‘A POINT OF PRIDE’
Documentary shines light on Jewish composers of Christmas hits
When Ophira Eisenberg was growing up in Calgary, she asked her parents who brought Jewish children Hanukkah presents.
Her mother said it was Moses. Apparently, the white-bearded prophet came down from the mountain each year and handed out dreidels and socks to good boys and girls.
“There was always these kinds of mash-up stories,” says Eisenberg, a comedian and writer who now lives in New York. “I give my parents big points for creativity. There were fun mash-up stories to explain things.”
Eisenberg tells this story as part of Dreaming of a Jewish Christmas, Oscar-nominated filmmaker Larry Weinstein’s documentary that charts the Jewish experience with yuletide festivities. The film’s focus, at least initially, is to explore how most of our beloved secular Christmas tunes were written by Jewish composers. It’s a jumpingoff point for an exploration of how Jews have traditionally celebrated, or not celebrated, the most Christian of holidays and how this may reflect the delicate balance they’ve maintained between preserving their culture and assimilating since landing in North America.
Eisenberg joins fellow comedians Mark Breslin, Lisa Geduldig and Jackie Mason and a number of other experts and Jewish personalities for the film, which first airs Sunday on the Documentary Channel and Thursday on CBC. Much of it takes place in a curiously musical Chinese restaurant in Toronto on Christmas Day — a tradition for many Jewish families.
Sea-Hi restaurant is where Weinstein’s family went on Christmas Day when he was a child and in the documentary, staff are prone to breaking into jubilant, Jewish-written Christmas carols. In between interviews, there are musical interludes by Canadian musicians, including Steven Page crooning a sombre version of Silver Bells while waiting for his takeout chicken balls, and Tom Wilson giving a rollicking run through Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer in a dark alley.
Weinstein traces the history of Jewish composers and chronicles how many of them, from Irving Berlin to Mel Tormé, came to write famous Christmas songs.
As a basically rootless people, Jews were the perfect candidates to assimilate when they arrived in the U.S. in the 19th century.
They wanted to fit in, and songwriting was one avenue open to them. So writing Christmas songs, among other types of popular tunes, became a path to success for some.
White Christmas (Berlin), Silver Bells (Jay Livingston and Ray Evans), The Christmas Song (Tormé, Robert Wells), Rudolph the RedNosed Reindeer (Johnny Marks) are among the favourites written by Jewish composers. The irony hasn’t been lost on Jewish people.
“It’s a little bit of an ongoing joke that the Jews wrote all the best Christmas carols,” Eisenberg says. “You can make the same comparison when you talk about standup comedy. I live in America and a lot of Americans always say some of the greatest comedians in America are Canadians. Maybe it’s always that the outsider has the greater approach to the insider’s material because of their objectivity.”
Eisenberg recalls being one of two Jewish kids in a Calgary school during Christmas festivities.
“We would go into the gymnasium … and they would put the lyrics to Christmas carols on the overhead projector.
“The music teacher would be on the piano and we would all sing Christmas carols,” she says. “There’s a lot of good Christmas carols, I’m not going to lie. They are pretty catchy. I could probably enter a competition; I feel like I know many more verses than any other people.”
Page also remembers singing Christmas carols in choirs in elementary school in Toronto.
“When you can go, ‘Oh, that song was written by a Jewish guy,’ it was always kind of a point of pride for us,” said the singer, who is set to resume a tour in the new year and is working on a new album.
“Then you realize that so many of these great American standards, holiday or otherwise, were written by Jewish composers.”
As the film discusses, many Jewish composers wrote Christmas classics during or after the Second World War in New York. They wrote the tunes in a secular way that included everyone in the holiday.
Weinstein said he wasn’t able to get the rights to all the songs he wanted for the film.
“Sometimes there was a bit of a sinister reason why we couldn’t,” he said. “Not the composers, because they had passed away, not their families.
“But the lawyers that held on to these estates simply were not interested in a film that brought up the fact that these Christian songs were written by Jewish composers.
“They thought that couldn’t be good for the image of the song, that might hurt the song.
“At least that’s the impression we got.”
Page said Christmas songs help musicians find common ground with their audience, yet writing a contemporary holiday tune is a challenge for many.
“I think because there’s so little irony that can be put into Christmas songs, so for something to be purely sentimental or joyful is harder for people to feel comfortable with,” said Page, who put out the 2004 Christmas album Barenaked for the Holidays with his former band.
The holidays also don’t seem to have the same “wide-eyed, naive innocence” of yore, Weinstein said.
“Certainly anything post-9/11, we’re just not the same. We’re not innocent and sweet, which is very sad to think about.”