Who put the Oy in Oi? Surprise is the default reaction, and sometimes even disapproval, when I mention the Jews in Punk panel I am moderating for London's Jewish Book Week. And no wonder. Punks and Jews really are a contradiction in terms. Orthodox Judaism means following a body of rules as closely as possible, whereas punk is the reverse.

But being a first-generation Brit, first-wave punk and Jewish in a time still closely touched by the second world war did have its conundrums. Witness an incident at my New Year's Eve party 1976/77, held in my basement flat in Ladbroke Grove in west London. The reggae soundsystem had started playing, rather late, when my friend Viv Albertine, the guitar player of the Slits, turned up with her pal Sid Vicious. Not yet a Sex Pistol, poor Sid's insecurities were camouflaged by black leather and a large swastika. When he walked in, the Rastas took one look and started packing up the speakers. Sid was no nazi: his dying love was a Jewess, Nancy Spungen. But understanding the price of style, Sid and Viv left for a less sensitive gathering.

A lucky break for me, as the Rastas saved me from one of those ghastly confrontations I avoided where possible. Being of refugee German Jewish descent, I saw concentration camp numbers on the arms of my parents' friends. Swastikas made me feel sick, even though I told myself they were an ancient Aryan symbol and that punks just wore them to piss off their parents. It was hardly worth debating, anyway, as the pat response was always that they were simply cool and anti-establishment; genuine believers in the swastika rarely gave their true identities away. The swastika also caused an argument between two Jewish manager/theorists of punk, the Pistols' Malcolm McLaren, and his friend, the Clash's svengali, Bernie Rhodes. Fast-talking McLaren embraced being what my late mother called "a disgrace to the race".

Activist, artist and punk chronicler Caroline Coon recalls rehearsals for the 100 Club's first punk festival in 1976. Malcolm started handing out swastika armbands he'd had made. Siouxsie of the Banshees put one on right away and some of the Pistols seemed ready to follow suit. Aghast, Rhodes blurted out that if anyone wore swastikas onstage, they couldn't use the Clash's instruments as planned. The Clash backed him up. The gig went on. No swastikas.

The subverted symbol might not have been of much concern, had it not been for the growing reach of the National Front, which at that time of social crisis was gaining traction and used punk for youth recruitment.

Writing for Sounds, the punk rock weekly, I infiltrated a National Front fundraiser gig by the band Skrewdriver, and wound up in a Holborn pub with a leather-clad NF spokesman, eager to recruit girls. Blithely he ranted against immigrants, Jews and the "coffee- coloured morons" who would soon ruin England. When he asked me for a date, I had to say: "Maybe not a good idea. I'm Jewish." A beat. "Oh, well, we can always make an exception," he replied cheerfully. Which made it sweeter when he wrote to me, complaining that after the article was published, the Front had kicked him out.

So the NF united Jews in opposition, and located us on barricades alongside our fellow tribal Brits. Despite its general whiteness, punk's bond with reggae made it the first artistic expression of the new multicultural society. Having been the main "other" in WASPy England for so long, maybe Jews were finally one British tribe among many.





Apart from Mick Jones of the Clash, Jon Moss – who drummed with several punk bands before Culture Club – and a few others, our UK punk input was more on the ideological, art, media and business side. Judaism was not discussed much. I knew that Geoff Travis, the founder of pioneering indie label Rough Trade, was inspired to structure its socialist business model on the time he had spent on a kibbutz. In a rare moment of same-faith bonding, NME writer Charles Shaar Murray told me that his grandmother had to scrub pavements for the Nazis in Vienna, which he felt drew him to the blues and all sufferers' music, such as punk.

As for the two managers, McLaren's charm was the flipside of a master manipulator. Both he and Rhodes aimed to control their teenage musicians absolutely, like dictators. Nonetheless, they helped create and project the free-thinking conceptual climate in which punk spread ideas, made money, and delivered enduring music. These days, punk is established as the international sound of rebellious youth, grown locally in any trouble spot. That is not because of New York's garage rock and artistic forays. It's because of the sort of UK punk energy those managers encouraged.

I happily embraced punk's ungodly Year Zero. My musician father, who always said he had escaped from Gestapo HQ in Berlin, cautioned me to remember that I was British, not English; never to feel too safe, even at home. That sense of life on a faultline made UK Jews, us first-generation ones anyway, perfect candidates for punk, an inclusionary haven for marginalised misfits and outsiders. Belonging to a generation that launched Rock Against Racism made me feel more secure.

In a classically angst-ridden Jewish ambivalence about identity, the New York punk Richard Hell – of Television, the Heartbreakers and the Voidoids – has said he doesn't like to be defined by the fact that his father is Jewish. But he's one of many Jewish (or Jewish-ish?) artists on the New York scene, such as Joey Ramone, Lenny Kaye of the Patti Smith Group and Blondie's Chris Stein, who overcame his Holocaust paranoia by collecting Nazi artefacts. (The concerns of punky American Jews are documented by by Steven Lee Beeber in his book The Heebie-Jeebies at CBGB's). In a documentary I made for BBC 6 Music, A Tale of Two Punk Cities, Talking Heads bass player Tina Weymouth recalled that New York punks thought people who talked politics were a bore. But to us, the ideas expressed in Anarchy In The UK and White Riot were real. The G2 or Second Generation theory, whereby children of Holocaust survivors are often socially conscious activists, could have had something to do with it, however it was never discussed. But the Yanks were trying to forget Vietnam, while we were still living among bombsites in our own civil war zone, fighting teds, skinheads and rockers as well as the sus law and the National Front. Our punky Jew experience was also different because British punk mostly inhabited a shared political landscape, as well as views of the kind that McLaren and Rhodes helped to spread, which manifested in organisations such as Rock Against Racism.

Nowadays I teach about punk in universities, to sophisticated New York students. Many of them regard LGBT rights as the last remaining major social issue of their generation (and that's not to diminish their importance). Getting the correlation between, say, the Clash's White Riot and the group's own experience of conflict, and seeing how it describes the street fighting Britain of the time, sometimes comes as a surprise. The immediacy of pop reacting in protest is not dead, but it is no longer necessarily expected, and the life support is beeping.

So the whole idea of Jews in punk arguably now has a quaint ring to it; the sound of a time when music responded quickly to battle lines that were clearly drawn and nervy underdogs were fighting in the streets for a cause, then singing about it. Today's enemy is diffused via infinite surveillance cameras and servers, not as easy to smash with a brick; and militant music is less fashionable than vinyl. But still, Jews these days feel beleaguered, what with the hostility to Israel on UK campuses spilling over into non-specific anti-Jewish feeling, and the quenelle debacle in France. Our old foes are on the rise again in Europe and an even worse toxic mess of unemployment and anger is feeding the microclimate in which they flourish.

This grim vortex, of course, is an ideal condition for punk and what I like to think of as a Jewish contribution. Take the inherited trauma of generations of exile and suffering, use it to up your empathy, and channel it energetically, using culture, for the world you want. In short: be as punk as possible.

Vivien Goldman chairs The Jewish Roots of Punk with Geoff Travis, Daniel Miller, Toby Mott and Charles Shaar Murray at Kings Place, London N1, on 1 Mar at 9pm. Details: jewishbookweek.com