Breaking History - From the Archives: Why Jews Wrote Your Favorite Christmas Songs

Episode Date: December 10, 2025

Did you know the soundtrack of Americans’ Christmas was written largely by . . . Jews? Most of the composers behind the holiday canon were the children of immigrants who fled pogroms and conscription in Russia and Eastern Europe between 1880 and 1920. Sammy Cahn, Frank Sinatra’s go-to lyricist, gave us “Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!” Mel Tormé, son of a Belarusian refugee, wrote “The Christmas Song”) (a.k.a. “Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire”). Frank Loesser—whose family escaped the Kaiser’s draft—penned the mischievous “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” And Johnny Marks, responsible for “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” “A Holly Jolly Christmas,” and “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree,” was also one of the chosen few. Towering above them all is Irving Berlin, whose “White Christmas” remains one of the biggest-selling singles in American history. Berlin’s own childhood began with a pogrom and  escape from Siberia before landing in New York in 1893. In a replay of this classic Breaking History episode, Eli Lake digs into how a generation of Jewish immigrants ended up shaping the very sound of America’s most beloved holiday. CREDITS Producer Greg Collard Executive Producer Alex Miller Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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 Cycle, 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 empire's colloquial. one man's vision ignites a civilization's rebirth.

Merlin becomes the bridge between myths and history and shapes the destiny of kings. The Pendragon cycle, Rise of the Merlin, premieres exclusively on Daily Wire Plus, January 22nd, 2026. Go watch the full trailer now at dailywire.com. Hello, listeners. It's Eli, early Merry Christmas to you and Happy Holidays from all of us here.

This week, we are re-uping one of my favorite episodes that I did for honestly. It's called Why Jews Wrote Your Favorite Christmas Songs. It has been a difficult year for the chosen people in America, 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. Being on the lookout from 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. Canada's Wonderland is bringing the holiday magic this season with Winterfest

on select nights now through January 3rd. Step into a winter wonderland filled with millions of dazzling lights, festive shows, rides, and holiday treats. Plus, Coca-Cola is back with Canada's kindest community, celebrating acts of kindness nationwide with a chance at 100,000 donation for the winning community. and a 2026 holiday caravan stop. Learn more at Canada's Wonderland.com. Merry Christmas, listeners.

Full confession, I love this holiday. I love the parties, the spirit of charity, the lights on Roe Homes and 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 ovra 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.

Think of the most beloved Christmas songs. 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. This one, performed here by the chairman of the board himself, Frank Sinatra. Well, it's about winter and romance. The lights are turned down low. Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow. There's no mention of Nazareth, Three Wise Men, Frankencents, or Mur.

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. Sure, there's a reference to Carol's Santa, Turkey and Missletoe. 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. And so, I'm offering this simple place.

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 Kahn, 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 Tourmet, The singer and songwriter responsible for the timeless 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, was born in to a bit of cold outside, was born in to a while.

was born into a middle-class Jewish family. His father escaped Germany in the 1890s to avoid serving in the Kaiser's military. Johnny Marx, the man who gave us Rudolph the Red-Nosed reindeer, a holly-jolly Christmas. And this piece of Yule-Tide bubblegum from Brenda Lee, Well, he was also one of the Chosenes. 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. From the free press, I'm Eli Lake, how American Jews helped create American Christmas after the break. House of Party rocking around The Christmas tree have a happy holiday Everyone dancing merrily in the new old All everyone's favorite Christmas songs were written by Jews

This is David Lehman, 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 Tourmet, 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 Kahn lyric and Julie Stein's music for Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow. Oh, the weather outside is frightful, but to 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 Shilock, 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 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 decrists 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 schlock. But nicely, nicely, so nicely that Goyam don't even know what hit him. They love it. Everybody loves it.

Well, I think Roth gets it wrong about the schlach. Berlin's White Christmas is not a rebuke to Christianity. It's a magic trick of universality, which is specifically American. 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 Lam, founder and president of Soul Shop Studio, and the president of Benet Zion Foundation. For example, 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. 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 McCorder. 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 that music that would be absurd, let it snow and white Christmas, 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 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. Good king when Cislaus looked out on the feast of Stephen,

when the snow lay round about, deep and crisp and even. Carolyn, 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 1800s, Christmas retained its rough edges. St. Nicholas, who would later transform into Santa Claus, retained his old-world sensibilities by meeting out judgment every December to children who were good and bad. 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.

Talking to all the kids from all over the world. I will let Louis Armstrong take it from here. It was the night before Christmas. When all through the house, none of a creature was storing, not even a mouse. 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. I've often said that time travel back to, say, 1880. Again, this is John McCorder. 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. 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. Ragtime is a kind of proto-jazz. It's piano bass, 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 Amel 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. Oklahoma, where the wind comes sweeping.

Guys and dolls. Hate me, go ahead, hate me. I love you. The best years in my life, I was a fool to give to you. Or singing in the rain. I'm singing in the rain, you're 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 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 Stettles, 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 one thing, they had freedom, and they didn't have to worry about pogroms. This is David Lehman again. The Russian Tsar, 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, they brought the Jewish musical tradition. It's not an accident that Harold Arlen born Chaim Arlick? The composer of Somewhere Over the Rainbow and Stormy Weather was the son of a canter, as was the great Irving Berlin, born Israel, Baleen, as well as Al Jolson, a star of vaudeville and the first talky 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 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. The one thing that there definitely seems to be is an accidental resemblance between a certain wailing cantorial element in Jewish music. This is John McQuarter again. And then also the blue note and the blues and 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 reader. 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 created delightful and unexpected new

combination. 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-consumption. 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 I regersh one. 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 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 Rogers 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.

Now let's all sing one question. Forget about the picture. After the break, how the man born in Siberia as Israel Baleen gave Christmas its American soul. 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. and newsroom notice. Each week, journalist Reese 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. of a white Christmas. 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 treakly 1997 tribute version of Candle in the Wind for Princess Diana, this was the biggest selling single in the history of recorded music. This lay bells in the snow. This slow nostalgic song from the 40s is bigger than Billy Jean, I want to hold your hand, or anything Elvis ever released.

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 Burgreen, 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 White Christmas, spoke with any idea that it's recurring could 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 four years ago. But it came out of the time when most of our troops were in areas that had no white Christians

in the jungles of 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 hundred 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 Capelow 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 one extra note.

Not this, but this. So this is the dreaming 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 dead. Those sad chords were in Berlin's bones. Born in Tolchon, Siberia, on May 11, 1888, 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 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, canter, 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 dogroll for the drunks who frequented the burlesques, bordellos, and bars. He would sleep in squalid boarding home is 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 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. 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, 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. A tribute to the music he loved, Alexander's Ragtime Band, in 1911. 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. There's no business like show business like no business. I know everything. Heaven. I'm in heaven.

And my heart beat so that I can hardly speak. I won't dance, don't ask me. I won't dance, don't ask me. I won't dance, madame with you. My heart won't let my feet do things that they should do. 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 Allen, recalls in this interview from 2013 that he wrote it while he was in Hollywood. One Christmas, he had to be in Hollywood,

because they were filming the movie Alexander's Ragtime Band. And we suspect that he starred in White Christmas then because of the burst. The sun is shining, grass is green, the orange and the country's sway. There's never been such a day in Beverly Hills, LA, but it's December the 24th, and I'm longing to be up north. However, it was written. 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.

The young man called V, a member of the K-pop Superstars, BTS. I'm dreaming of a wild Christmas 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'm dreaming. Dreaming of a white, white Christmas. The drifters. Just like the ones I used to know. Elvis Presley. Where those street are written. The incomparable Darlene Love.

And of course, Ella Fitzgerald. I'm dreaming of a white Christmas with every 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 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 wholly American art form. So much of this great genre is the reinterpretation of the American songbook. One finds Jews like Berlin, Kern, Arlen, Rogers and Hammerstein, all over the real book, a large binder of song's sketches, the chords, the basic melody, that every working jazz musician must master. Here is Rogers and Hammerstein's kind of Christmas song, my favorite things, from the 1959 Sound of Music, is performed by Julie Andrews. Cream-colored ponies and crisp apple strudels, doorbells and sleigh-bells and schnitzel with noodles. Pleasant enough, but listen to what John Coltrane and his brilliant quartet does with it.

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 in 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. In 1954, when Irving Berlin was 66, he told the Washington Post that he'd 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'Hara's, he said, and shared their goodies. This was my first sight of a Christmas tree. The O'Hara's 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. 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. 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 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 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 diehard. 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 with jingle bells in the sky. 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 at 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 thefp.com as well as all of your finest podcast platforms.

Let it know only. Just another Christmas song, and this time I'll sing along. Just another Christmas song with this time I'll see along.