Why Jews Wrote Your Favorite Christmas Songs
It was Jewish Americans like Irving Berlin who drew on Yiddish and the rhythms and chords of traditional cantorial music to create our most beloved Christmas tunes.
I
love Christmas—the parties, the spirit of charity, the lights glowing
on modest row houses, the tree at Rockefeller Center, even the schmaltzy
movies. What I really love, though, is the music. Think of the most beloved Christmas songs, like “Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!”  It’s about winter and romance: “When we finally kiss goodnight / How you'll hate going out in the storm.” There’s no mention of Nazareth, three wise men, frankincense, or myrrh. It’s warm and homey, but vaguely sexy too. Cheeky and charming, and not remotely Christian. Any American can relate. Or “The Christmas Song,” with references to Santa, turkey, and mistletoe; it doesn’t feel like revelation so much as cocktail hour. It’s not about Christ. It’s about Christmas.  What’s most surprising, however, is that the Americans who wrote those two Christmas standards—and most of the other seasonal classics—were, like Jesus himself, Jews. They were often children of parents who fled Russia and elsewhere in Eastern Europe during the great wave of immigration between 1880 and 1920. There’s Sammy Cahn, who wrote “Let It Snow.” The son of Galician Jewish immigrants, Cahn rose to become Sinatra’s favorite lyricist. There’s also Mel Tormé, the singer and songwriter who, with Bob Wells, penned “The Christmas Song,” more commonly known as “Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire.” His father, William Torma, a Jewish cantor, emigrated from Belarus in the early 20th century. Frank Loesser, a titan of Broadway and Hollywood musicals who composed the slightly naughty “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” was born into a middle-class Jewish family. His father left Germany in the 1890s to avoid serving in the Kaiser’s military.  Johnny Marks gave us “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” “A Holly Jolly Christmas,” and “Rockin’ Around The Christmas Tree,” a yuletide bubblegum favorite introduced in the 1950s by Brenda Lee. Marks, too, was one of the chosen ones. “He was Jewish and didn’t even believe in Christmas,” Lee told Billboard Magazine years later. “And all that would come out of him was Christmas music!” “All everyone’s favorite Christmas songs were written by Jews, and this is a fact,” David Lehman, a poet and editor and the author of A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs, told me. “The most famous example being “White Christmas” by Irving Berlin.”  In his novel Operation Shylock, the Jewish American novelist Philip Roth parodies this phenomenon and its chief architect, Berlin: The radio was playing “Easter Parade” and I thought, But this is Jewish genius on a par with the Ten Commandments. God gave Moses the Ten Commandments and then he gave to Irving Berlin “Easter Parade” and “White Christmas.” The two holidays that celebrate the divinity of Christ—the divinity that’s the very heart of the Jewish rejection of Christianity—and what does Irving Berlin brilliantly do? He de-Christs them both! Easter he turns into a fashion show and Christmas into a holiday about snow. Gone is the gore and the murder of Christ—down with the crucifix and up with the bonnet! He turns their religion into schlock. But nicely! Nicely! So nicely the goyim don’t even know what hit ’em. They love it. Everybody loves it. I think Roth gets it wrong. Berlin’s “White Christmas” isn’t a rebuke to Christianity. It’s a magic trick of universality which is specifically American. It’s a testament to America itself that these songs by Jews about Christmas are so jauntily peaceful. Because at least historically, Christmas was a time of terror for my people in Europe. “Medieval rulers would use Christmas as an occasion to put out anti-Jewish legislation because it would be a time when it would be received with great applause,” Rabbi Ari Lamm told me. “And so Christmas is a time when the Jewish community remembers feeling great fear.” That is not the case in America today. Christmas in the U.S. can be criticized for its commercialism. But it is open to Americans of all faiths. And it’s stitched together by a great canon of songs that mark the season every year—written mostly by Jews. The question is why?
To answer that question, you have to go back to the very beginning of American Christmas music. Turns out, Americans weren’t always the most Christmassy of Christians. The Puritans even made celebrating Christmas a criminal offense in the Massachusetts Bay colony in 1659 because back in Europe it had been an occasion for drunkenness and debauchery. St. Nicholas, who would later transform into Santa Claus, retained his old-world sensibilities by meting out judgment to children every December. The bad kids were beaten with a rod from a birch tree. But by 1823, American Christmas was beginning to crystallize with Clement Moore’s poem A Visit from St. Nicholas. Santa had become a jolly man with a sleigh who handed out gifts. And by the late 1800s, the building blocks for modern American Christmas were all there. But the music was not. “There was just almost no music done other than classical music,” John McWhorter, New York Times columnist and linguistics professor at Columbia University, told me. “The good music hadn’t happened yet.” The good music started with vaudeville, the variety shows that blew up in New York in the 1880s. But it really wasn’t until ragtime, the piano-based predecessor to jazz perfectly suited to mechanical player pianos of the era, that the bones of popular recorded music would begin to form. The giants of the genre were black Americans like Scott Joplin, composer of the famous “Maple Leaf Rag.” The popularity of ragtime coincided with the invention of the gramophone, the early version of the record player. Around the start of the 20th century, the modern record industry was born when Emile Berliner figured out how to mass-produce the shellac discs that were the first records, replacing the cylinders that Thomas Edison’s first phonograph machine used to play recorded sound. This innovation—combined with the music of black Americans and the mass migration of European immigrants to the United States—created the conditions for the birth of the American songbook, a collection of timeless music that began around 1920 and petered out in the early 1960s. We know it largely as the stuff of Broadway and big Hollywood musicals such as Guys and Dolls, Oklahoma!, and Singin’ in the Rain. Until rock and roll, this was American pop music. And this is the exact period when you get the bulk of the great American Christmas songs, written mostly by a minority who don’t celebrate Christmas.
Much of the Jewish migration to the U.S. at the start of the 20th century came from the Pale of Settlement, the area ruled until the Russian Revolution by the Romanov dynasty. Jews were segregated into isolated towns known as shtetls where they were marginalized and often subjected to pogroms. Imagine, then, these people arriving at Ellis Island, where they were greeted by opportunity, diversity, and technology, finally free to express themselves in a new land. They brought with them the Jewish musical tradition: the cantorial minor keys found in Jewish prayer. It’s no accident that Harold Arlen (born Chaim Arluck), the composer of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” and “Stormy Weather,” was the son of a cantor. Then, there was the Yiddish language, a hybrid tongue with words plucked from German, Hebrew, and other languages. Yiddish lends itself to surprising rhymes and pleasant meter. In this respect Yiddish is a lot like American music itself—an alchemy of cultures that create a delightful and unexpected new combination. So it’s this combination of factors—the Yiddish language, the freedom America afforded Jewish immigrants, and the haunting minor key found in Jewish prayer—that help explain why Jews wrote so many of the great American songs. But if there was one man who embodied the alchemy of the Jewish American experience in a single life, it was Irving Berlin, the greatest American composer of them all.
Born in Tyumen, Siberia, on May 11, 1888, Irving Berlin said his earliest memory was of watching his family home burn to the ground in a pogrom. The family fled Siberia for Belarus, eventually immigrating in 1893 by steamship to New York City. They moved into a cramped tenement on the Lower East Side with no running water. The young Berlin had to grow up quickly. His father, a rabbi, cantor, and kosher butcher, died when Berlin was 13. He left home as an adolescent and began his musical career as a busker, singing songs for pennies in the Bowery, often transposing the lyrics of popular tunes into raunchy doggerel for the men who frequented burlesques, bordellos, and bars. He would sleep in squalid boarding homes for boys, where at any moment his few possessions could be stolen. When Berlin was 14, he got a steady job as a singing waiter. Patrons would literally throw coins at his feet. Berlin had no formal musical training. He taught himself piano at the saloons where he waited tables, learning to play only on the black keys in F-sharp. One of his first investments was a “transposing piano” that allowed him to play in F-sharp and change it to any key he wanted. It had a large disc to shift the key that resembled a steering wheel. He called the instrument his Buick, and he composed his masterpieces on it for decades. Berlin adored ragtime. He slipped references to the genre into his songs of this period. His 1911 breakout hit, “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” a tribute to the music he loved, made Berlin wealthy and an international celebrity. At the age of 23, he was a self-made success. And he would remain the central figure of American music for the next 40 years. Jerome Kern once remarked that “Irving Berlin has no place in American music. He is American music.” Berlin’s melancholic masterpiece, of course, is “White Christmas,” and he didn’t write it until he was in his 50s, when his career might have been winding down. The original was recorded in 1942 by Bing Crosby with the Ken Darby singers. “White Christmas” is still thought to be the biggest-selling single in the history of recorded music, bigger than “Billie Jean,” “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” or anything Elvis ever released. It was serendipitous that a song about winter raced up the hit parade as American troops were at war in deserts and jungles, longing for the tranquility of a snowy holiday. Poet Carl Sandburg, writing for the Chicago Daily Times, captured what this meant for the GIs overseas. “Away down under, this latest hit of Irving Berlin catches us where we love peace,” he wrote. “The Nazi theory and doctrine that man in his blood is naturally warlike, so much so that he should call war a blessing, we don’t like it. . . The hopes and prayers are that we will see the beginnings of a hundred years of white Christmases—with no blood spots of needless agony and death on the snow.” According to Laurence Bergreen’s 1996 biography of Berlin, As Thousands Cheer, as soon as Berlin finished writing, he excitedly told his assistant it wasn’t just the best song he ever wrote, but the best song ever written.
Just this month, on December 6, a new version of this crown jewel of American Christmas music was released, a duet with a risen-from-the-dead Bing Crosby and a contemporary superstar, V, a member of the K-pop band BTS. It’s not my favorite version. The video features staggeringly bad animation of Bing as Santa, and if you listen really closely during the song, you can probably hear V cashing his check.  Nevertheless, through the years, “White Christmas” has been like a rite of passage for artists from Otis Redding to The Drifters to a somber Elvis and, of course, Ella Fitzgerald. My favorite version is Darlene Love’s, produced by Phil Spector.  Christmas classics continue to be reinvented, generation after generation. And this tells us something about America. Unlike Europe, where symphonies and operas are meant to be played to the exacting specifications of the composer, the American songbook continues to be improvised, reinterpreted and tinkered with. This great mixing is what makes American music so magnificent.
The American songbook is a precious heirloom. And so is the American Christmas music we know today. In 1954, when Irving Berlin was 66, he told The Washington Post that while he didn’t celebrate Christmas as a child on the Lower East Side, he still felt connected to the holiday. “I bounded across the street to my friendly neighbors, the O’Haras, and shared their goodies,” he said. “This was my first sight of a Christmas tree. The O’Haras were very poor and later, as I grew used to their annual tree, I realized they had to buy one with broken branches and small height. But for me that first tree seemed to tower to heaven.” “What an unbelievable accomplishment the American version [of Christmas] is relative to everything that came before,” said Rabbi Lamm. “Everybody is a part of it. And we're going to sing a bunch of songs written by Jews and we're going to play them in every mall, restaurant and office and private home in the country. What an unbelievable, almost unimaginable achievement on the part of American culture. It’s something that we as a nation should be very proud of.” https://www.thefp.com/p/eli-lake-jews-wrote-your-favorite-christmas-songs-irving-berlin?utm_campaign=email-post&r=rd3ao&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email So this Christmas, even though there’s no tree in my home, no mistletoe, and no presents to be exchanged, this holiday doesn’t exclude me. I live in a country so welcoming of Jews that it allowed my people—as they fled the horrors of the old world—to build a new American Christmas, whose songs are reinvented and perfected every season. |
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