Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Life

Dead Kennedys an Odd Choice for the American Jewish Committee

The 1980s anti-establishment punk band The Dead Kennedys may have won a handful of friends in the Jewish community with their single, “Nazi Punks, F— Off!” but the last place one would expect the band to turn up is in a video from the American Jewish Committee.

Any links between the AJCommittee and the band seem tenuous, at best. But that hasn’t stopped the AJCommittee from using The Dead Kennedys’ 1980 song “Holiday in Cambodia” in the opening scene of a video posted Thursday on YouTube.

The AJCommittee video, called “Vilified: Telling Lies About Israel,” makes a case for what it perceives as media bias against Israel, and the media’s extensive focus on the actions of Israel at the expense of the world’s myriad intractable wars and human rights crises.

“Holiday in Cambodia” seems a puzzling — insensitive? — choice, given what the lyrics (not included in the video) discuss. The satirical song tells of a father sending his lazy, good-for-nothing son to a Khmer Rouge labor camp to experience harshness of the real world.

The song seems to make the point: You think you’ve got it bad, kid, look at what is going on in the rest of the world.

A harsh message, to say the least.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines.
You must comply with the following:

  • Credit the Forward
  • Retain our pixel
  • Preserve our canonical link in Google search
  • Add a noindex tag in Google search

See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.