I’m All Lost In, #79: Trump’s antisemitic fight against antisemitism; Kurt Weill’s black keys; turning parking lots into housing.

I’m All Lost In …

The 3 things I’m obsessing about THIS week.

#79

1) Trump’s Fake Jews

Sorry if I don’t buy it when Donald Trump, whose consistent mix of America First populism, Ku Klux Klan nativism, and Third Reich authoritarianism—all infamously paranoid ideologies that demonize Jews as bogeyman and shadowy puppet masters—says he’s fighting antisemitism. To the contrary (and hardly surprising): Trump’s clampdown on campus antisemitism traffics in antisemitic tropes itself.

Trump’s effort to fight antisemitism is nothing more than a brute attack on the First Amendment rights of those who dare to criticize Israel. To claim he’s defending Jews by going on the offense against students who criticize Israel, Trump is equating condemnations of Israel with antisemitism. There are certainly strains of anti-Israel rhetoric that eagerly channel antisemitism, but they’re not synonymous. And more to the point: Trump’s move reduces American Jewish identity to Israeli identity, a sweeping and condescending configuration of the age-old, toxic idea that Jews maintain a secret-password loyalty to an alien brotherhood, typically conjured as a cabal of internationalist bankers, that disqualifies Jews from being authentic Americans. Trump is not fighting antisemitism. He’s embracing it.

Last November, Jews overwhelmingly rejected Trump; more than 70% voted for Kamala Harris. Cue Trump’s name calling. In his febrile brain, this made the super-majority of American Jews “fools” who “hate their religion.”

While Trump dismantles basic government services, due process, America’s favorable status around the world, and the economy, I’d say Jews are the opposite of fools: 5.25 million of us knew our monthly checks from George Soros would no longer be enough if our 401Ks were wiped out, so we voted en masse against Trump’s dangerous tantrum. We also knew, per Woody Guthrie in the early 1940s singing about notorious antisemite Charles Lindbergh and the original America First movement, “When they say America First, they mean America next.”

While we’re on the topic of giving Trump the thumbs down, it did seem like a few flashes of resistance to his KKK agenda captured a subtle but noteworthy shift against MAGA this week: U.S. Sen. Chris Van Hollen’s (D-MD) trip to El Salvador and unusually successful (for a Democrat) press conference to highlight the unconstitutional plight of Trump deportee/political prisoner Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia; the agitated crowd at Republican U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley’s (R-Iowa) town hall; a series of court rulings calling out the Trump administration’s delinquent behavior; Harvard! (us Jewish elites like that one); another weekend of protests; and, not too surprising, but I love this: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar on Jackie Robinson Day defending the importance of Black history.

2) Weill’s Black Keys

Speaking of antisemitism, this week I’m all in lost in Kurt Weill; the German Jewish composer fled Nazi Germany in 1933, but not before writing his lumpenproletariat, urchin chic classic, 1928’s The Threepenny Opera.

Realizing what a huge mistake it is that I haven’t been practicing piano much this year, I revisited one of my favorite songs to rejuvenate my keyboard brain chemistry: Weill’s tale of working class vengeance, “Pirate Jenny,” the anti-capitalist showstopper from The Threepenny Opera.

For a song that’s supposedly written in all-white C Major, there are a lot of dissonant black keys in Weill’s mix. This is most notable when, after the chorus concludes with its way-off-script and dramatic F#, the only way to segue back into the verse—already an off-kilter circus polka in its own right with its C to D/E-flat cluster—is to pause, take a breath, and then jump back in to Weill’s revolutionary fervor.

As verse two kicks off, Pirate Jenny, incognito as a washerwoman, presses fast forward on the dialectic: “You gentleman can say, ‘Hey girl, finish the floors, get upstairs, make the beds, earn your keep here!’” Little do they know more pirate black notes are coming. Third verse: “Then you gentleman can wipe off the laugh from your face, every building in this town is a flat one…”

3) Turning Parking into Housing

I wrote a PubliCola column in late February about the excellent Transit Oriented Development bill that’s in play this year in the state legislature. The newsworthy part to me was the breakthrough compromise that matched the longstanding proposal’s originally unfunded requirement to include affordable housing near transit stops with the dollars to actually pay for affordable housing. Call it Funded Inclusionary Zoning, or FIZ.

But this week, as the bill was on its way to pass the senate 30-18 (it passed the house in early March, 58-39), Urbanist reporter Ryan Packer posted about an amendment to the legislation. And now I’m obsessed. The extra language enables King County to turn a bunch of park & rides into housing.

Not only do I now need to write a new PubliCola column about this unpave-paradise provision, but the concept of redeveloping park & rides into housing seems like a prompt for a poem as well.

P.s. Be sure to check out episode #3, just out this week, of the monthly podcast I record with my bestie ECB, “Are You Mad at Me: A Shattered Glass Podcast.” It’s all about the greatest movie of all time, 2003’s Shattered Glass.