Gary Lachman: Jewish punk?

I checked Whit's podcast just now and found that his most recent guest, in an episode posted to YouTube on October 17, was Gary Lachman, formerly of Blondie.

(Note the "Alistair" Crowley reference in the video title. Whit is a Masterpiece Theatre guy, not a Diary of a Drug Fiend guy.)

Blondie gets mentioned a lot in The Heebie-Jeebies at CBGB's -- Chris Stein is of course Jewish, and there's a whole chapter, which I haven't read yet, called "The Shiksa Goddess," meaning Debbie Harry -- so that seemed somewhat synchy. I haven't listened to much of it yet, but two minutes in Whit says this:

But let's start with the seventies and CBGB's and that world. I lived about three blocks from CBGB's in those days. I don't recall ever seeing you there, but I may have. . . .

Whitley Strieber, America's alien abductee laureate, lived three blocks from CBGB during the birth of punk? Small world.

A further sync is that Whit refers to the club as CBGB's, with the possessive 's, even though the actual name was CBGB (okay, technically CBGB & OMFUG). Steven Lee Beeber also uses the possessive 's in the title of the book I'm reading, but that's because he wanted to make it rhyme with heebie-jeebies. (He's big on rhyming Billy DeBeck lingo. Another chapter is titled "Hotsy-Totsy Nazi Shatzes.")

So this sync, such as it is, raises the obvious question: Is Gary Lachman a Jew? The Heebie-Jeebies sort of implies that by referring to him as Gary "Valentine" Lachman, which is the author's usual way of introducing a Jew hiding behind a goyish stage name, but he never says it outright. It's a book about Jewish punk with a whole chapter on Blondie; if the authour knew Lachman was Jewish, he would have said so. But if he wasn't Jewish, you'd think he would have said that, too. Wikipedia is no help -- no "Early Life" section at all; the "Biography" section begins with his joining Blondie. Lachman is often a Jewish name but could also just be German.

Googling is gary lachman jewish led me to a 2018 Facebook post of his, linking to this /x/ thread and saying:

Now I've upset some other people. 4chanately they've only accused me of being Jewish. If only.

Okay, this is deliberate can-neither-confirm-nor-deny schmegegge, and I can only assume that Beeber got the same in his interviews and was thus forced to leave Lachman's possible Jewishness up in the air in The Heebie-Jeebies.

The /x/ thread links to a page called "Jewish Punks 1974-80," which includes Lachman on the list, but with no documentation.

My best guess -- just a guess, but it's what makes the most sense of that weird, carefully worded Facebook post -- is that he's got a Jewish father and a shiksa mother.

Update: Here's a more direct statement, posted in 2020 on his official website:

Am I Jewish? No. Brought up Catholic but became a honorary Jew by living in the East Village for a few years.

So he's got something in common with Whitley Strieber, another Catholic with a German surname that sounds like it might be Jewish. As I've mentioned, Christopher Walken plays Strieber as a Jew in the movie Communion, or at least has him talk like a Jew.