The Heebie-Jeebies at CBGB's

I noticed the phonetic similarity of CBGB to heebie-jeebies and wondered if the latter term might have its origins in anti-Jewish slurs, so I googled it. It doesn't, apparently. It was coined by Barney Google cartoonist Billy DeBeck -- who also gave the language hotsy-totsy and googly eyes, and who is thought to have inspired the coinage of the numerical term googol and thereby the name of the Jewish-founded search engine through which I discovered all this -- with no apparent reference to the Tribe. Remarkably, though, searching for heebie-jeebies jewish led me right back to, of all things, CBGB -- specifically, to a book by Steven Lee Beeber entitled The Heebie-Jeebies at CBGB's: A Secret History of Jewish Punk.

So of course I had to read it. I'm only a few chapters in, but it's hands-down the most Jewish thing I've ever read in my puff -- a puff that has included reading an awful lot of awfully Jewish stuff -- and it's quite intoxicating.

Beeber views heebie-jeebies as a goyish translation of shpilkes, though at least as I use those terms they're significantly different -- the one connoting fear and uneasiness in the face of the uncanny, while the other is more restless anxiety while waiting. You get the heebie-jeebies in a haunted house, not before a job interview.

The idea that the punk rocker evolved naturally out of the Nice Jewish Boy makes me wonder: When are we going to get our Mormon equivalent of punk? Well, it took the Jews a few thousand years, so I guess I shouldn't be sitting on shpilkes waiting for it.