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- [00:00]
Eli Lake
Every once in a while, someone makes something that feels bigger. Not another Hollywood reboot, but a story built on courage, faith and meaning. The Daily Wire did that with their new seven part series, the Pendragon Rise of the Merlin. Based on a book series by Stephen R. Lawhead. It's a retelling of the classic King Arthur legend. The first official trailer just dropped and you should check it out. In this world, while pagan gods fall silent and empires collapse, one man's vision ignites a civilization's rebirth. Merlin becomes the bridge between myth and history and shapes the destiny of kings. The Pendragon cycle Rise of the Merlin premieres exclusively on Daily Wire January 22, 2026. Go watch the full trailer now at DailyWire.com.
- [00:59]
Hello listeners, it's Eli Early. Merry Christmas to you and happy holidays from all of us here this week. We are re upping one of my favorite episodes that I did for honestly. It's called why Jews Wrote youe Favorite Christmas Songs. It has been a difficult year for the chosen people in America, so something we've covered extensively on the show. And yet even in this season in a divided America, this episode, I think reminds all of us of the enduring privilege of living in a country where Jewish identity can flourish so openly, contribute so richly that it even manages to shape the ultimate Christian holiday. We will be putting out one more episode here on the feed in the next few weeks, but Breaking History will also be taking a small break after that. As we head into the new year, be on the lookout for exciting announcements from Breaking History. We're going to try a little bit of a different format for 2026, and until then, Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukkah.
- [02:06]
John Legend, Sheryl Crow, Elvis Costello and Alanis Morrison star in the MGM Original series.
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Rabbi Ari Lam
Words and Music.
- [02:16]
Eli Lake
Iconic artists share intimate performances and the stories behind the songs. New episodes Sundays on mgm.
- [02:36]
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. Ah, but the music of the season is not only infectious, it's also secular.
- [03:32]
Think of the most beloved Christian.
- [03:35]
Various Singers (e.g., Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Brenda Lee)
Oh, the weather outside is frightful but the fire is so delightful since we've no place to go Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.
- [03:48]
Eli Lake
This one, performed here by the chairman of the board himself, Frank Sinatra. Well, it's about winter and romance.
- [03:55]
Various Singers (e.g., Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Brenda Lee)
The lights are turned down low Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.
- [04:01]
Eli Lake
There's no mention of Nazareth, three 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 one.
- [04:23]
Everybody knows A turkey.
- [04:27]
Various Singers (e.g., Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Brenda Lee)
And some mistletoe.
- [04:31]
Help to make the season bright.
- [04:35]
Eli Lake
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 two Christmas standards and most of the other classics as well, are, like Jesus himself, Jews.
- [05:18]
Various Singers (e.g., Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Brenda Lee)
And so.
- [05:20]
I'm offering the simple, free.
- [05:24]
Eli Lake
These were often the children of parents who fled Eastern Europe and Russia during the great wave of immigration between 1880 and 1920. There is Sammy 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.
- [05:50]
Various Singers (e.g., Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Brenda Lee)
On an open fire.
- [05:54]
Eli Lake
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.
- [06:11]
Various Singers (e.g., Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Brenda Lee)
Stay But Baby, it's cold outside, was.
- [06:14]
Eli Lake
Born into a middle class Jewish family. His father escaped Germany in the 1890s 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.
- [06:34]
Various Singers (e.g., Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Brenda Lee)
Rocking around the Christmas tree at the Christmas party hop.
- [06:39]
Eli Lake
Well, he was also one of the chosens. Brenda Lee, many years later would tell Billboard magazine of Marks he was Jewish and didn't even believe in Christmas. And all that would come out of him was Christmas music.
- [06:54]
Various Singers (e.g., Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Brenda Lee)
Later we'll have some pumpkin pie and we'll do some caroling.
- [07:00]
Eli Lake
From the Free Press, I'm Eli Lake. How American Jews helped create American Christmas. After the break.
- [07:16]
Various Singers (e.g., Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Brenda Lee)
The Christmas Tree. Have a happy holiday.
- [07:21]
Everyone dancing merrily in the new old fashioned way.
- [07:29]
All everyone's favorite Christmas songs were written by Jews.
- [07:34]
Eli Lake
This is David Lehman, poet, editor and the author of A Fine Jewish Songwriters American Songs.
- [07:42]
Various Singers (e.g., Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Brenda Lee)
The 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.
- [08:17]
Oh, 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.
- [08:33]
Eli Lake
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.
- [08:49]
The radio was playing Easter Parade and I thought, but this is Jewish genius on 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.
- [09:09]
Rabbi Ari Lam
The.
- [09:10]
Eli Lake
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 a crucifix and up with a bonnet he turns their religion into schlock. But nicely, nicely so nicely that goyim don't even know what hit him. They love it. Everybody loves it.
- [09:37]
Well, I think Roth gets it wrong about the schlock.
- [09:41]
Berlin's White Christmas is not a rebuke to Christianity. It's a magic trick of universality, which is specifically American.
- [09:50]
Various Singers (e.g., Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Brenda Lee)
I'm dreaming of a white.
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Christmas.
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Just like the one.
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Eli Lake
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.
- [10:23]
Rabbi Ari Lam
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.
- [10:33]
Eli Lake
This is Rabbi Ari Lamb, founder and president of Soulshop Studios and the president of B' Nai Zion Foundation.
- [10:40]
Rabbi Ari Lam
For example, you know, in 1369, 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 1881, 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 three days, Jews are just killed in the streets. And so Christmas is a time when the Jewish community remembers feeling great fear.
- [11:25]
Eli Lake
Well, that is not so in America.
- [11:27]
John McWhorter
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.
- [11:41]
Eli Lake
Here is Columbia linguistics professor and New York Times columnist John McWhorter.
- [11:46]
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.
- [11:57]
And that without the songs, it wouldn't be the holiday at all. Imagine Christmas where you just kind of exchanged presents and ate certain food, but there was none of that music that would be absurd. Let it snow and white Christmas. And frankly, the really good ones. And those are American songbook ones.
- [12:15]
Eli Lake
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 1659. 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 1700s, 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.
- [12:58]
Various Singers (e.g., Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Brenda Lee)
Good King Wenceslas looked out on the feast of Stephen when the snow lay round about deep and Crisp and even.
- [13:07]
Eli Lake
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 through a tune and demanding cash. Not very Charlie brown. Into the 1800s, Christmas retained its rough edges. St 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 1821, Santa was losing his edge. And the American Christmas was beginning to crystallize with the poem a visit from St. Nicholas. Though you probably know it by its immortal first lines.
- [13:55]
Various Singers (e.g., Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Brenda Lee)
Talking to all the kids from all over the world.
- [13:59]
Eli Lake
I will let Louis Armstrong take it from here.
- [14:02]
Various Singers (e.g., Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Brenda Lee)
Twas the night before Christmas.
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When all through the house.
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Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.
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Eli Lake
Now, by the time Clement Moore 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 1800s, the building blocks for American Christmas were all there. But it's just that the music was not.
- [14:38]
John McWhorter
I've often said that time travel back to say, 1880.
- [14:42]
Eli Lake
Again, this is John McWhorter.
- [14:43]
John McWhorter
But one 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.
- [14:54]
Eli Lake
The good stuff started with vaudeville, the variety shows that began in France, but blew up in New York in the 1880s. 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.
- [15:14]
Ragtime is a kind of proto jazz. It's piano based, perfect for the mechanic 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 discs 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 1960s. We know them largely as the stuff of Broadway and big Hollywood musicals. Think of Oklahoma.
- [16:18]
Various Singers (e.g., Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Brenda Lee)
Oklahoma where the wind comes sweeping down the plain and the.
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Eli Lake
Waving Guys and dolls.
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Various Singers (e.g., Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Brenda Lee)
Hate me. Go ahead, hate me. The last years of my life I was a fool to give to you all right already.
- [16:34]
Eli Lake
Or Singing in the Rain.
- [16:35]
Various Singers (e.g., Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Brenda Lee)
I'm singing in the rain. You're singing in the rain.
- [16:42]
Eli Lake
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 1880 and 1920 largely came from the Pale of Settlement. The landmass 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.
- [17:45]
Various Singers (e.g., Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Brenda Lee)
Well, for one thing, they had freedom and they didn't have to worry about pogroms.
- [17:50]
Eli Lake
This is David Lehman again.
- [17:52]
Various Singers (e.g., Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Brenda Lee)
The Russian czar, who had been somewhat benevolent, was assassinated in 1881. 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.
- [18:09]
Eli Lake
They brought the Jewish musical tradition. It's not an accident that Harold Arlen, born Chaim Ehrlich.
- [18:16]
Various Singers (e.g., Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Brenda Lee)
Someday I'll wish upon a star and wake up where the clouds are.
- [18:22]
Eli Lake
The composer of Somewhere over the Rainbow and Stormy Weather was the son of a cantor, as was the great Irving Berlin, born Israel Baleen, as well as Al Jolson, a star of vaudeville and the first talkie motion picture, the Jazz Singer.
- [18:37]
Various Singers (e.g., Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Brenda Lee)
Now every Jewish family wants their kid to play piano or violin. And this is, you know, before there are radios, there's a 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.
- [18:58]
John McWhorter
The one thing that there definitely seems to be is an accidental resemblance between a certain wailing cantorial element in Jewish music.
- [19:07]
Eli Lake
This is John McWhorter again.
- [19:09]
John McWhorter
And then also the blue note and the blues and that kind of. That kind of tear in the eye.
- [19:16]
Eli Lake
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.
- [19:38]
John McWhorter
But I think also part of it, and I have to be careful here because I don't want to 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 going to 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 lyrics.
- [20:19]
Eli Lake
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, one of the first breakout stars of New York's Tin Pan Alley, who composed the scores for Showboat and Swing Time, two of the first major modern musicals. But if one 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.
- [21:07]
Various Singers (e.g., Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Brenda Lee)
Now, let's all sing one choir and forget about the picture.
- [21:13]
Eli Lake
After the break, how the man born in Siberia as Israel Baleen gave Christmas its American soul.
- [21:24]
Hey there, Eli. Here. If you're enjoying breaking history, you're probably interested in how power really operates in America and who is behind it. If that's you, I want to tell you about the new podcast On Notice, produced by the nonpartisan newsroom Notice. Each week, journalist Reece Gorman sits down with lawmakers for candid conversations, not just about the latest headlines, but also what makes them tick and what brought them to Washington in the first place. On Notice gives you an insider's view of the people shaping policy in the United States. Reese's approachable style has earned him trust on both sides of the aisle, unlocking unguarded conversations you won't hear in traditional interviews. Tune in to on notice. That's notice spelled N O T u s. It's available every Monday wherever you get your podcasts or on YouTube. This episode is brought to you by State Farm.
- [22:27]
Various Singers (e.g., Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Brenda Lee)
Listening to this podcast Smart move Being.
- [22:30]
Eli Lake
Financially savvy Smart move.
- [22:33]
Various Singers (e.g., Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Brenda Lee)
Another smart move having State Farm help.
- [22:35]
Eli Lake
You create a competitive price when you choose to bundle home and auto bundling. Just another way to save with a personal price plan. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.
- [22:45]
Various Singers (e.g., Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Brenda Lee)
Prices are based on rating plans that vary by state.
- [22:47]
Eli Lake
Coverage options are selected by the customer. Availability, amount of discounts and savings and eligibility vary by state.
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I.
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Various Singers (e.g., Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Brenda Lee)
Dreaming of a White.
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Christmas we.
- [23:14]
Eli Lake
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.
- [23:46]
This slow, nostalgic song from the 40s was bigger than Billie Jean, I want to hold you'd hand, or anything Elvis ever released.
- [23:57]
Crosby recorded it in 1941 for an MGM film called Holiday Inn, a silly musical that revolves around American holidays and is rather dramatically timestamped by a scene where Bing dresses up in blackface for a routine about Abraham Lincoln.
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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.
- [24:34]
Various Singers (e.g., Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Brenda Lee)
See, I wrote quite Christmas. Cope with any idea that the scoring could be a so called song hit.
- [24:41]
Eli Lake
This is Berlin himself in a 1945 interview with Armed Forces Radio. Please forgive the sound quality. There was a goddamn war going on.
- [24:49]
Various Singers (e.g., Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Brenda Lee)
I wrote it for a picture called Holiday Inn and it was written four years ago. But it came out of a time when most of our troops were in.
- [25:00]
Eli Lake
Areas that had no outquishment in the.
- [25:02]
Various Singers (e.g., Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Brenda Lee)
Jungles of the Pacific and the deserts of North Africa that gave it a special significance.
- [25:12]
Eli Lake
So perhaps White Christmas would have been a head 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.
- [25:35]
Journalist Carl Sandburg, writing for the Chicago Times, captured what this meant for the gis overseas. Away 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 hundred years of white Christmases with no blood spots, needless agony and death on the snow.
- [26:05]
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 Capollo explained it in a video for the Toronto Sun a few years ago. It starts off like 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 one extra note.
- [26:36]
Various Singers (e.g., Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Brenda Lee)
Not this, but this.
- [26:39]
Rabbi Ari Lam
So this is the dream.
- [26:40]
Eli Lake
Now, a normal version would go like this.
- [26:46]
Rabbi Ari Lam
But his is.
- [26:48]
Eli Lake
And right here.
- [26:51]
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 chord Christmas, ordinary.
- [27:03]
Berlin.
- [27:07]
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 11, 1888, Berlin's earliest memory was of watching his home burn to the ground in a pogrom as his family fled Siberia for Belarus. Eventually, the family would emigrate in 1893 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 paper boy 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, Erving Guerlin got his first songwriting credit. It was written in an exaggerated Italian style called Marie from Sunny Italy. These were fashionable in the first decade of the 20th century. Songwriters in Tin Pan Alley would write specifically Irish, Jewish, Italian or German songs to appeal to the new immigrants teeming into the big city.
- [28:39]
Various Singers (e.g., Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Brenda Lee)
My sweet Marie from sunny Italy.
- [28:42]
Eli Lake
This is Bing Crosby singing Marie nearly 60 years later for an Ed single Sullivan tribute special.
- [28:48]
Various Singers (e.g., Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Brenda Lee)
Forevermore Then I'll be true Just say the word and I will marry you and then you'll surely be My sweet.
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Eli Lake
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, one of his first investments was what was known as a transposing piano that would allow him to play in F sharp, but he could then change it to any key he wanted. His model 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. In those early years, Berlin continued to write the ethnic songs until his first breakout hit.
- [29:36]
A tribute to the music he loved, Alexander's ragtime band, in 1911.
- [29:50]
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.
- [30:39]
He's not kidding. Check out the back catalog.
- [30:42]
Various Singers (e.g., Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Brenda Lee)
There's no business like show business like no business I know everything.
- [30:52]
Heaven.
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I'm in heaven and my heart beats so that I can hardly speak.
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I won't dance don't ask me, I won't dance don't ask me I won't dance Madame, with you.
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My heart won't let my feet do things that they should do.
- [31:18]
Eli Lake
His greatest hit of all was White Christmas. Berlin wrote it when he was in his 50s, 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.
- [31:52]
Various Singers (e.g., Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Brenda Lee)
One 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 burst the sun is shining, grass.
- [32:08]
John McWhorter
Is green, the orange and palm trees.
- [32:10]
Various Singers (e.g., Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Brenda Lee)
Sway there's never been such a day in Beverly Hills, La, but it's December 24th and I'm longing to be up north.
- [32:23]
Eli Lake
However, it was written in 2024, it's now clear that White Christmas is never going away. In fact, just last December, a new version was released featuring Bing Crosby's undead vocals duetting with a K Pop superstar, a young man called V, a member of the K Pop superstars BTS.
- [32:43]
I.
- [32:46]
Various Singers (e.g., Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Brenda Lee)
Dreaming of the Wine.
- [32:51]
Christmas.
- [32:54]
Just like.
- [32:55]
Eli Lake
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.
- [33:22]
Various Singers (e.g., Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Brenda Lee)
Dreaming of a white.
- [33:27]
White Christmas, the Drifters.
- [33:32]
Just like the ones I used.
- [33:35]
Eli Lake
To know, Elvis Presley.
- [33:43]
The incomparable Darlene Love.
- [33:54]
And of course, Ella Fitzgerald.
- [34:02]
Various Singers (e.g., Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Brenda Lee)
Dreaming of a white.
- [34:07]
Christmas.
- [34:13]
Eli Lake
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. The spirit of innovation is something that drives our nation of immigrants when we are at our best. Consider the brilliance of jazz, a holy American art form. So much of this great genre is the reinterpretation of the American songbook. One 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.
- [35:00]
Various Singers (e.g., Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Brenda Lee)
Bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens.
- [35:04]
Eli Lake
Here is Rodgers and Hammerstein's kind of Christmas song, My Favorite Things from the 1959 Sound of Music as performed By Julie Andrews.
- [35:14]
Various Singers (e.g., Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Brenda Lee)
Cream colored ponies and crisp apple strudels Doorbells and sleigh bells and schnitzels Pretzel with noodles, Wild geese.
- [35:21]
Eli Lake
Pleasant enough, but listen to what John Coltrane and his brilliant quartet does with it.
- [35:48]
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 dechrist 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. I bounded across the street to my friendly neighbors, the o', Hara's, 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. I realized they had to buy one 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.
- [37:16]
Rabbi Ari Lam
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.
- [37:26]
Eli Lake
Is bad, but again, this is Rabbi Ari Lam.
- [37:29]
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's 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 and restaurant and office and private home in the country. And that's going to be what we all understand to be the 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.
- [38:17]
Eli Lake
So this Christmas, rather than fleeing cossacks on horseback or huddling in the dark to avoid marauder 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.
- [38:58]
Thanks for listening. If you liked this episode, if you learned something, if you disagreed with something, or if it simply sparked a new understanding of our present moment, please share it with your friends and family and use it to have a conversation of your own. And if you want to support honestly, there's just one way to do it. Go to the free press@thefp.com and become a subscriber today. And if you like these dives into the past, well, next month we will be launching Breaking History with yours truly. So keep an ear out for this feed on the fp.com as well as all of your finest podcast platforms.
- [39:40]
Various Singers (e.g., Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Brenda Lee)
Let it know only.
- [39:49]
Just another song I'll sing along.