• Egyptians gathered en masse in Tahrir Square to mark the one-year anniversary of #Jan25. [NYT]

• You will be shocked to learn that, according to President Abbas, the past month of negotiations in Amman went nowhere. [JTA]

• A newly uncovered Irving Berlin song was not actually written by him after all, but by the lesser-known Lew Brown and Cliff Friend. [NYT ArtsBeat]

• Jewcy’s Jason Diamond sketches Nathan Englander. [Capital]

• Fascinating new Website about the Jewish refugees who came to Apulia, Italy, after World War II. [University of Salento (Lecce)]

• Richard Brody on Agnieszka Holland, whose In Darkness received a Best Foreign Language Film nomination yesterday. [New Yorker The Front Row]

Yes, you’re allowed to cry.

As the 20th century reached its midpoint, tunesmiths moved elsewhere. (The Brill Building, famously home to later generations of songwriters, is just north of Times Square.) Old buildings came down while new ones went up, and our portion of West 28th is now a bustling commercial hodge-podge bookended by the flower district to the west and the perfume district to the east. To learn more about our new neighborhood—where Emma Goldman founded her anarchist magazine, too, and Zero Mostel had a painting studio—Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry spoke to Jim Mackin, a New York City historian and tour guide, about West 28th Street, how specialized commercial districts come into being, and Irving Berlin’s first big hit. [Running time: 16:17.]

As the curtain rises on Baby It’s You, a new musical celebrating Greenberg’s life and work, Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry speaks with Slate Magazine music critic Jody Rosen about the obstacles Greenberg might have faced as a pioneering woman, about her ability to identify voices and styles that others didn’t think America was quite ready for, and about the real meaning of the song “Say a Little Prayer for You.” [Running time: 20:05.]

Coney Island and the Jews have a long history together. “Nathan’s Famous” hot dog founder, Polish-Jewish immigrant Nathan Handwerker, set up his first shop on the corner of Surf and Stillwell Avenues, practically introducing the European sausage to New York society. The strip’s growing industry attracted rising Jewish entertainers such as Harry Houdini and the Marx brothers, and even Irving Berlin worked there as a singing waiter.

Jews also frequented Coney Island as guests and audience members, clamoring in the bath houses and dominating the busy handball courts. Famous Jewish criminal Abe Reles was kept under constant guard by six policemen at the Half Moon Hotel in the early 1940s.

The area has made a dent on Jewish literary and film culture: The All-of-a-Kind Family book series paints a picture of life on the shore in the summers, people looking for a brief respite from hot city life. Joseph Heller (Now and Then, 1998), Neil Simon (Brighton Beach Memoirs, 1983) and Isaac Bashevis Singer (Enemies: A Love Story, 1972) all grew up in or visited the local neighborhoods, and detail what the everyday looked like by the amusement park’s shows and the consequent social milieus. Recent Oscar-nominee Darren Aronofsky shows the area’s more sordid side in his Requiem for a Dream (2001).

Which brings us to the present: In 2009, Jewish mayor Bloomberg and his administration rezoned the 19-block Coney Island strip and bought seven more acres with the goal of developing more hotels, amusement parks, and housing units. We’ll see what cultural gems this Jewish-Coney Island history chapter produces.

Former Coney Island Roller Coaster Is For Sale [WSJ]

But think of the music Sachs leaves out. What do we do with George Gershwin and Paul Simon and Bob Dylan, with the songs belted out by Fanny Brice in the Ziegfeld Follies or Lou Reed at Max’s Kansas City—the whole messy sprawl of 20th-century American pop music history, which, from I Gotta Right to Sing the Blues” to I’ve Gotta Be Me” to “(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (to Party!)” has been inflected by the Jewish genius for passing and pastiche? And where, for that matter, does it leave Serge Gainsbourg, Israeli techno, Jonathan Richman, Yo La Tengo, or Ofra Haza? Or ”Hanukkah in Santa Monica”?

Perhaps a better answer to the Jewish musical conundrum is a famous quip. The story goes that the composer Jerome Kern and the lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II were discussing the possibility of a musical based on the life of Marco Polo. Hammerstein said to Kern, “Here is a story laid in China about an Italian and told by Irishman. What kind of music are you going to write?” Kern replied, “It’ll be good Jewish music.”

Here, then, is our list of the 100 Greatest Jewish Songs. Some were created by Jews, as Jews, for Jews. Some are by Jews pretending to be gentiles—or by gentiles pretending to be Jews. If history has taught us anything, it’s that Jewish music is a dizzyingly broad and fluid category, encompassing an extraordinary range of sounds and styles and ideas and themes, from the sacred to the secular—from the normatively Jewish to the Jew-ish to the seemingly not-at-all-Jewish. Our list includes a bit of everything: sacred songs and synagogue staples and Yiddish ballads and Broadway showstoppers. There’s even some disco and hip-hop. All of them are great songs—and good Jewish music.

CLICK HERE TO SEE A LIST OF THE 100 SONGS ON ONE PAGE.

1. “Over the Rainbow” (1939)

In 1900, L. Frank Baum wrote a strange, 259-page novel about a Kansas farm girl who travels to a magical land. Critics couldn’t help reading it as a Gilded Age political allegory, but Baum insisted it was simply a children’s fairytale. Thirty-nine years later, a movie mogul hired a pair of Tin Pan Alley pros—a cantor’s son from Buffalo and a Lower East Side lefty—to write a theme song for the novel’s film adaptation. The result was a grandly orchestrated echt-Hollywood ballad, crooned by the movie’s 16-year-old starlet to a little black doggie on a barnyard set filled with clucking chickens.

And it was the most beautiful Jewish exilic prayer ever set to music.

In formal terms, “Over the Rainbow” is flawless, lit up by Harold Arlen’s luscious chromaticism and startling octave leaps. Yip Harburg’s lyrics are a triumph of artful artlessness: “Somewhere over the rainbow/ Way up high/ There’s a land that I heard of/ Once in a lullaby.” Call that land Oz, if you’d like. Or call it Israel. (For that matter, call it Miami Beach or Shaker Heights or the Upper West Side.) Any way you slice it, the story “Over the Rainbow” tells is the oldest Jewish story of them all: There’s no place like home. (JR)

2. “Hava Nagila” (1918)

Harry Belafonte has sung it. So has Chubby Checker and the Boss. Dick Dale shredded it; Lionel Hampton swung it. It’s been Latinized, technoized, and Bollywoodized. It’s the Little Freylekh That Could—the Jewish party song that belongs to the world.

The history of “Hava Nagila” is shadowy. The tune is thought to have originated in 18th- or 19th-century Eastern Europe as a niggun, or mystical musical prayer, possibly among the Sadigorer Hasidic sect. By 1915, the melody had migrated to Palestine, where it was transcribed by the musicologist and folklorist Abraham Zvi Idelsohn, who was then serving as a bandmaster in the Ottoman Army. Three years later, he played the song in a concert commemorating the British victory over the Turks. Idelsohn added a Hebrew text based on some biblical verses, and “Hava Nagila” was born.

To millions who know no better, “Hava Nagila” is Jewish music. Of course no musical culture, particularly one as rich and variegated as ours, can be represented by a single tune. Still, it’s hard to imagine another song doing the job so well. Like all great dance music, “Hava Nagila” puts the emphasis on joy and community—on the ecstatic fellowship forged by an infectious tune and insistent beat. “Hava nagila, hava nagila/ Hava nagila ve-nismeha/ Hava neranena, hava neranena/ Hava neranena ve-nismeha” (Let us rejoice, let us rejoice/ Let us rejoice and be glad/ Let us sing, let us sing/ Let us sing and be glad).” That’s not a half-bad philosophy of music or, for that matter, of life. (JR)

3. “Highway 61 Revisited” (1965)

U.S. Highway 61, wrote Bob Dylan in his 2004 memoir Chronicles Volume One, “begins about where I came from,” stretching from southern Minnesota, near Dylan’s hometown of Duluth, to New Orleans. “Highway 61 Revisited” begins a bit further afield. “Oh God said to Abraham, ‘Kill me a son’/ Abe says, ‘Man, you must be puttin’ me on,’ ” Dylan sings in the opening measures, as the song settles into a bluesy lope.

As always with Dylan, it’s impossible to untangle the strands of autobiography, mythology, and carnival barker gibberish. Many commentators have pointed out that Dylan’s own father was an Abraham—Abe Zimmerman—and that the songwriter’s retelling of the binding of Isaac may have personal resonance. But what is a Dylanologist to make of Georgia Sam, Mack the Finger, Louie the King, and the other cartoon characters that populate the song? And what about the burst of biblical mumbo-jumbo in the song’s fourth verse?:

Now the fifth daughter on the twelfth night
Told the first father that things weren’t right
My complexion she said is much too white
He said come here and step into the light he says hmm you’re right
Let me tell the second mother this has been done
But the second mother was with the seventh son
And they were both out on Highway 61

As always with Dylan, the meaning is blowing in the wind. What’s unmistakable in “Highway 61 Revisited” is the tone. Delivering Old Testament imagery and cosmic jokes in his most exaggerated nasal drawl, Dylan is part-prophet, part-provocateur, part-badchen, and full-time blabbermouth. In other words: He’s just so Jewish. (JR)

4. “Kol Nidre” (13th century)

It’s the “Stairway to Heaven” of Jewish liturgical music; just about anyone who has ever recorded a Jewish album or led a congregation in prayer has toyed with the idea of recording his or her own version of the annual Yom Kippur eve negation of vows.

The text is vexing, saying basically that one is not responsible for the vows one makes. Not surprisingly, it inspired centuries of anti-Semitic speculation about the shiftiness and general untrustworthiness of Jews in business. Jewish tradition suggests that it was written for Jews who were forced to convert to Christianity who might be looking for a legal loophole through which they could reclaim their connection to Judaism. Still, it’s a strange way to begin the Day of Atonement, when one is supposed to take serious stock of one’s shortcomings, not try to explain away one’s inability to make good on promises.

But it’s the music that really matters. Anti-Semites and Conversos aside, nobody comes to synagogue on Yom Kippur because they believe in those words—they come to hear that unmistakable opening cadence. Unlike much of liturgical music, Kol Nidre has no single known author. Musicologists suggest that Kol Nidre is less a proper composition than a mashup cobbled together from a number of different Jewish liturgical and folk motifs. Nevertheless, the melody of that first line is as heart-aching and moving as any melody in any liturgical tradition. Ever. (AYK)

5. “Hatikvah” (1888)

The Jewish national anthem was in wide circulation well before it unofficially became the Israeli national anthem in 1948. Part of a much longer poem written in 1878 by Naphtali Herz Imber, the text was shortened and adapted a few different times by early Zionist settlers before it became the anthem of political Zionism, concluding with the line: “To be a free nation in our land/ The land of Zion and Jerusalem.”

The melody, however, took a slightly more roundabout route on its way to Jerusalem. Samuel Cohen, its composer, said that he adapted the melody from a Romanian folk song, “Carul cu boi.” The song’s central motif can be heard there, and it can also be heard in the Italian madrigal “La Mantovana,” and again in Czech composer Bedrich Smetana’s “Ma Vlast,” his ode to Bohemia.

The song’s resonance lies somewhere between the obvious folk roots of the melody and the haughty and explicitly Jewish political aspirations of the lyrics: Critics hear Zionism-as-colonialism in the non-Jewish folk roots of the melody; Zionists hear the in-gathering of Jewish exiles echoing in the combination of notes.

Everyone else might just hear the unreconciled struggle between the two. It’s still an anthem, but one of a different kind—in some ways, it’s an anthem that captures the contradictions of modern nationalism rather than the bombastic heroism of rockets red glare. (AYK)

6. “My Mammy” (1918)

Before Frank Sinatra, before Elvis Presley, before Michael Jackson, there was Al Jolson, the 20th century’s first pan-media “rock star.” With his dynamic stage act and rafter-rattling voice, he was for millions of fans the embodiment of pop modernity—the poster boy for ragtime, which was unmooring America from its Victorian past one raucous song at a time. But Jolson was not just a New American; he was vividly, unapologetically a Jewish American, with a fearless devotion to schmaltz and a “tear in a voice,” his birthright as a cantor’s son.

He was also, infamously, history’s most famous practitioner of blackface minstrelsy. Today, we are rightly repulsed by Jolson’s blackface act. But to shunt Jolson to history’s margins is to betray history. Listening to his signature song, “My Mammy”—the 1918 hit that he reprised in the landmark first film talkie, The Jazz Singer—we confront the sheer weirdness of pop music’s early days, when beauty and vulgarity, Jewish immigrant striving and primordial American racism were inextricably enmeshed. Jolson was a pop vocal genius whose art most majestically took flight when he slathered his white skin with burnt cork, affected a broad “darky” accent, and belted out an Oedipal ode to his little old Jewish mother. It’s not a comfortable story, but it’s a true one. (JR)

7. “Shema Yisrael” (19th century)

“Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One.” The English translation of this central prayer leeches the deep spirituality of the original Hebrew—which powerfully asserts that all is unified, connected, related, intertwined, one. It’s about as close to a theo-national pledge of allegiance as we get.

It’s been crammed into mezuzot and tefilin, and—apart from Tzvika Pik’s 1972 uptempo version (shunned by many for being too poppy for prayer)—it has, to Ashkenazic Jews, only one melody.

Many treat that melody as if it had been handed down to Moses at Mount Sinai along with the lyrics. In fact, written grandly in 3/4 time by the Austrian cantor Salomon Sulzer, it’s from the early 19th century. Sulzer is credited with helping to modernize Jewish worship by introducing a choir and a handful of other updates to suit his Viennese congregation.

As it’s sung by millions of Jews across the world, it sounds a little uptight, even when belted with big gusts of meditation-y breaths punctuating the text. But the irony is that what now sounds uptight was once considered both radical and modern, an exalted sentiment set to a Viennese waltz. In this way Pik’s 1972 version was just doing what Sulzer did 150 years earlier, giving the “watchword of our faith” a little sonic makeover. And what’s so bad about a little syncopation in the face of the unity of everything? (AYK)

8. “White Christmas” (1942)

“Not only is it the best song I ever wrote,” said Irving Berlin when he finished writing “White Christmas,” “it’s the best song anybody ever wrote.” There’s certainly a lot in it. Its dreamy scenery belongs to the same tradition as Currier and Ives’ wintry landscapes and Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” The melodicism is pure Broadway and Hollywood sophistication, but the maudlin sentiments—that vision of snow-blanketed yuletides “just like the ones I used to know”—has deeper, homelier roots, drawing on Stephen Foster’s antebellum nostalgia and Victorian parlor ballads, and ladling some Jewish schmaltz over the top.

“White Christmas” was released in the middle of World War II, in November 1942, the first Christmas season that American troops spent overseas. It stirred such homesickness that it became the definitive pop hit of the war—a “why we fight” song that never mentioned the fight. And that was just the beginning of its success. It’s doubtful any song has generated more total record sales. Bing Crosby’s definitive version stood as the top-selling pop single for more than a half-century.

Tonally “White Christmas” stands apart from the cheeriness of most Christmas songs: It’s as dark and blue as it is “merry and bright.” Some have attributed this plaintive quality to Berlin’s Jewishness—to the seasonal melancholy of a man doomed to view the holiday from a distance. But “White Christmas” is sneakier than that. “God gave Moses the Ten Commandments and then He gave Irving Berlin … ‘White Christmas,’ ” wrote Philip Roth in Operation Shylock. “If supplanting Jesus Christ with snow can enable my people to cozy up to Christmas, then let it snow, let it snow, let it snow!” (JR)

9. “Be My Baby” (1963)

It starts, literally, with a bang: the thunderclap rumble of Hal Blaine’s drumbeat, among the most famous opening salvos in rock ‘n’ roll. That’s just the beginning of the bombast, as hand claps, castanets, swooping strings, braying brass, and background vocals pile on, inflating the Ronettes’ “Be My Baby” into something like pop Wagner.

Of course, it isn’t Wagnerian—it’s Spectorian. Phil Spector, a diminutive studio geek from the Bronx, was 23 years old in 1963 when he co-composed “Be My Baby” with two Jews from Brooklyn, Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich. To realize Spector’s “Wall of Sound” vision took weeks of rehearsal, 42 studio takes, and saintly patience on the part of lead singer Veronica “Ronnie” Bennett, who would marry Spector later that year. On paper, the song’s sentiments are insipid: “Won’t you please/ Be my little baby?/ Say you’ll be my darlin’/ Be my baby now.” But bolstered by a rousing melody and the full fathom force of Spector’s production, they become sublime, proof that a 3-minute-long declaration of puppy love can be as overwhelming—sonically, emotionally, spiritually—as any symphony. (JR)

10. “I Got Rhythm” (1930)

As American credos go, the Gershwin brothers’ most famous chorus is hard to top: “I got rhythm/ I got music/ I got my girl/ Who could ask for anything more?” For declarative brashness, it’s right up there with “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” And it’s got a more danceable beat.

Composed in 1928, “I Got Rhythm” became a hit in the 1930 musical Girl Crazy, thanks in no small part to the performance by Ethel Merman, just 22 years old but already a human wind turbine. Ira Gershwin’s lyrics are a study in compression and pithy interior rhymes. (“Ol’ Man Trouble/ I don’t mind him/ You won’t find him/ ’Round my door.”) But it was George’s chord progression, soon to be known simply as “rhythm changes,” that made the song musical holy writ, the basis of countless jazz songs in the swing and bebop eras. (JR)

But it reminded me that around this time last year, I collaborated with David Lehman, author of Nextbook Press’s A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs, on a list of the ten best Christmas songs of all time. Check the original for extensive commentary; check after the jump for just the list itself.

My favorite? “Santa Baby.” I see Taylor Swift has ruined it, but below you’ll find a link to Eartha Kitt doing it right.

10. “The Christmas Waltz,” music and lyrics by Sammy Cahn and Julie Styne.

9. “Silver Bells,” music by Jay Livingston, lyrics by Ray Evans.

8. “Winter Wonderland,” music and lyrics by Felix Bernard.

7. “Santa Baby,” music and lyrics by Joan Ellen Javits and Philip Springer.

6. “Sleigh Ride,” lyrics by Mitchell Parrish.

5. “I’ll Be Home for Christmas,” music by Buck Ram, lyrics by Walter Kent.

4. “I’ve Got My Love to Keep Me Warm,” music and lyrics by Irving Berlin.

3. “Let it Snow, Let it Snow, Let it Snow,” lyrics by Sammy Cahn, music by Julie Styne.

2. “The Christmas Song” (“Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire”), music and lyrics by Mel Tormé and Bob Wells.

1. “White Christmas,” music and lyrics by Irving Berlin.

Have Yourself a Jewish Little Christmas [Tablet Magazine]
Related: A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs [Nextbook Press]
The Ten Most Depressing Christmas Songs Ever Recorded [Nerve]

There is, of course, another striking fact about this creation story, and about the whole history of the modern musical as Stempel tells it. This Midwestern epic, which seemed to capture the country’s most idealized image of itself—this story about cowboys and farmers, with names like Curly and Laurey and Jud—was being created in New York City by two Jews, with names like Hammerstein and Rogazinsky (Anglicized to Rodgers by the composer’s grandfather). No wonder they felt the importance of “integration” so keenly: What was Oklahoma! if not a triumph of integration, not just artistic but social and psychological? (David Lehman makes a similar point in Nextbook Press’s A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs.)

Stempel does not tell the history of the Broadway musical as a Jewish story, and of course it is not simply a Jewish story. It is also a black story, and an Irish story, and a gay story, which is another way of saying that it is an American story. For Stempel, it all begins in the mid-19th century, when shows like Uncle Tom’s Cabin and The Black Crook combined theatrical spectacle, moral uplift, and frank eroticism to create a new kind of popular sensation. All of these elements, Stempel shows, would remain at the core of Broadway’s DNA, and the tension among them was the force propelling the musical’s rapid evolution. Throughout its history, the people who made shows and the people who watched them would debate the proper proportions of sophistication and vulgarity; but the best musicals have always had at least some of each. Try to make the musical a purely artistic form, and you end up with shows like Porgy and Bess or Candide or Assassins—all of which flopped on their first appearance and have lived subsequently in opera houses or on cast albums, not on Broadway.

Shows devoid of any artistic ambition, on the other hand, have made their money and disappeared. Today, the songs that Cole Porter and the Gershwins and Rodgers and Hart wrote for Broadway in the 1920s and 1930s are “standards,” constituting the American Songbook. But no one revives the shows themselves, which were too silly and dispensable to last. How many people who know the Gershwins’ yearning love song “Lady Be Good” know anything about the show in which it appeared, Lady, Be Good!, which ran for 10 months in 1924-25? Stempel is one of the rare ones, and his summary of the show explains the problem: “a brother-sister team of vaudevillians become ever more deeply entangled in high society … until the heroine saves her brother from penury and a loveless marriage by impersonating a Mexican heiress.” The original would have been worth seeing, since it starred Fred and Adele Astaire, but no one is calling for a revival.

That marks the main difference between Broadway before Oklahoma! and Broadway after Oklahoma!. It is the shows of the Golden Age, from the 1940s through the 1960s, that are still cherished and revived. Rodgers and Hammerstein followed their breakthrough with Carousel, South Pacific, The King and I, and The Sound of Music. Porter wrote the music for Kiss Me, Kate, and Irving Berlin for Annie Get Your Gun; Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe wrote My Fair Lady, Camelot, and Brigadoon. Then there’s West Side Story, Guys and Dolls, Gypsy, and How To Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, to name just a few of the biggest hits. Reading Stempel’s accounts of these shows and the people who made them—he focuses mainly on the writers, with occasional sidelights on important producers and directors—leaves no doubt that the Broadway musical was one of the great phases of American popular culture, like jazz before it and rock and roll afterward.

This Golden Age is usually said to have come to an end with Fiddler on the Roof, by Sheldon Harnick and Jerry Bock, which premiered in 1964 and ran on Broadway for an astonishing seven years. Is it a coincidence that this show, the most explicitly Jewish musical ever written, is the one that marked the end of an era? Writing about Fiddler, Stempel comes as close as he ever does to wondering about the Jewishness of the Broadway musical as a form:

Not only were Jews as a group involved in virtually all aspects of Broadway show business—creating, producing, disseminating, and consuming shows—but Broadway culture itself was regularly perceived as somehow Jewish in character. Indeed, the “disproportionate” Jewish presence in, on, and around Broadway altogether became a topic of interest in many discussions of twentieth-century American popular culture.

The cautious quotation marks around “disproportionate” are understandable—here, as in discussions of Hollywood, the observation that Jews have a large role in creating American culture can sometimes lead to ugly suggestions that they have too large a role. But the proportion of Jews among the makers of Broadway’s Golden Age is more than striking: Of the shows mentioned above, all but one were written by Jews. (The exception is Kiss Me, Kate, with music by Cole Porter. It is a nice example of Broadway’s alchemy that Porter, a WASP born in Indiana, became the most urbane and sophisticated, the most quintessentially “New York,” of all Broadway composers.)

It would be interesting to know what proportion of the Broadway audience, in the years 1940-1970, was also Jewish. Stempel is generally uninterested in economic and demographic questions—he is writing about the works of Broadway, not how Broadway works—and there may be no way of finding out the answer. But it is noteworthy that Broadway’s Golden Age coincided exactly with the period of American Jews’ rise into the middle class and the professions, and with the migration of New York’s Jews from the Lower East Side and Brooklyn to Long Island and Westchester—the prosperous suburbs, from which they could return for dinner and a show in Times Square.

Seeing Broadway’s classics as shows written by Jews for a largely Jewish audience does not make them parochial, or restrict their appeal to American and, indeed, international audiences. (When Fiddler went to Tokyo, Stempel writes, a Japanese producer asked the book-writer, Joseph Stein, “whether they actually understood Fiddler on the Roof in America,” because “it’s so Japanese!”) But it’s possible that, again as with Hollywood movies, Broadway musicals had such a universal appeal precisely because they were the product of Jews imagining their way into American life—a kind of imagining with worldwide resonance in the American century.

Certainly it is striking how many of the Golden Age musicals deal with exactly the subjects that most concerned American Jews in the postwar era, when the aftermath of the Holocaust and the early Civil Rights Movement put Jews at the forefront of struggles for racial and social justice. From Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific, with its anti-racist anthem “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught,” to West Side Story, with its vision of love struggling against prejudice, to Finian’s Rainbow, in which a leprechaun turns a racist Southern senator into a black man, the Broadway musical was drawn to a liberal vision of integration and brotherhood.

That this vision, and the music that expressed it, were never too challenging or too adventurous—that the musical happily used leprechauns to make a point about tolerance—is a reminder that Broadway was always a business first, and the musical always a popular art. If it is no longer very popular today—if jukebox musicals and mega-spectacles have left only a little space for good original shows (like the recent Grey Gardens)—this is not necessarily because, as the usual charge sheet has it, the writers of musicals have retreated into a Sondheimesque intellectuality and abrasiveness. Near the end of the book, Stempel quotes Jason Robert Brown, one of the acclaimed but not quite popular composers hailed as “Sondheim’s children”: “A commercially successful show is, by some definitions, a better work.” On Broadway, Showtime makes clear, a masterpiece isn’t a masterpiece unless it’s a hit.

Rufus Wainwright opened the show, in the Allen Room at Lincon Center, with its wall of windows overlooking Columbus Circle and Central Park, with a soulful rendition of Irving Berlin’s “Let’s Face the Music and Dance.” He was backed by a 14-piece band, playing sultry nightclub arrangements of a dozen pop standards behind not just Wainwright but also Shannon McNally, Jenni Muldaur, Van Dyke Parks, and Christine Olmann, who brought the house down belting a loungey arrangement of Arlen and Koehler’s “Stormy Weather” in a flowing pink ’60s dress and a towering bouffant of blonde hair.

But even bigger names played, too. Sting proved himself a master of the songbook, delivering plaintive, moving renditions of George and Ira Gershwin’s “Love Is Here to Stay” and, later, “”Someone to Watch Over Me.” And none other than Lou Reed showed up to close the show with a hard-rocking, guitar-and-drums-heavy take on Arlen and Johnny Mercer’s “One For My Baby (and One More For the Road).”

All photos by Dese’Rae Stage:

Wainwright with David Lehman, author of the Nextbook Press book A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs.

Photos from “I Gotta Right To Sing The Blues?” Music and readings from A Fine Romance, at The Allen Room, Frederick P. Rose Hall, Home of Jazz at Lincoln Center, Broadway at 60th Street, New York City.

David Lehman’s Top Ten Christmas Songs Written by Jews

10. “The Christmas Waltz,” music and lyrics by Sammy Cahn and Julie Styne. “Listen to Sinatra’s version of this interestingly self-referential lyric.”

9. “Silver Bells,” music by Jay Livingston, lyrics by Ray Evans.

8. “Winter Wonderland,” music and lyrics by Felix Bernard. “Michael Feinstein was my source on this one. And I’m surprised! The lyrics involve an impromptu wedding ceremony performed by a Parson Brown. The most interesting lyrical moment is the rhyme of ‘snow man’ and ‘no, man.’”

7. “Santa Baby,” music and lyrics by Joan Ellen Javits and Philip Springer. “Very enjoyable song. The closest thing to a jazz song here. ‘Santa Baby, hurry down the chimney to me.’ It adapts the conventions of Christmas songs to become a kind of love and seduction song. Eartha Kitt sings a swell version.”

6. “Sleigh Ride,” lyrics by Mitchell Parrish. “Sometimes people encounter it as a musical backdrop. On a personal note, I remember flying between the U.S. and England in the 1970s, and at Heathrow or Gatwick or JFK, you would always hear that. I had never liked it particularly, but because of the association it is very dear to me. Parrish—born Michael Hyman Pashelinsky in Lithuania—wrote the lyrics to one of the most famous of all jazz standards, Hoagy Carmichael’s ‘Stardust.’”

5. “I’ll Be Home for Christmas,” music by Buck Ram, lyrics by Walter Kent. “Like ‘White Christmas’ and ‘Have Yourself,’ this song was popular during World War II, and it appeals to a certain nostalgia and homesickness, not only on the parts of the troops abroad, but the loved ones at home.”

4. “I’ve Got My Love to Keep Me Warm,” music and lyrics by Irving Berlin. “This is a great song that is sometimes overlooked when people think of great Christmas songs, in part because of the other major Berlin effort in this category, and in part because it is one of the few songs on this list that can be done come snow or shine, year in and year out.”

3. “Let it Snow, Let it Snow, Let it Snow,” lyrics by Sammy Cahn, music by Julie Styne. “This is my own favorite of the ‘Jingle Bells’-type Christmas song. I love the way it is used as the exit music in Die Hard.”

2. “The Christmas Song” (“Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire”), music and lyrics by Mel Tormé and Bob Wells. “These first two picks are traditional Christmas songs—they mention the holiday explicitly, are full of heartfelt sentiment, and may jerk a few tears.”

1. “White Christmas,” music and lyrics by Irving Berlin. “Bing Crosby’s version is the best-selling single ever.”

Related: Lehman serves up an American songbook playlist

A Fine Romance

Berlin represents commerce in your play—the successful hitmaker—while Joplin represents art, hard at work on a ragtime opera he couldn’t get produced. Joplin goads Berlin into revealing that he has a secret, major work, a sort of a symphony telling his own American story. Was there a really such piece?

There was, but I couldn’t use it. It was also a ragtime opera, and it would just be too unbelievable that two of them would be writing two ragtime operas. So I turned it into more of an instrumental piece, but still a piece of serious music.

But then Berlin’s businessman instincts overtake his artistic aspirations, and that symphony instead becomes “Alexander’s Ragtime Band”—and the Eastern European motifs, representing his Russian childhood in that symphony, turn into the opening chords of “Alexander’s.” Is there that influence in the real song?

Not specifically in “Alexander’s.” But, sure, in songs like “Yiddishe Nightingale.” What’s interesting, I think, is that in pre-World War I America it was fine to do blatantly Yiddish and Jewish-influenced popular songs, like “Yiddishe Nightingale.” And then something happened along the way and made it taboo. I don’t know why this happened, but in silent movies there are Jewish characters, and these songs like “Yiddishe Nightingale” are sheet music that everybody sings. But then there’s this exclusion, the feeling that sort of we have to hide ourselves. Maybe because a lot of these media companies, in music publishing or movies, were headed by Jews. It wasn’t till the 1950s that Jewish characters started appearing again in the movies. Irving Berlin was writing blatantly Jewish songs, and then he stopped, completely I think, for the rest of the career.

Was it the flip side of the same coin—that to deracinate, to not write things like “Yiddishe Nightingale,” allowed him to write things like “White Christmas”?

When you’re in pop culture, which is sales, there’s a sense, like in all marketers, of what the public is going to buy. Every writer wants a Christmas song; it comes around every year. It’s one of the pots of gold in the music business, and the biggest pot of gold has been “White Christmas,” which to me has a little Yiddish melody in it. You know the cantorials, those notes you had to learn for your bar mitzvah? Those notes are very close together—the distance between the notes are almost as close as you could sing. If you listen to “White Christmas”—put some Hebrew words to that, see if it’s your bar mitzvah chant.

One of the things about the Jewish songwriters—I think Cole Porter pointed this out—is that because of growing up with cantorials, those bar mitzvah chants, those close notes, they were comfortable writing that. It’s not standard to English-Irish music, where a lot of our music came from. But this Middle Eastern kind of sound, for the Jewish songwriters, that came very easily. It wasn’t strange, and it wasn’t exotic, and it’s very affecting—to the general public it kind of corkscrews into your heart.

So the reason so many Jews were Tin Pan Alley songwriters is because they learned to chant their bar mitzvah portions?

I think that’s part of it. But Tin Pan Alley wasn’t just composing. It was also coming up with a way of taking music and selling it. And I think a lot of the Jews coming into New York had to learn that peddler way of monitoring the customer, for survival—I know what he wants, and I know what he’ll pay. That idea of, take a piece of sheet music and sell it as if it was a tie or a new style of skirt, and have marketers around the country, and break it all at once, and get that product moving—Tin Pan Alley invented that.

And Irving Berlin, the play suggests, was all businessman. He turns that symphony into “Alexander’s” so he can sell it.

But he created a deathless piece of art. He may have created miniatures rather than murals, but I’ll take my Faberge egg. In fact it turns out that Joplin was kind of wrong about musical art in America in the 20th century. He thought American operas would be the great art. But there aren’t many American operas. Whereas I can hand you the great American songbook, and this is our art, this is the peak of our musical art.

You could argue there’s something specifically American about an art form that derives in part from commerce.

Could be. But, you know, Mozart had to fill his seats if he was going to write another opera.

In October, Nextbook Press will publish David Lehman’s A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs. It’s available for purchase in advance from Amazon.

Jewface, a new album from Reboot Stereophonic, introduces several of these songs to listeners far removed from the immigrant experience and the Yiddish inflections that infused it.

Jody Rosen, the music critic for Slate, is the album’s curator. He talks with Nextbook about discovering these scratchy wax-cylinder recordings and what audiences a century ago thought of songs like “When Mose With His Nose Leads the Band” and “That’s Yiddisha Love.”