Religion
Related: About this forumDeck The Halls With Boughs of Challah
Jews Created Soundtrack for Both Hanukkah and Christmas
Berlins Harem: Composer Irving Berlin serenades some of songdoms leading ladies, including Dinah Shore, second from right.
By Eileen Reynolds
Published December 03, 2012, issue of December 07, 2012.
A Jewish music preservation group sets out to make the definitive Hanukkah compilation and ends up with an album dripping with Christmas cheer.
Thats not just a humdrum holiday punch line its also an accurate description of the genesis of the Idelsohn Societys December release, Twas the Night Before Hanukkah: The Musical Battle Between Christmas and the Festival of Lights, a catalog of efforts by a centurys worth of Jewish musicians to head off the yuletide blues. And really, what did the Idelsohn researchers expect?
The archive of Hanukkah songs was not as deep and varied as we had imagined, they admit in an introduction to the two-disc set, revealing a truth that will surprise no one familiar with the story of a Jewish people embracing a somewhat minor Jewish holiday in a spirited, if not wholly successful, attempt to compete with the merry month-long red-and-green festival of gifts, food, and decorated trees that is an American Christmas.
Hand-wringing over the relationship between Hanukkah and Christmas is nothing new, of course, and the Idelsohn Society traces that tension all the way back to 1870, when Christmas was declared a national holiday. It was then that a New York City-based group called The American Hebrews started campaigning for a Grand Revival of the Jewish National Holiday of Chanucka in a manner and style never before equaled. In keeping with the martial spirit of the post-Civil War era, one early revival effort took the form of a Young Mens Hebrew Association-sponsored military pageant (the better to celebrate the Maccabees as an ancestral race of manly Jewish warriors).
http://forward.com/articles/166799/deck-the-halls-with-boughs-of-challah/?utm_source=t.co&utm_content=general-general&utm_campaign=&utm_medium=jd.fo-other
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(5,167 posts)in the dark off-the-shoulder dress, next to Dinah shore.
rug
(82,333 posts)No Vested Interest
(5,167 posts)with names of the cute young blond gals. I thought the one to the left might be Doris Day, but then thought not.
Re Jewish/Christian context - Dinah Shore was of Jewish background, from Tennessee, I think; Rosalind Russell was Catholic.
Irving Berlin, in addition to "White Christmas", also wrote "Easter Parade".