This Baltimore Cover Artist is Using Yiddish Music to Fight Fascism

David Harris may perform under the sobriquet Ira Remsen’s Ghost, but don’t let that fool you; they’re flesh and blood, and they’re protesting fascism. Harris (he/they) is a Pigtown resident, and he’s been performing a cover set of Daniel Kahn & The Painted Bird’s songs on and off since last year. It’s an oddball choice of inspiration, but it all comes into focus when you hear the songs they’re covering, with titles like “Embrace the Fascists” and “Freedom is a Verb.”

It’s klezmer music: a traditional Jewish genre that dates back to at least the 1500s.  The European Institute of Jewish Music describes the genre as a “music of exile.”

Harris isn’t Jewish — his family has German roots — but perhaps that’s why klezmer music calls to him.  “I won't pretend to know what it's like to be systematically marginalized in the way that other minority members have been marginalized,” he said. “I do know what it's like to feel like the world doesn't give a shit about you.”

Harris was born in Columbus, but they grew up in London, Ohio where they say they struggled as an autistic child in a small Catholic school. They originally moved to Baltimore to study organic chemistry at Hopkins, but they ended up mastering out and falling in love with the city. Still, the Hopkins’ alum pride shows in their chosen stage name, which they’ve lifted from Ira Remsen, the Hopkins chemist who co-discovered saccharin back in 1887.  

When I meet Harris, his look is as eclectic as the rest of him. He’s wearing two beaded bracelets on his wrist. Looking closer, I see one has beads that spell out “CHINGA LA MIGRA.”  They bounce from topic to topic with a certain meticulousness: in one moment, singing opera inside the tiny coffee shop, in another, criticizing the death penalty.  This self-contradiction, I learn quickly, is a feature, not a bug.  Harris’ work, like them, straddles the line of protest and performance, of seriousness and insincerity, and even of peace and war.

Their music venue of choice is Lafayette Square, directly across from the White House. Only last year, it was the site of the longest standing political protest in US history, a nuclear armament peace vigil that began in 1981.  But President Trump had it dismantled on a whim last September.

When Harris heard what was happening, he says he rushed to the scene to perform that night and to help his companions at the vigil.  That’s when Harris’ partner snapped an emblematic picture of them with their gear, surrounded by the same officers who’d been tasked with disrupting the vigil.

Harris hopes his music can serve as a “spiritual successor” to the peace vigil, but for now, Lafayette Square is inaccessible because of a real estate development initiated by the Trump administration, which they called “embezzovations”: a portmanteau of embezzlement and renovations.  For years, President Trump’s various real estate ventures have been the subject of fraud schemes and racial discrimination suits, and he’s eschewed longtime presidential norms around divesting from business interests during his second presidency. All of this comes at a time when the administration is touting its economic success while pouring billions into deportation efforts that don’t even target criminals.

“Lafayette Square has always been this epicenter of protest, and I kind of want to keep that tradition going,” Harris said.  They tell me it’s all about the ability to “disrupt business as usual.”  That’s why, when they switch from singing to reading material like their old biochem textbook or Mary Trump’s humiliating biography of President Trump, they back it with a recording that occasionally includes a metal pipe randomly falling with an unsettling clamor. When Trump went after Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert, Harris blasted audio of their shows outside. 

It’s a strange, personal attack aimed at the commander in chief, designed to target his ego.  It’s also loud — like, loud enough that people at the White House can hear it. He knows that because once, when he was doing his usual set, someone on the second floor of the White House turned a light on and looked directly at him.

“I go there to torture him,” Harris admits, discussing the president.  There’s humor in it, but only so much.  Because that is the ultimate point of this, according to them: pushing Trump over the edge.

They present it to me as a philosophy of accelerationism; if he can make Trump miserable enough to snap, maybe people will finally wake up and discover the American nightmare we’re living in. In reality, he admits he has doubts the president knows he exists.

Reading between the lines, though, the protest seems it’s about more than the misery of one man.  Harris’ career has been an unwieldy journey, from their Hopkins studies to engineering to now.  But ever since they were a kid, they tell me, they’ve been singing.

Their music is drawing people in, too.  He tells me he’s got regulars who show up, eager to see him, when he dons the fishing mask he performs in to shield his face.  He tells me he wants to pick up copies of Mary Trump’s book to hand out to people when they ask him what he’s reading, so more people can read it.

Even when people are less enthused, he doesn’t seem to take it too hard.  When I ask them about how people react to their music, they start in a story.

This isn’t about money for them, but they do accept tips, like a busker would.

They pull a dollar from their wallet, spreading it out on the table with their fingers so I can snap a picture.  When they first got it, they thought the woman who gave it to them might be trying to leave her number.  Instead, it reads, in curvy Sharpie lettering: “Don’t Quit Ur Day Job.”

They’ve been carrying it with them ever since.

“Something that you need to understand about me is I will do a lot for a laugh,” Harris told me.  “Part of this might be kind of a reactionary thing too with what I went through as a kid. That I understand loneliness and despair and living in that, and if I can make somebody laugh by making myself look like a dumbass … Hell yeah, I'll do it. Like, that's why I'm willing to burp into a 1500-watt loudspeaker.”

Harris is currently working on recording an album with the working title “Shabbey Road.”

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