The fact that the most beloved Christmas songs were written by American Jews is not an anomaly if you understand Jews. The idea of America in cinema was invented by Ben Hecht, Hermann Mankiewicz and Billy Wilder.
The superhero genre was invented by Jerry Siegel and Bob Kane; imagine Superman and Batman as surnames, and you can hear Siegel and Kane’s longing for superpowers a century on. So why not invent the American Christmas too?
The most glittering example is White Christmas by Irving Berlin, and his story is typical. His childhood name was Israel Beilin and he was born in Siberia, the youngest son of Moses, a cantor. Their home was burnt down by anti-Jewish arsonists when Israel was four or five. Berlin’s biographer, Jody Rosen, believes Israel’s earliest Christmas memories were of pogroms, which tended to reach a pitch during Christian festivals.
The family moved to America and Irving Berlin – now renamed after an English actor and a German city, said a wag – grew up on the Lower East Side of New York City.
He left school to become a busker, a singing waiter, and a songwriter at Tin Pan Alley where, in an act of chutzpah and subconscious fear, he turned himself into the perfect American. He wrote God Bless America, which became his adopted homeland’s anthem; Easter Parade; and White Christmas. When asked how a Jew could write a song about Christmas, he replied, “I wrote it as an American”. I’m not sure that is true.
“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?” wrote Philip Roth, Berlin’s most canny observer, in Operation Shylock. “He de-Christs them both! Easter turns into a fashion show and Christmas into a holiday about snow… He turns their religion into schlock. But nicely! Nicely! So nicely the goyim don’t even know what hit ’em ….”
Even in America, Jews were excluded from so-called respectable professions. The established population had no interest in the new mass culture and the way was clear for a cultural flowering and symbiosis: Jews would make it for them. They had the tradition of Yiddish theatre and song, and the cacophony of Israel Zangwill’s Melting Pot to draw on. “Had I been born on the Lower East Side,” Cole Porter, the only elite gentile songwriter of the time, said in tribute, “I might have been a true genius.”
White Christmas began as satire: a swell (the kind of man the half-Jewish but gentile-passing Fred Astaire always played) sitting in Hollywood, longing for the comforts of home. “I’m dreaming of a white Christmas…” But Berlin realised he had something more profound. He was an unreliable narrator with multiple stories of the song’s creation myth. It is possible that its wistfulness comes from the fact that his baby, Irving Berlin Jnr, died on Christmas Day 1928, but he would never have said so explicitly. He was a joy-maker who made myths.
White Christmas spoke to the itinerant soul of America. They had all, as refugees to the United States, or migrants from country to city during the Great Depression, left their homes behind. The critic Michael Beckerman wondered if the song was, “a kind of holiday Moby-Dick, a distant image of things that can never be reclaimed: the past, childhood, and innocence itself?”
It was first performed by Bing Crosby on Christmas 1941, shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbour. The Jewish songwriter must have a gentile singer as an avatar, which Rosen calls “a projection of Jewish desire… downtown street smarts but uptown ‘class’”. White Christmas became the anthem of the war: the musical version of Casablanca, a story about refugees who likewise cannot go home, likewise written by Jews from the Lower East Side – the Epstein brothers – and released in 1942. “Away down under this latest hit of Irving Berlin,” wrote Carl Sandburg, “catches us where we love peace”. It became the best-selling single of all time.
Many songs followed it. Let it Snow and Santa Baby were written by American Jews; so were Walkin’ in a Winter Wonderland; Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire; Silver Bells; It’s The Most Wonderful Time of the Year; Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree; A Holly, Jolly Christmas; and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.
These songs express the longing of the immigrant to create a world where he is safe, a dazzling act of tribute, cynicism, and control. If you hate Christmas music, blame the eastern European pogromists that tangentially inspired it. But I am with Philip Roth when he marvels: “If supplanting Jesus Christ with snow can enable my people to cosy up to Christmas, then let it snow, let it snow, let it snow!”
