Professional Documents
Culture Documents
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Arthur Gilbert and Oscar Tarcov,
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Your Neighbor Celebrates, 1957
'TWAS
THE NIGHT
BEFORE HANUKKAH
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© Copyright 2012
Idelsohn Society for Musical Preservation
New York, NY USA
Printed in Canada
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A Few Words from the Idelsohn Society 5
Mirthful Maccabees by Jenna Weissman Joselit 13
Silent Night by Greil Marcus 19
Songs of Hanukkah 22
Songs of Christmas 25
Acknowledgments 30
A
few years ago, while compiling what became our
release Black Sabbath: The Secret Musical History of
Black-Jewish Relations, the Idelsohn Society started
dreaming up an early version of the project you now
hold in your hands: a collection of songs that would tell the tale of
Hanukkah through recorded sound. While the archive of Hanukkah
songs was not as deep and varied as we had imagined, much of what
we listened to were true musical treasures: some filled with Jewish
passion and reverie, some jocular, and some hybrids of Hanukkah
tales and games with pop and rock styles. Yet all told a similar story,
of a Jewish people embracing a somewhat minor Jewish holiday and
elevating its importance until it was celebrated with the same vigor
invested in Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur and Passover.
But what struck us most during our record and thrift store
searches was the other story that began to unfold with each Hanukkah
tune we considered. While that other winter holiday…Christmas…
produced 10,000 times the amount of musical releases as Hanukkah
releases, many of the songs were also written by Jews and many of
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the greatest were produced and recorded by Jews. And it was while
discussing that truism during one of our weekly Idelsohn phone
calls, that the real foundation of this release began to be built.
After all, the idea of a Jew celebrating Christmas is nothing
new. Theodor Herzl, the godfather of Zionism, had a Christmas tree.
So did a young Gershom Sholem, the pioneering scholar of Jewish
mysticism. Throughout America, when the end of December rolls
around, Jews don Christmas sweaters, send family Christmas
cards, and snap photos of the kids on Santa’s lap in the middle of
the suburban mall where they do their Christmas shopping for their
Jewish relatives. As Joshua Eli Plaut traces in his book A Kosher
Christmas: ‘Tis the Season to Be Jewish, this has been happening,
with varying degrees of fervor, since the 1870s, when Christmas
went from being a primarily religious, Christian, holiday to being
a fully secular national holiday — a red-and-green festival of gifts,
food, and decorated trees, of reindeers, elves, and sleighs. American
Jews celebrated Christmas not because it was Christian, but because
it was American. “Can the American Jew keep Christmas?,” Rabbi
Solomon Sonneschein asked back in 1883. “I say he can, without in
the least disgracing his religious convictions or interfering with the
building up of a stronger and nobler Judaism.”
Of course, not all American Jews shared that confidence.
As soon as Christmas was declared a national holiday in 1870, the
competitive campaign to beef up Hanukkah — a relatively minor,
unheralded Jewish holiday — went into high gear: not only will we
celebrate Christmas, we will create a rival holiday of our own to cel-
ebrate as well! You have one day of presents, we will have eight nights!
The roots of the reclamation lay in the creative minds of a
small band of New York City-based youths who called themselves
“The American Hebrews.” In the wake of the Civil War when
American popular imagination had been captivated by the twin
obsessions of militarism and masculinity, the Hebrews believed
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“A Reform Jew Figures It Out,” Der Groyser Kundes, 1910.
Caption translation: “This year Christmas and Hanukah occur
at the same time. We saw how a Reform Jew lit the Hanukah
Candles on a Christmas tree. Just like you see in the picture.”
From the Archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research,
New York
Musically yours,
The Idelsohn Society
Roger Bennett, Courtney Holt, David Katznelson, and Josh Kun
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A Note on Spelling Hanukkah
J
udaism is known for many things: discipline and constancy,
say, or high-mindedness and intellection. Mirth does not ap-
pear on anyone’s inventory of characteristics. For centuries, it
was nowhere to be found, at least not until the Americanized
Hanukkah fully came into its own in the 1950s, when putting the mirth
into that age-old holiday became a Jewish communal project. Although
American Jewry’s cultural custodians of the time preferred to speak of
fun and happiness — the word ‘mirth’ probably struck them as a tad old-
fashioned or smacked too much of Christmas — their sustained efforts
at lightheartedness transformed Hanukkah into a major moment on the
American Jewish calendar, giving it a new lease on life.
To be sure, earlier generations of Hanukkah celebrants were not
without a sense of occasion. In late 19th century New York, large scale
holiday spectacles were all the rage. At New York’s Academy of Music
in 1879, 100 cymbal-bearing maidens, along with “Jewish soldiers,
trumpeters, banner bearers, Syrian captives and young women with
harps,” took to the stage in what Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper
called a “grand work of realistic art.” Filling the eye as well as the ear,
the American Hanukkah was initially an exercise in pageantry.
A generation or so later, Hanukkah developed into an op-
portunity to “shower Jewish children with gifts,” or so exhorted
What Every Jewish Woman Should Know, a popular guidebook to
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Jewish ritual celebration. “If ever lavishness in gifts is appropriate,
it is on Hanukkah,” the text told its readers, hastening the holiday’s
transformation from a grand public event into an intimate, domestic
phenomenon centered on exchange. Meanwhile, the commercializa-
tion of Hanukkah and its pleasing association with material things
accelerated further when advertisements in the early 1900s har-
nessed the holiday to the consumption of newfangled food products.
Blending “Chanukah Latkes with Modern Science,” the manufactur-
ers of Crisco, among others, made a point of touting the virtues
of both tradition and modernity. Little wonder, then, that Hanukkah
became more and more attractive to contemporary American audi-
ences. The holiday was increasingly hard to resist.
Still, it was not until the postwar era that Hanukkah really took
off. A number of factors, both domestic and global, came together at the
time to propel the millennial moment into the elevated ranks of popular
American Jewish holidays. For one thing, affluence combined with the
baby boom of the 1950s to generate lots of interest in childhood and its
appurtenances. Against that background, Hanukkah seemed tailor-
made to appeal to kids and their increasingly attentive parents. For
another thing, postwar America was awash in sentiments of “cultural
one-ness,” which granted Jewish forms of religious expression a kind of
parity with Christian ones. The winter holiday of Hanukkah benefited
mightily from that ecumenical spirit even if, at times, it resembled too
closely what one disgruntled American Jewish parent disparaged as
a “competitive winter sport.” More pointedly still, the rise of the State
of Israel, whose embattled latter-day Maccabees saved the day, offered
yet another incentive — and a highly relevant one, at that — for em-
bracing Hanukkah. Once consigned to the history books, these brave
warriors of yesteryear re-emerged as modern-day heroes.
Music, especially songs and choral works pitched to chil-
dren, was central to the postwar community’s efforts to trumpet
Hanukkah. Sound now flooded the American Jewish home and the
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Gladys Gewirtz, Chanukah Song Parade, c. 1960s
P
hil Spector was born in the Bronx in 1940 and lived in New
York City until he was thirteen; you can hear something
of his voice — a thin whine, with a steely, smile-when-you-
say-that glint in the eyes behind it — in Joey Ramone, born
Jeffry Hyman in Queens in 1951. Spector’s speaking voice, that is, as,
with “Silent Night” vamping wordlessly behind him, once pronounced
his unctuous tribute to Christmas, Christmas music, the music industry,
and himself on the A Christmas Gift for You from Philles Records, the
epochal, Lazarus-like album he released in 1963, just in time for the
assassination of John F. Kennedy. It disappeared, that season; in those
days, no one wanted to celebrate in the unrestrained, all but unlimited
way Spector’s clan of singers had to offer: the Ronettes, Bobb B. Sox
and the Blue Jeans, the Crystals, most of all Darlene Love, giving
everything to the hugely swinging big beat of “Winter Wonderland,”
“White Christmas,” “The Bells of St. Mary’s,” or “Sleigh Ride.” Since
then, those recordings have been all over the radio every Christmas,
with Love appearing annually on the David Letterman Show to dive all
the way into her track from the album, “Christmas (Baby Please Come
Home)” — written by Spector, Ellie Greenwich and Jeff Barry, perhaps
not the best Christmas song every written by American Jews, but far
and away the best record ever made of one.
But this album features not Christmas songs written only by
Jews, or produced only by Jews, or sung only by people who might
or might not have had Jews in their past (there is some evidence that
Elvis Presley, who wore both a crucifix and a Star of David to keep his
bets covered, had a Jewish great-grandmother), so it’s not here. Thus
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we have Mitch Miller’s “White Christmas,” not Bing Crosby’s.
The Ramones’ “Merry Christmas (I Don’t Wanna Fight
Tonight),” from 1989, near the end of their career as New York’s
standard-bearing punk band, is a cartoon. By this time the band’s
bash-bash-bash sound was as kitschy as “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa
Claus.” The video for the number opens with a woman confronting her
layabout Jewish boyfriend as “Jingle Bells” plays dimly in the back-
ground. She’s mad at him because he’s set up a Christmas party for his
family. “What do you think you’re doing?” she screams. “I’m reading A
Christmas Carol,” he screams back. “Oh,” she says with utter disgust,
“since when did you learn to read?” And then it’s off to the races, with
Joey Ramone teasing doo-wop inflections through the song as the
couple pummels each other while surrounded by his relatives, who
pay no attention because they’re eating everything in the place. Obvi-
ously they should have gone to a movie and a Chinese restaurant.
No one ever pretended that Hanukkah music took up as
much space in the American imagination as Christmas music — or,
for that matter, in the American Jewish imagination. For one thing,
Hanukkah is not Yom Kippur. For most people singing or writing with
a straight face, it’s not important enough as a holiday to justify music
that reaches for the sublime, the epic, or the soul-killing depths of
John Zorn’s Masada compositions. And, as it’s celebrated, Hanukkah
too is a cartoon, which is why Adam Sandler’s 1994 “The Chanukah
Song,” madly preening over, if not everyone’s favorite American show-
business Jews, definitely Sandler’s (James Caan, Kirk Douglas, Paul
Newman, Harrison Ford, Goldie Hawn, Ann Landers, Abigail Van
Buren, William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, David Lee Roth, and “Tom
Cruise’s agent”), is the best Hanukkah song every written, at least
since the last World War. Why it’s not here I have no idea. But with one
song that is, all of that ceases to matter.
“It’s that good old, intangible, can’t-put-your-finger-on-it ‘White
Soul,’” Al Kooper — born Kuperschmidt in 1944 in the Bronx — wrote
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in 1968, reviewing the Band’s Music from Big Pink in Rolling Stone,
“like church music or country music or Jewish music”- and the likes of
Yossele Rosenblatt’s 1916 “Yevonim” must have been what he meant.
Rosenblatt was born in the Ukraine in 1882; a cantor before he was
twenty, he reached New York in 1912. Within the Jewish world, he was
a hero; because he would not despoil holy music, he turned down the
chance to sing the Kol Nidre in The Jazz Singer.
In “Yevonim,” a song about the oil that burned for eight days,
the sound is distant, the surviving cylinder worn and scratchy. All of
that adds to the sensation that something precious is being passed
on — something the singers are not sure will make it to the future,
something they might fear will die with them. Women carry the
music first; then a chorus of men, their voices muffled, join them from
behind. You can see them forming a circle- and then, with the arrival
of Rosenblatt’s big, reaching, demanding, unsatisfiable voice, you can
see him appearing out of nowhere in their midst.
It could be a Passover song. It could be a Yom Kippur song, not
a plea but a demand that all sins be erased, because how could God
resist a voice like this? I will write my name in the Book of Life myself!
And yet behind the bravado, behind the fullness of life in Rosenblatt’s
tone, in the singing of the women and men around him, there is a
deadly fatalism; there is terror. There is the specter of the pogrom,
from the Middle Ages to the villages of Rosenblatt’s boyhood and the
childhoods of all of those singing with him, with the certainty, even in
America, of the pogrom to come, even if no one could imagine that it
would be meant to cleanse the earth itself.
What you hear, finally, is the anonymous singers, all of them
now dead, standing in for the dead who will follow them — all of their
families, left behind. They are the specter of the specter — and that, on
the first disc of this album, is what you will take away. Even Phil Spector,
whose grandfather carried the name Spekter from Russia, sitting in
his prison cell, listening to this song, knowing it is about him, too.
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Clockwise from top left:
Stanley Adams and Sid Wayne, Chanukah Carols, 1962;
A.W. Binder, Jewish Holidays in Song, c. 1940;
Various Artists, Great Songs of Christmas, 1965;
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Moishe Oysher, The Moishe Oysher Chanukah Party, c. 1940
The Songs of Hanukkah
and Christmas
Acknowledgements
The Idelsohn Society also wishes to thank: Jenna Weissman Joselit, Greil Marcus, Seymour
Stein, Brooke Berman and The Rights Workshop, Eddy Portnoy, Lorin Sklamberg and Jesse
Aaron Cohen at the YIVO Archives, the Judaica Sound Archives at Florida Atlantic University,
The Amazing Maya Benton, Rachel Levin, Yoav Schlesinger, Scott Belsky, Greg Clayman, Ben
Elowitz, Kate Frucher, Jeremy Goldberg, Julie Hermelin, Jed Kolko, Samantha Kurtzman-
Counter, Steven Rubenstein, Jill Soloway, Anne Wojcicki, Amelia Klein, Shane Hankins,
Melissa McCullough, Maria Arsenieva, and all at Reboot, Jennifer Gorovitz, Jeff Farber,
Dana Corvin, Alan Rothenberg, Debbie Findling, Shana Penn, Adam Hirschfelder, Danielle
Foreman, Rebecca Popell, Samson, Ber, Zion, and Oz Bennett, Marouane Fellaini and David
Moyes, Samuel Holt, Kaya Katznelson, Cecilia Bastida, Matthew Johnson, Birdman Recording
Group, Dan Schifrin and all the CJM, Gary Hobish, Barb Bersche, Marco and Anne Cibola at
Studio Ours, Cam and everyone at Polar Bear Productions, Steven Greenberg, Regina Joskow
at Missing Piece Group, and Steven Smith of Nerd Elite Design.
Extra special thanks to the American Hebrews, Judah the Maccabee, and Father Christmas.
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The Idelsohn Society for Musical Preserva- The Idelsohn Society is helmed by Roger
tion is an all-volunteer-run organization. We Bennett, Dana Ferine, Courtney Holt, David
are a core team from the music industry and Katznelson and Josh Kun, and supported
academia who passionately believe Jewish by the thousands of individuals who have
history is best told by the music we have loved mailed in their vinyl records, shared their
and lost. In order to incite a new conversation stories, and attended our events.
about the present, we must begin by listening
anew to the past. The Idelsohn Society is a 501c3 nonprofit
dependent on the support of those who
We do this in a number of ways: by re- believe in our mission. Make a donation at
releasing lost Jewish classic albums and the www.idelsohnsociety.com.
stories behind them; building a digitally-based
archive of the music and the artists who
created it in order to preserve their legacy
for future generations; curating museum We are grateful to the following
exhibits that showcase the stories behind the organizations for their critical support:
music; and creating concert showcases which
bring our 80- and 90-year-old performers The Casden Institute for the Study of the
back onstage to be re-appreciated by the Jewish Role in American Life
young audiences they deserve. All of this Contemporary Jewish Museum
work is driven by the passion and energies of Jewish New Media Innovation Fund
our volunteer supporters and donors across Jim Joseph Foundation
the country, who share the belief that music The Koret Foundation
creates conversations otherwise impossible in Kroll Family Foundation
daily life. Nextbook/Tabletmag.com
Reboot
The Idelsohn Society would love to hear any Richard and Rhoda Goldman Fund
memories you have of any of our other artists. Righteous Persons Foundation
Be in touch at www.idelsohnsociety.com and San Francisco Jewish Community Federation
see our other albums and gift cards at Skirball Cultural Center
www.idelsohnsociety.com. Follow us on The Taube Foundation for Jewish Life and
Twitter@idelsohnsociety. Culture
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CHECK OUT OUR OTHER CLASSICS AVAILABLE AT WWW.IDELSOHNSOCIETY.COM:
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© Copyright 2012
Idelsohn Society for Musical Preservation
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