Transcript of Why Jews Wrote Your Favorite Christmas Songs (From the Honestly Archives)

Merry Christmas, listeners. Full confession. I love this holiday. I love the parties, the spirit of charity, the lights on row homes in working class neighborhoods, the tree at Rockefeller Center, even the schmaltzy movies. What I really love about Christmas though is the music, and not just the broad oeuvre inspired by the birth of Jesus.

I like Handel and Bach just fine. But as an American, what stirs my soul is our Christmas songbook. Now don't get me wrong. I am Jewish, so you won't find me dragging a small Norwegian spruce into my living room or attending midnight mass. On Christmas day itself, I eat wonton soup and sweet and sour chicken at a Chinese restaurant, as is my people's tradition.

But the music of the season is not only infectious, it's also secular. Think of the most beloved Christmas songs.

Oh, the weather outside is frightful, but the fire is so delightful. Since we have no place to go, let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.

This 1 performed here by the chairman of the board himself, Frank Sinatra. Well, it's about winter and romance. There's no mention of Nazareth, 3 wise men, frankincense, or myrrh. It's about a mood. It's warm and homey, but vaguely sexy too.

It's taking you to the dance, but it's also bringing flowers for your mother. It's cheeky and charming, loving and caring, and not remotely Christian in the religious sense at least. Or

this 1.

Sure.

There's a reference to carols, Santa, turkey, and mistletoe. But there's nothing church like about the music, nothing reverential, elegiac, or as dramatic as you may expect any song about the birth of God's son to be. That's because it's not about Christ. It's about Christmas. The Christmas we celebrate today, a national holiday largely observed at home, where all are welcome to reflect on the year and cherish the ones you love.

A spirit marked by the ubiquity of the American Yuletide canon. And what's surprising is that the Americans who wrote those 2 Christmas standards

and most of the other classics

as well are, like Jesus himself, Jews.

And so, I'm offering the simple free.

These were often the children of parents who fled Eastern Europe and Russia during the great wave of immigration between 18/80/1920. There is Sami Khan who wrote Let It Snow, the song we heard from Frank Sinatra. This son of Galatian Jewish immigrants rose to become Sinatra's favorite composer. There's also Mel Torme, the singer and songwriter responsible for the timeless.

Chestnuts roasting on an open fire.

His father, William Torma, was a Jewish cantor,

a

man who sung the Jewish prayers in synagogue and fled Belarus for New York in the early 20th century. Frank Lesser, a titan of Broadway and Hollywood Musicals who composed the slightly naughty Baby, It's Cold Outside

I really can't stay.

But baby, it's cold outside.

Was born into a middle class Jewish family. His father escaped Germany in the 18 nineties to avoid serving in the Kaiser's military. Johnny Marks, the man who gave us Rudolph the red nosed reindeer, a holly jolly Christmas, and this piece of Yuletide bubblegum from Brenda Lee.

Walking around the Christmas tree at

Well, he was also 1 of the Chosens. Brenda Lee, many years later, would tell Billboard Magazine of Marx, he was Jewish and didn't even believe in Christmas. And all that would come out of him was Christmas music.

Later, we'll have some fucking pie and produce some caroling.

From the free press, this is Honestly. I'm Eli Lake. How American Jews helped create American Christmas after the break.

All everyone's favorite Christmas songs were written by Jews.

This is David Laymon, poet, editor, and the author of A Fine Romance, Jewish Songwriters, American songs.

The most famous example being White Christmas by Irving Berlin. Another example is Mel Torme, who was only, I think, 20 years old at the time. He wrote the music for chestnuts roasting on an open fire. My favorite of them is, Sammy Khan lyric and Julie Stein's music for Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow.

All the weather outside is frightful, but the fire, it's so delightful. And since we've no place to go, let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.

It's eerie, this Jewish connection to American Christmas, and I'm hardly the first person to notice. In his novel Operation Shylock, Philip Roth writes about this phenomenon and its chief architect, the composer Irving Berlin. The radio was playing Easter parade, and I thought, but this is Jewish genius on par with the 10 Commandments. God gave Moses the 10 Commandments, and then he gave to Irving Berlin Easter parade and White Christmas, the 2 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 a bonnet. He turns their religion into shlock. But nicely, nicely, so nicely that Goyim don't even know what hit him.

They love it. Everybody loves it. Well, I think Roth gets it wrong about the schlock. Berlin's White Christmas is not a rebuke to Christianity. It's a magic trick of universality which is specifically American.

Dreaming of a white

Christmas. Just like the white

It's the sound of comfort for the huddled masses. A home and a hearth for the American myth. White Christmas, Silver Bells, Walking in a Winter Wonderland, 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.

What would sometimes happen is that 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.

This is rabbi Ari Lamb, founder and president of Soul Shop Studios and the president of B'nai Zion Foundation.

For example, you know, in 13/69, the king of Sicily passes a decree that all the Jews in his kingdom have to wear a special badge at all times to mark them out as Jews, and he announces that on Christmas because that's an auspicious time for announcing such a thing. In 18/81, there's a stampede that occurs just out of enthusiastic crowds in a church in Warsaw on Christmas Eve. And, nonsensically, the Jews are blamed for that, and there's a resulting massacre in which, you know, for 3 days, Jews are just killed in the streets. And so Christmas is the time when the Jewish community remembers feeling great fear.

Well, that is not so in America.

Christmas is not a Christian holiday to me. I mean, to the extent that Christianity played any significant role in my house, I guess certain things came up because of things that I would see in Christmas specials, but that's about it.

Here is Columbia linguistics professor and New York Times columnist John McWhorter.

It's an American consumerist holiday. I have always thought of it as a holiday that involved a great deal of really good songs. And without the songs, it wouldn't be the holiday at all. Imagine Christmas where you just kind of exchange presents and ate certain food, but there was none of that music that would be absurd. Let It Snow and and and White Christmas and and, frankly, the really good ones, and those are American songbook ones.

Americans were not always the most Christmassy of Christians. The first boatloads of Puritans to arrive weren't big on holiday cheer. They despised Christmas. You could say it was the pilgrims who launched the first war on Christmas when they made celebrating it a criminal offense in Massachusetts Bay Colony in 16/59. Why ban Christmas?

Well, much as their great great grandchildren would later do with soccer, Europeans had managed to turn something fun into a ritualized hooligan piss up. By the late 1700, Christmas had become a moment of class rebellion, as peasants and workers got drunk and extorted landowners for money, wine, and food in exchange for a song. Even. Caroling as we know it today, neighbors in Santa hats collecting for charity by singing Silent Night on your doorstep is quaint, but this was a bit more spicy. Drunken mobs demanding entry into a private home belching their way to a tune and demanding cash.

Not very Charlie Brown. Into the 1800, Christmas retained its rough edges. Saint Nicholas, who would later transform into Santa Claus, retained his old world sensibilities by meting out judgment every December to children who were good and bad. The bad children were beaten with a rod from a birch tree. But by 18/21, Santa was losing his edge, and the American Christmas was beginning to crystallize with the poem, a visit from Saint Nicholas.

Though you probably know it by its immortal first lines.

Talking to all the kids from all over the world.

I will let Louis Armstrong take it from here.

'Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house, none of creature was stirring, not even a mouse.

Now by the time Clement More penned this famous poem, Santa Claus was a jolly man with a sleigh who handed out gifts. Christmas was entering its department store era, its finest form. So by the late 1800, the building blocks for American Christmas were all there, but it's just that the music was not.

I've often said that time travel back to, say, 18/80

Again, this is John McWhorter.

But 1 thing that would be hard is that we would find the music dull. There was just almost no music done other than classical music. Everything else would have felt thin because the good music hadn't happened yet.

The good stuff started with vaudeville, the variety shows that began in France but blew up in New York in the 18 eighties. But this was still the era before radio or gramophones. It wasn't until ragtime music that the bones of popular recorded music would begin to form. Ragtime is a kind of proto jazz. It's piano based, perfect for the mechanical player pianos of the era.

And the giants of the genre are black Americans like Scott Joplin, the composer of what we are now listening to, his famous Maple Leaf Rag. Now the popularity of ragtime happens to coincide with the invention of the gramophone, the early version of the record player. By 1901, the modern record industry was born when Emil Berliner figured out how to mass produce the shellac disks that were the first records, replacing the original cylinder that Thomas Edison's first phonograph machine used to play recorded sound. When this innovation combined with the musical traditions of black Americans and the mass migration of European immigrants to the United States, the conditions were created for the birth of the modern American songbook, a collection of timeless music that began around 1915 and petered out in the early 19 sixties. We know them largely as the stuff of Broadway and big Hollywood musicals.

Think of Oklahoma.

Oklahoma where the wind comes sweeping down the plain, and the waving

Guys and Dolls. Hate me. Go ahead. Hate me.

Love that. I love you. Years of my life. I was a fool to give to you.

Alright. Already

Or singing in the rain.

I'm singing in the rain. I'm just singing in the rain.

Until rock and roll, this was American pop music. And it's in this period from about 1920 to 1960 that you get the bulk of the great American Christmas songs. And those songs are largely written by Jews. So the question is why? Was there something in the lives of these American Jews that gave them the superpower to unite a nation under the mistletoe?

Jewish migration in this period between 18/80/1920 largely came from the Pale of Settlement, the land mass ruled until the Russian Revolution by the Romanov dynasty. Jews were segregated into shtetls, small isolated towns, which are dangerous places, often attacked by cossacks on horseback. These Jews could not participate in Russian society or government. They were marginalized, struggling, inward looking communities. Imagine then these people arriving at Ellis Island to be greeted by opportunity, diversity, and technology.

The process uncorked a suppressed Jewish genius. People finally free to express themselves in this new land.

Well, for 1 thing, they had freedom, and they didn't have to worry about pogroms.

This is David Laymon again.

The Russian czar who had been somewhat benevolent was assassinated in 18/81, and what followed in persecution of the Jews was really horrific. That's why people like Irving Berlin came and all the others.

With them, they brought the Jewish musical tradition. It's not an accident that Harold Arlen, born Chaim Arlick

Someday I'll wish upon a star and wake up where the clouds are

The composer of Somewhere Over the Rainbow and Stormy Weather was the son of a cantor, as was the great Irving Berlin, born Israel Bailin, as well as Al Jolson, a star of vaudeville, and the first talkie motion picture, The Jazz Singer.

Now every Jewish family wants their kid to play piano or violin. And this is, you know, before there are, radios. There's that musical orientation. Then if you go to synagogue, the melodies are very, very interesting, and there's a minor key element in the American songbook.

The 1 thing that there definitely seems to be is an accidental resemblance between a certain wailing cantorial element in Jewish music

This is John McWhorter again.

And then also the blue note and the blues and that kind of that kind of tear in the eye.

There is also an element of the language that this first generation of Jewish immigrants spoke, Yiddish, that lends itself to surprising rhymes and pleasant meter. It's a hybrid tongue written in Hebrew with its words plucked from Russian and German. And in this respect, Yiddish is a lot like American music itself, an alchemy of cultures that create a delightful and unexpected new combination.

But I think also part of it, and I have to be careful here because I don't wanna stereotype, but Yiddish is a language that is very much about a certain almost self consciously crafted wit, a kind of use of words. And it's not that there are any human beings who are not into their words. But Yiddish has a certain extremity there. And I think it led a lot of those guys to have a fondness for light verse that not everybody did. And so Ira Gershwin I'm not gonna say Jewish people are the people of the book.

I think it's more about a particular close verbal wit in Yiddish that I think sensitized a lot of those guys to writing that kind of lyric.

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. They gave us the American songbook, George and Ira Gershwin, the brothers that gave us Rhapsody in Blue and I've Got Rhythm, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, who produced The Sound of Music and many other unforgettable Broadway shows, the great Jerome Kern, 1 of the first breakout stars of New York's Tin Pan Alley, who composed the scores for Showboat and Swing Time, 2 of the first major modern musicals. But if 1 man embodied this blessed alchemy of the Jewish American experience in a single extraordinary life, it was Irving Berlin, the greatest American composer of them all.

Let's all sing 1 chord and listen, and forget about the picture.

After the break, how the man born in Siberia as Israel Balaen gave Christmas its American soul. We are listening to the crown jewel of American Christmas music. This is the original version of White Christmas by Bing Crosby and the Ken Darby Singers. Until Elton John's treacly 1997 tribute version of Candle in the Wind for Princess Diana, this was the biggest selling single in the history of recorded music.

Listen to him.

This slow nostalgic song from the forties is bigger than Billie Jean, I wanna hold your hand, or anything Elvis ever released. Christmas. Crosby recorded it in 1941 for an MGM film called Holiday Inn, a silly musical that revolves around American holidays and is rather dramatically time stamped by a scene where Bing dresses up in blackface for a routine about Abraham Lincoln. According to a 1996 biography of Berlin by Lawrence Bergreen, as Berlin finished the song, he excitedly told his assistant that it was not only the best song he ever wrote, but the best song ever written. Over time though, Berlin leaned into modesty.

See, I wrote quite Christmas, spoke with any idea that it's occurring to be a so called phone hit.

This is Berlin himself in a 1945 interview with Armed Forces Radio. Please forgive the sound quality. There was a goddamn war going on.

I wrote it for a picture called Holiday Inn, and it was written 4 years ago. But it came out at a time when most of our troops were in areas that had no White Christmas in the jungles of the Pacific and the deserts of North Africa that gave it a special significance.

So perhaps White Christmas

would have

been a hit even if it had been released into a world of peace, but I doubt it would have had such an emotional appeal. It's serendipitous, I suppose, that a song about winter happens to race up the hit parade as Americans are at war in deserts and jungles, longing for the tranquility of a snowy holiday. It connected. Journalist Carl Sandberg, writing for the Chicago Times, captured what this meant for the GIs overseas, quote, a way down under this latest hit from Irving Berlin catches us where we love peace, 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 100 years of White Christmases with no blood spots of needless agony and death on the snow. End quote. It wasn't just the lyrics though. White Christmas offers sublime melancholy and this clicked with a world yearning for the end of suffering. It is a melancholy rooted in Jewish traditions that Berlin grew up in.

The composer Ron Capillo explained it in a video for the Toronto Sun a few years ago.

It starts off like this. I'm dreaming of a white Christmas. So we have this great first chord. I mean, this would be a normal chord. No dreaming whatsoever.

But all the yearning of an immigrant to be assimilated is in this 1 extra note. Not this, but this. So this is the dreamy. Now a normal version would go like this. But his is and right here, that chord.

Now some people see that as Yiddish. Some people see that as Jewish. But to me, I just hear it as a beautiful, almost like fog on the window as you're looking at this white Christmas. Ordinary.

Berlin.

That chord, and they're dreaming of a white Christmas. Again, normal would be

Those sad chords were in Berlin's bones. Born in Tolchin, Siberia on May 11th, 18, 88, Berlin's earliest memory was of watching his home burned to the ground in a pogrom as his family fled Siberia for Belarus. Eventually, the family would immigrate in 18/93 by steamship to New York City. Their first cramped home was a tenement in 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 he was 13. It was the same year that he quit school and began his working life as a paperboy in the Bowery. 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 dirtier doggerel for the drunks who frequented the burlesques, bordellos, and bars. He would sleep in squalid boarding homes for boys, where at any moment his few possessions could be stolen in his sleep. Eventually, when he was 14, he got a steady job as a waiter, singing for his tips.

Patrons would literally throw coins at his feet as he sang. In 1907, at age 19, Irving Berlin got his first songwriting credit. It was written in an exaggerated Italian style called Marie from Sunny Italy. These were fashionable in the 1st decade of 20th century. Songwriters in Tin Pan Alley would write specifically Irish, Jewish, Italian, or German songs to appeal to the new immigrants teaming into the big city.

My sweet Marie from sunny Italy.

This is Bing Crosby singing Marie nearly 60 years later for an Ed Sullivan tribute special.

Forever more than I'll be true. Just say the word and I will marry you, and then you'll surely be my sweet Marie from sunny Italy.

Berlin had no formal music training. He literally taught himself piano at the saloons where he waited tables and only learned how to play on the black keys in f sharp. When he finally got enough money for his own apartment, 1 of his first investments was what was known as a transposing piano that would allow him to play an F sharp, but he could then change it to any key he wanted. His model had a large disk to shift the key that resembled a steering wheel. He called the instrument his Buick, and he composed his masterpieces on it for decades.

In those early years, Berlin continued to write the ethnic songs until his first breakout hit, a tribute to the music he loved, Alexander's ragtime band in 1911.

Oh, my honey. Yes. Oh, my honey. Yes. Better hurry and lift me and, ain't you going?

Where are you going?

It was a labor of love. Berlin, like Gershwin, Kern, and the other songwriters in New York of this era loved ragtime. Berlin slipped references to the genre into his songs of this period referring to playing the rags that he loved. Alexander's ragtime band made the young man an international celebrity. In an era before radio, it was a transatlantic hit.

The sheet music flew off the shelf. Every local band loved it. Berlin traveled to London that year, and the song made him wealthy. At the age of 23, Irving Berlin was a self made success, and he would remain the central figure of American music for the next 40 years. Jerome Kern, another giant of the time, once remarked that Irving Berlin has no place in American music.

He is American music. He's not kidding. Check out the back catalog.

His greatest hit of all was White Christmas. Berlin wrote it when he was in his fifties when his career should have been in decline.

Biographers have puzzled over the origins of the song. James Kaplan, for example, writes that he began composing it in 1938 or 1939 while he was either in Phoenix, Arizona or New York. Berlin himself has given different accounts saying he composed the melody in 1939 and the lyrics sometime in 1940. His daughter, Mary Ellen, recalls in this interview from 2013 that he wrote it while he was in Hollywood.

1 Christmas, he had to be in Hollywood because they were filming the movie Alexander's Ragtime Band. And we suspect that he started White Christmas then because of the verse. The sun is shining, grass is green The orange and palm trees. Sway. There's never been such a day in Beverly Hills, LA, but it's December 24th, and I'm going into the unknown.

However it was written, in 2024, it's now clear that White Christmas is never going away. Just this month, on December 6th, a new version was released featuring Bing's undead vocals duetting with a contemporary superstar, the young man called V, a member of the k pop superstars BTS. The It's hardly my favorite version. The video features a staggeringly bad animation of Bing as Santa. And if you listen really closely, I'm sure you can actually hear v cashing his check during the song.

Nevertheless, through the years, White Christmas has been like a rite of passage for great artists. There is Otis Redding.

I

am dreaming,

The Drifters. Elvis Presley.

Where those trees are, they're done.

The incomparable Darlene Love.

In a lonely song to hear, sleigh bells in the snow.

And of course, Ella Fitzgerald.

I'm dreaming of a white Christmas Christmas with every Christmas

Christmas classics like this continue to be reinvented generation after generation, and this tells us something about America itself. Unlike in Europe, where traditional symphonies and operas are meant to be played to the exacting specifications of the composer, the American songbook is designed to be improvised and tinkered with. This spirit of innovation is something that drives our nation of immigrants when we are at our best. Consider the brilliance of jazz, a wholly American art form. So much of this great genre is the reinterpretation of the American songbook.

1 finds Jews like Berlin, Kern, Arlen, Rodgers, and Hammerstein all over the real book, a large binder of song sketches, the chords, the basic melody that every working jazz musician must master.

Bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens.

Here is Rodgers and Hammerstein's kind of Christmas song, My Favorite Things, from the 1959 Sound of Music as performed by Julie Andrews.

Cream colored ponies and crisp apple strudels, doorbells and sleigh bells and schnitzel with noodles, wild goose

The second life given to the American songbook by jazz completes a circle of sorts. Because all of the Jewish composers of Broadway and Hollywood Musicals were themselves smitten with the early ragtime and jazz created by black Americans. And here are black jazz artists squeezing unexpected brilliance from the compositions of Jewish songwriters. This great mixing is what makes our American music so magnificent. The American songbook is a precious heirloom, and so is American Christmas as we know it today.

Philip Roth was wrong about this. Irving Berlin's Christmas and the contributions of the other great Jewish American songwriters was not a scam played on the Christians to de Christ the holiday. Rather, it is an expression of both the genius and inclusivity of America at its best. 1954, when Irving Berlin was 66, he told the Washington Post that he did not celebrate Christmas as a Jew living in the lower east side tenement of his youth, but he still felt connected. Quote, I bounded across the street to my friendly neighbors, the O'Haras, he said, and shared their goodies.

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 1 with broken branches and small height. But for me, that first tree seemed to tower to heaven. That is a very different kind of Christmas than the ones endured by Jews in the old country.

Like, if you understand what an unbelievable accomplishment the American version of Christmas is relative to everything that came before, it's not that everything that came before is bad. But

Again, this is rabbi Ari Lam.

But just the idea that the American Christmas season is a time where people feel an obligation and feel it's in the spirit of the season to reach out to their fellow citizens in a spirit of kindness and good cheer, and, like, that's what it's about and that everybody is a part of it. And we're gonna sing a bunch of songs written by Jews, and we're gonna play them in every mall and restaurant and office and private home in the country, and that's gonna be what we all understand to be this season. What an unbelievable, like, almost unimaginable achievement on the part of American culture. Like, it's something that we as a nation should be very proud of.

So this Christmas, rather than fleeing Cossacks on horseback or huddling in the dark to avoid marauding carolers, my family will enjoy Chinese food in a restaurant and perhaps a rewatch of Die Hard. Even though there is no tree in my home, no mistletoe, and no presents will be exchanged, this holiday does not exclude me. I live in a country so welcoming of Jews that it allowed for my people as they fled the horrors of the old world to build a new American Christmas, whose songs are reinvented and perfected, it seems, every season.

I'm dreaming of a white Christmas. We jingle bells in the sky.

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