic and aesthetic signifiers of what I term a post-postwar “bricolage Jewishness,” I situate punk’s origins alongside the codification of the Judeocide or Shoah as “the Holocaust” and heightened anxieties over who “counts” as Jewish amid rising interfaith/outmarriage in postwar America. I contend that Hell’s “Blank Generation” asserts power over generational erasure by refusing identity-based, nationalistic, and religious purification, shaping creative genealogies of negationist resistance and Jewish interethnic solidarity. I offer three framing provocations to amplify sonic and visual filters
that mark power over generational blankness and identity-based purification via Jewish cultural lineages in punk’s foundational circulations. First, I examine the “marked effacement” of the
figural and literal “Jew” through Euro-American assimilationism and punk acculturation. Second, I emphasize punk misfitting that confuses binaries, engaging Sonali Thakkar’s notion of postwar racial
“plasticity.” Third, drawing on Muñoz’s disidentification, I show how the doubly minoritized subject dis-identifies with dominant representations to activate “new social relations … for minoritarian counterpublic spheres.” Punk’s humanistic difference emerges not as nihilism or blankness, but as a rejection of ambiguous existence and an affirmation of choice—sonic movements of post-postwar Jewish survival in the US and European returns.

Jessica A. Schwartz is an Associate Professor in Musicology and Music Industry at the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music. Schwartz approaches research on musical representations and sonic
histories of militarization and imperial violence through community-focused collaborations, movements, and creative dissent. Schwartz is the author of Radiation Sounds: Marshallese Music and Nuclear Silences (Duke University Press, 2021) and is currently completing a book on the U.S. governmental sound design of early Cold War civil defense, which utilized postwar psychoacoustic studies surrounding mass behavioral responses to crisis. Schwartz interrogates institutional,
intersectional ableism and workshops radical accessibility in and beyond the classroom in courses such as “DIY: Punk Organizing as Social Justice” and “Unsettling Pedagogies: Music & Education.”
Schwartz hosts the Punkast series, co-hosts the Punk Scholars Podcast (Punk Scholars Network), and is the cofounder/Academic Advisor of the Marshallese Educational Initiative, an Arkansas-based non-profit, and plays in noise/punk bands.