More in ‘Irving Berlin’

“I Gotta Right to Sing the Blues” is a 1932 pop standard by Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler. It was also the title of Wednesday night’s concert in Lincoln Center’s American Songbook series—a night of music and commentary produced by the impresario Hal Willner and celebrating A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs, David Lehman’s ...

“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 do? He de-Christs them both! Easter he turns into a fashion show and Christmas into a holiday about snow.” Philip Roth, in Operation Shylock, was referring to Berlin’s “Easter Parade” and, ...

It’s astonishing how many hits from the American songbook—the corpus of music written from the 1920s to the 1960s that includes Broadway hits, Tin Pan Alley tunes, and Hollywood musicals—were written by Jews. These Jewish composers and lyricists included heavy hitters like Irving Berlin, Rodgers and Hammerstein, and the Gershwins, plus perhaps lesser known figures ...

The Tin Pan Alley Rag, which opened last night at the Laura Pels Theatre in New York, recounts an imagined meeting between two giants of the American songbook: Irving Berlin and Scott Joplin. The two were famous and successful in the same pre-World War I period—Berlin starting his career; Joplin late in his—and though they were both living and working in New York, there’s no record they ever met. Playwright Mark Saltzman spoke to Tablet about his play, Tin Pan Alley, and the Jews who invented it.

Irving Berlin, the man responsible for “God Bless America,” was also the brains behind “Cohen Owes Me 97 Dollar,” a 1916 number which sent up the stereotype of the tight-fisted Jew. It was one in a slew of Tin Pan Alley minstrel songs that made fun, often affectionately, of greenhorns and their slightly savvier predecessors. ...