Some of you may have had your heart-warmed by reading Irving Berlin biographer Lawrence Bergreen’s recent piece in the Journal quoting an exchange between cantor’s son Berlin and his musical transcriber, Helmy Kresa.
“I want you to take down a song I wrote. Not only is it the best song that I ever wrote, it’s the best song anybody ever wrote,” Berlin told Kresa in 1940 about White Christmas. According to Bergreen, “Helmy rolled his eyes with doubt, but the moment Berlin sat down in front of a piano and played the song, Helmy ‘knew right away that it really was the greatest song ever written’ because of the way Berlin had juxtaposed the ‘warmth of Southern California and the cold snow’.”
White Christmas still reliably precipitates every Yule Tide, whereas God Bless America may be losing favor.
Anyway, it’s past time for you over-heated White privileged, Berlin admirers to chill out by admitting that the musical white side has a dark side exploited by this notorious Jewish minstrel man’s most beloved song. Last December, as demonstrators held “I Can’t Breathe” protests over the death of African American Eric Garner, others launched a social media assault on black singer Darius Rucker for having the audacity to sing White Christmas in Rockefeller Center not far from where Garner died under police restraint.
Since then, reverberations have been nonstop, most recently from UC Berkeley students—in the spirit of the Black Lives Matter Movement and “Black Xmas” protests—blocking Sather Gate where they accosted white passersby with demands, among other things, that racist White Christmas be banned.
In the Spirit of the Season, you might charitably be inclined to dismiss these protests as just a bit over the top. You would be wrong. As an historian, I can attest to their serious antecedents among radical Jewish scholars whose commitment to multiculturalism makes my own moderate version of the multicultural creed pale in comparison.
There may have been earlier rumblings against White Christmas among white historians who proudly call themselves “race traitors,” but so far as I know the groundbreaking work was done independently a generation ago by historians Robert Dawidoff and Jeffrey Melnick, both brilliant scholars with extraordinary talent for epatering the Jewish bourgeoisie.
In 1944, Winston Churchill met Irving Berlin, who responded to a query by telling Churchill that White Christmas was his favorite composition. This is said to have nonplussed the British PM who had mistaken Irving (born Izzy Baline) for Isaiah Berlin, the cosmopolitan Jewish philosopher-historian whose wartime dispatches from Washington Churchill much admired.
This anecdote has always had a following among those who have disdained Irving Berlin as a social climber. American Jews who didn’t like intermarriage in general or Irving Berlin’s in particular looked askance at him for flirting with Christianity not only with White Christmas but with Easter Parade. What’s of more recent vintage, however, is the argument that Berlin’s deepest motivation was pandering to being white.
According to Melnick but not Dawidoff, Berlin was obsessed for almost from the beginning by incredible rumors that he had ripped off his greatest hits, starting with Alexander’s Ragtime Band (1911), from the work of “a little colored boy in the closet” whom he is said to never have credited. Dawidoff more-or-less argues that Berlin spent his whole career trying to counter insinuations that his musical inspiration was somehow “black.”
Hence, while Melville’s Captain Ahab’s fatal attraction was killing the White Whale, Irving Berlin’s was allegedly hiding his not-quite-white Jewish roots under a White Christmas blizzard.
There hasn’t been much snow this Xmas in most of the U.S. But on our elite college campuses the supply of postmodern ideological hokum like that besmirching White Christmas as perhaps a White Jewish conspiracy against nonwhite musical genius is in abundant, year-round supply.
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