Christmas, the Greatest Jewish American Holiday

In America, this promised land, Christmas is a Jewish holiday. Our Christmas soundtrack, which resounds from every mall, drugstore and grocery, was mostly composed by Jews. “Let It Snow,” “Silver Bells,” “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” “Winter Wonderland,” “The Christmas Song (Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire),” “A Holly, Jolly Christmas,” “Santa Baby”—all are the work of Jewish songwriters. Hollywood, that Jewish American mecca, gave us Miracle on 34th Street and It’s a Wonderful Life. The artificial Christmas tree was invented by a World War II bomber pilot named Si Spiegel, whose crew was made up of five Catholics, two Jews and one WASP.

To hear the songwriter Jews tell it, Christmas is not about the birth of the savior but instead comfort, cheer, and goodwill toward men. Jewish American Christmas takes the place of that hopeless earlier universalism, the socialist dream cherished by so many Jews, which never quite caught on in America and led to catastrophic results in Europe. The long history of this Jewish universalism begins in the rabbinical period with the Aleinu prayer, which foresees the time when all humanity, following the Jews, will abandon idolatry. It comes to a neatly paradoxical conclusion in modern Christmas, when the Jews embraced American capitalism’s branch of idol worship, the gift-giving juggernaut that swamps all ethnic and religious lines. Hanukkah and Kwanzaa orbit our major celebration, so that shopping rhythms can coincide.

Jewish Christmas is unashamedly capitalist, its prime symbol a tree with presents piled high all around, and in this way, it banishes the religious character of the holiday. Jewish composers’ Christmas songs feature snow, reindeer, Santa, fireplaces, and trees sparkling with lights, rather than the infant Jesus. First God gave Moses the Ten Commandments and then he gave Irving Berlin “White Christmas,” Philip Roth wrote in Operation Shylock. Berlin’s song was a gift to the gentiles that allowed the Jews a respite from persecution.

The two greatest masterpieces of American Jewish Christmas music both have a sad yearning about them—Berlin’s “White Christmas” and Phil Spector’s “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home).” The two men were starkly different, Berlin dapper and reserved, Spector a raving narcissist and megalomaniac. But they had something in common, too. Jews in a gentile world, both were perpetually on the outside looking in. The pang of sadness that we sometimes feel in the midst of the holiday’s merriment was especially present to these two Jewish geniuses, who spent their lives commandeering the non-Jewish mass culture that makes America both fake and heartfelt, freewheeling and suffocating, the congenial yet utterly lonely land that it is.

Irving Berlin, born Israel Baline in Russia in 1888, once said his earliest memory was cowering on a blanket in the road while watching his house being burned down by Cossacks. In 1893, the Balines came to America, where Christmas and Easter were times of joy and peace, rather than occasions for Jews to hide from the pogromists who liked to kill and rape them on Christian holidays.

Izzy Baline left home at 13 to become a singing waiter and busker in the Bowery’s dives, places with names like the Bucket of Blood and Suicide Hall, where he scrabbled for the pennies that customers threw on the floor. He lived in flophouses that doubled as bordellos. Izzy, who now called himself Irving Berlin, had a knack for improvising lyrics, and he started composing, too. His first song, “Marie from Sunny Italy” (Berlin wrote the lyrics), earned 75 cents in royalties in 1907, the year it came out. Four years later, Irving Berlin would become world famous for the massive crowd pleaser “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” his first superhit, whose straight-ahead bravado channeled George M. Cohan, one of Berlin’s heroes.

Berlin was a many-sided songwriter, the man behind the spiced-up razzmatazz of “Puttin’ on the Ritz” as well as “Face the Music and Dance,” which dispels brooding—“There may be trouble ahead”—with a sudden gear shift from minor to major, also featured in “Blue Skies,” which Al Jolson belted out in The Jazz Singer. Top Hat (1935), Berlin’s shining collaboration with Fred Astaire, is suave, snappy and, in the era’s lingo, swellegant. The Jewish refugee from Siberia even furnished his new home with a national anthem that nearly outstripped “The Star-Spangled Banner,” the hugely straightforward “God Bless America,” first performed by Kate Smith in 1938, with the Nazis terrorizing Europe (“While the storm clouds gather far across the sea,” as the song put it), and sung at both the Republican and Democratic conventions in 1940.

“I thought I was a songwriter until this young man came along,” the Irish American Cohan announced at a Friars Club roast in 1914, with the 25-year-old Berlin in the audience. “I thought he was a ‘Dago,’ but afterward I discovered he was a Jew boy, who named himself after an English actor and a German city.”

Berlin’s greatest success would be “White Christmas.” On Jan. 8, 1940, he bustled into his office, boasting that he had written not merely his best song, but “the best song anybody ever wrote.” Ever. Berlin’s verses have a strong undercurrent of nostalgic longing, with the singer wishing for a snow-blanketed Christmas “just like the ones I used to know.” Berlin reaches toward a vanished New England past of sleighbells, children playing and glistening treetops, a Currier and Ives America. “White Christmas” traces a long-lost innocence.

Jews intuited the sadness lurking in the Christian holiday, no one more than Irving Berlin, whose 1-month-old son, Irving Jr., died unexpectedly on Christmas morning 1928. Ever after, Christmas was a somber day for Berlin, and the darkness of personal memory lingers in the branches of his greatest song. The Berlin scholar Jody Rosen links “White Christmas” to the “gently cooed meditations and confessions” that appear in so many Tin Pan Alley songs from the 1920s on. “White Christmas,” that quiet hymn, has at its core a lonely soul.

“White Christmas” must be heard in Bing Crosby’s 1942 recording. Crosby’s voice was far less sauntering and insouciant than Sinatra’s, but instead mellow and rich, and as Louis Armstrong said, like gold being poured from a cup. Crosby, famously casual in his recording habits, hit the song on the second take. Notice the flutter between G and F when Bing croons the words “dreaming” and “sleighbells.” The ember glow of this voice, its sheer warmth, is still unmatched anywhere.

In December 1942, Crosby’s “White Christmas” could be found in every U.S. Army jukebox, and it became wildly popular among the troops, expressing perfectly their yearning to be home surrounded by loved ones. “White Christmas” became a worldwide hit—by some measures, it is the most popular song ever recorded. The 1942 master got worn out, and so Crosby rerecorded Berlin’s tune in 1947, the version most of us grew up with. Jule Styne and Sammy Cahn emulated the wistfulness of “White Christmas” in “The Christmas Waltz” and “The Secret of Christmas,” but Berlin’s classic remains unrivaled in its ability to both soothe and stir the holiday listener.

Born on the day after Christmas in 1939, Phil Spector was a spindly kid from the Bronx, transplanted to LA’s heavily Jewish Fairfax neighborhood. His father killed himself when Phil was 9, and Phil’s mother and his sister ran his life in a smothering fashion—the family’s screaming arguments never seemed to stop. His mother often told Phil he was the cause of his father’s death, and he would hurl the accusation back at her. (The one time Spector took acid, under his analyst’s supervision, he imagined he was present at his father’s suicide.)

Beginning with the Teddy Bears’ hit “To Know Him Is to Love Him,” modeled after the inscription on his father’s grave (“To Know Him Was to Love Him”), Spector set out to conquer the world of pop music. The Wall of Sound, Spector’s stunning innovation, was gestated in the matchless echo chambers at LA’s Gold Star recording studio, where Phil would cram as many as 20 instrumentalists, a chorus, and three or four pianos. The thundering yet cushioned mono sound that resulted enabled Spector to scale the highest summits of girl group pop, culminating in the deathless “Be My Baby,” sung by his soon-to-be wife, Ronnie Bennett of the Ronettes. Mick Brown, Spector’s biographer, calls “Be My Baby” an “idealized fable of a love [...] too perfect to be true.” The song vibrates with anxiety, as Brian Wilson, who adored it to no end, also knew. Spector’s possessiveness with Ronnie, Brown adds, was a “symptom [...] of how little he trusted himself to be able to keep her.” The producer Kim Fowley said that pop is “music for lonely people, made by other lonely people.” The massive surging power of the Spector sound is designed to compensate for that loneliness.

In Spector’s early hits excitement turns frenetic, as in the Crystals’ “Da Doo Ron Ron” and “He’s a Rebel” (the latter actually sung by Darlene Love). The pace is a bit too fast—there’s a manic edge to these songs.

Spector was in fact dangerously manic. He waved handguns around, locked guests in his house, and drank heavily. He was a generous friend to Lenny Bruce and John Lennon, among others, but his paranoia took its toll. His long decline ended in the murder of the actress Lana Clarkson, who came to his fortresslike mansion, the Pyrenees, one night in 2003. During his two trials, Spector, quivering with guilt, wore a series of strange wigs, along with his customary elevator shoes (Spector was 5-foot-5). The “first tycoon of teen” (as Tom Wolfe dubbed the 25-year-old Spector in 1965) ended up a withered, helpless wreck. He had always used freakishness to try to escape from his fears. The rock critic Nik Cohn, who interviewed Spector in the late ’60s, described him as “a tiny, wispy figure,” really just “a terrified little boy.”

But in his prime Spector was a world-historical wonder. “The records are built like a Wagner opera,” Spector said in 1964. “They start simply and they end with dynamic force, meaning and purpose. It’s in the mind, I dreamed it up. It’s like art movies.” There is no better illustration of Spector’s pop titanism than his holiday album A Christmas Gift for You, which came out the day of JFK’s assassination in 1963. Spector always said he got a kick out of how the biggest Christmas song ever, “White Christmas,” was written by a Jew, and so, like Berlin, he tossed his hat in the ring.

A Christmas Gift for You begins with Spector’s take on “White Christmas.” Darlene Love, discovered by Spector a year earlier, is on vocals. The track begins with a hearty shuffle-vamp, pianos pounding away, percussion tinkling. Spector turns “White Christmas” into, of all things, a march, not triumphal but ceremonious and a bit disheveled, with all that towering cumulus of instrumentation tugging at your heart, a stark counterpoint to Crosby’s soothing sadness. He also restores the introductory verse that Berlin cut before Crosby first sang it:

The sun is shining,
The grass is green,
The orange and palm trees sway
There’s never been such a day in old LA [Berlin had written “Beverly Hills, LA,” a New Yorker’s goof]
But it’s December the 24
And I’m longing to be up north

Love speaks these words in a cool ironic deadpan, a denizen of sunny Southern California picturing the old-time world of wintry cottages, sleds, and snowmen. Ending with some jaunty chimes and a firm drumroll, this “White Christmas” handily takes care of Spector’s anxiety of influence with respect to Berlin.

A Christmas Gift’s pinnacle is that masterwork of exhilarating desperation, “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home),” the only original song on the album—first intended for Ronnie Bennett, but Spector in the end gave the song to the superpowered voice of Darlene Love. The track starts with nervous pizzicati and a decisive tolling of church bells, along with some strangely fateful time-keeping sleigh bells. Then comes a stepped-up chunka-chunka rhythm, and Love’s passion tumbles down like a waterfall. When she belts out “and all the fun we had last year,” Love sounds like she’s climbing a mountain. “If there was a way” is an unfettered, shiver-inducing wail. Out of sync with all the happy people around her, the ones singing “Deck the halls” and putting lights on the trees, she pines for her absent beloved. Love’s voice, its pain and power mated, could swing the Empire State Building. A honking sax solo occupies the break, and as the song fades out, a lone piano improvises eccentrically.

There is no more fervent love prayer in American popular music than “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home).” Could there ever have been a Delphic priestess more fully possessed by the god than Darlene Love by the window with the snow coming down, watching it fall, Darlene’s deity being, as her name tells you, love itself? The promise of the song is that if you implore the heavens hard enough, rolling all your heart, soul and voice into one mammoth heaving sublimity, you can indeed bring your baby home for Christmas.

Brian Wilson was in the studio on the day that “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” was recorded, but he was too nervous to play any notes in the presence of his idol Phil Spector. Spector inspired the thickly layered Pet Sounds and Wild Honey—as he did Springsteen’s Born to Run, later on. During his nervous breakdown, Wilson, who eventually decided Phil was “a mind-gangster,” hallucinated Spector’s voice coming from a movie screen (the film was John Frankenheimer’s Seconds).

A Christmas Gift ends with a bizarre rendition of “Silent Night” featuring Spector’s voiceover monologue, which expresses his pride in “all the artists ... The Crystals, The Ronettes, Darlene Love, Bob B. Soxx and the Blue Jeans and myself,” and thanks the listeners “so very much for letting us spend this Christmas with you.” Then comes a sample verse from “Silent Night,” “Holy infant so tender and mild / Sleep in heavenly peace,” followed by a little off-key whistle, a kiss-off tying a sarcastic bow on the holy schmaltz we have just heard, the sole reference to Jesus on the entire record. Recording engineer Larry Levine recalled that Spector’s initial version of his “Silent Night” monologue went “something like, ‘I made this record for you, cocksuckers.’”

1963, the year of A Christmas Gift, was the apex of Spector’s stardom. The next year belonged to Berry Gordy, whose Motown label overtook Spector’s Philles Records. In 1966 Spector’s “River Deep—Mountain High,” with Tina Turner pounding the lyrics, was a staggeringly baroque production that barely made the charts, though The Beatles called it their favorite song, and its ravenous operatic ambition still dazzles. Spector went on to work with The Beatles (on Let It Be), and he produced George Harrison’s and John Lennon’s early solo albums. But he was in a downward plummet, left behind by ’70s rock ’n’ roll, which gravitated to garage rock primitivism rather than Spector’s sonic extravagance. He drifted away from music, and like Berlin, became a bereaved father—his son Phillip Jr. died at age 10. For his last full-scale project, Spector produced, and mostly ruined, the Ramones’ fifth album, End of the Century, sheathing it in thumping drums, heavy strings and horns.

Irving Berlin, like Spector, got left behind by music history. He tried, without success, to get DJs to stop playing Elvis Presley’s rendition of “White Christmas.” Elvis’ nearly smirking vocal manhandled what Rosen calls the “charm, craftsmanship, and feeling” of the song, the “delicacy” that marks “White Christmas” along with so many other Tin Pan Alley classics.

Spector once said, “I knew that the real folk music of America was George Gershwin, Jerome Kern, and Irving Berlin. These names were bigger than the music. That’s what I wanted to be.” Berlin will forever remain in the firmament, one of the biggest stars of the great American songbook.

Each Christmas Eve, carolers used to gather at 17 Beekman Place, where Berlin lived until his death in 1989, to sing “White Christmas.” Most years, Berlin would wave from his window, no doubt aware that he, as a Jew, had united us all under the banner of the Christmas holiday. “Let’s All Be Americans Now,” Berlin urged in one of his tunes from the 1910s. Phil Spector, maestro of our greatest Christmas album, couldn’t agree more, along with Mel Tormé, Sammy Cahn, Jule Styne, and all the other Christmas Jews.