50 Years of Punk – punk shows from Germany and Israel

Fifty Years of Anger
An evening in collaboration between the Goethe-Institut and Yung Yidish
October 20, 2026 | 20:30

"We'll still be dancing when nobody thinks of you anymore"
Live performance with Annette Benjamin, DVMP and Kleptomanim.

Around the world, 1976 is celebrated as the year punk was born. That year the Ramones' debut album came out in New York, followed in London by the first singles of the Damned and the Sex Pistols. In Israel and Germany, punk encouraged young people to cut their hair short, start bands and publish their own zines. In punk they found an aesthetic tool to challenge the societies they lived in, marked by authoritarianism, social and political conservatism and an obsession with norms. Punk was loud, crude and deliberately ugly. It cultivated the pose of the radical outsider and welcomed everyone who could not or would not fit social expectations. Just as important, punk was also an answer to a century of man-made disasters: Auschwitz, the Gulag, Hiroshima. The Vietnam War had ended only shortly before.

The Goethe-Institut Tel Aviv's event series "Close to the Edge" is dedicated to the similarities and differences between punk in Israel and Germany, then and now.

Entry: suggested donation of 25 NIS or more.