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'TWAS THE NIGHT BEFORE HANUKKAH

� Music� Ba�� Bet�n Christmas and Festiv� of Lights

� I�sohn Soc�ty P�sents

2 Arthur Gilbert and Oscar Tarcov, Your Neighbor Celebrates, 1957

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'TWASTHE NIGHT

BEFORE HANUKKAH

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© Copyright 2012 Idelsohn Society for Musical PreservationNew York, NY USA

Printed in Canada

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A Few Words from the Idelsohn Society 5Mirthful Maccabees by Jenna Weissman Joselit 13

Silent Night by Greil Marcus 19Songs of Hanukkah 22Songs of Christmas 25 Acknowledgments 30

Arthur Gilbert and Oscar Tarcov, Your Neighbor Celebrates, 1957

6 Ray Brenner and Barry E. Blitzer, Have a Jewish Christmas…?, 1967

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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

A Few Words from the Idelsohn Society

“God gave Moses the Ten Commandments and then He gave to Ir-ving Berlin ‘Easter Parade’ and ‘White Christmas.’ The two holidays that celebrate the divinity of Christ -- the divinity that’s the very heart of the Jewish rejection of Christianity -- and what does Irving Berlin brilliantly do? He de-Christs them both! Easter he turns into a fashion show and Christmas into a holiday about snow…. He turns their religion into schlock. But nicely! Nicely! So nicely the goyim don’t even know what hit ‘em. They love it. Everybody loves it...

-- Philip Roth, Operation Shylock

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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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the Maccabean themes of Hanukkah offered the opportunity to prove they hailed from warrior-stock as much as the next Ameri-can. They created an ambitious campaign for the “Grand Revival of the Jewish National Holiday of Chanucka in a manner and style never before equaled.” Their explicit goal was to rescue this “national festival from the oblivion into which it seemed rapidly falling.” After persuading the Young Men’s Hebrew Association to sponsor a Hanukkah military pageant, the race to build a bigger, better, stronger holiday was on. The festival was soon replete with its own Hanukkah songbook. Rabbi Gustav Gottheil kicked it off

“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

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before the turn of the 20th century by giving an Americanized makeover to an older Hanukkah song, “Ma’oz Tzur,” and turning it into “Rock of Ages.”

Songs about dreidels, gelt, and candles soon followed.Yet because Hanukkah songs were never designed to be

national American hits, not one ever cracked the Billboard charts, and it’s a rare day when you hear “Rock of Ages” piping over the PA of a department store in the buildup to a Christmas sale. What you will hear, of course, are Christmas songs — “The Christmas Song,” “White Christmas,” “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” “Let It Snow,” “Holly Jolly Christmas,” “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day” — all written by Jews themselves who were having their musi-cal holiday cake and eating it too: Hanukkah songs for us, Christmas songs for all of us. If Jews were Americans, and Jews wrote Ameri-can popular songs (the Great American Songbook you might say is largely the Great Jewish-American Songbook), then why shouldn’t Jews write the Christmas songs that everybody sings? Who knows America better than the Jews? America is a craft, and Jews have long mastered it, so let it snow.

And then there were the Jewish musical artists who spent part of their springtime in a recording studio producing Christmas songs to be ready for release later that year (maybe even showing up late to a Passover Seder after a long day in the studio!). The biggest Jewish names in music have at least one Christmas recording in their catalog, some entire records. Regardless, if the motivation behind these recordings was around marketing, money-making, sentimentality, or a simple love for the music, the result was a truly American phe-nomenon: a category of Christmas music, as sung by Jews, became a vital part of the holiday fabric.

As a result, when we sat down to imagine this release, it was clear from the start that putting together a historic compilation of purely Hanukkah songs would only tell part of the story. The full

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story would require Christmas songs. The full story would require an exploration of how American Jews used music to negotiate their place in American national culture. But what to include? With so many possibilities, our criteria became increasingly specific. Well-trodden Hanukkah choices like Adam Sandler’s “The Chanukah Song” wouldn’t make the cut, and classic Christmas albums per-formed by non-Jews but conceived by Jews like one of our favorites, Phil Spector’s A Christmas Gift For You, would probably have to wait for Volume 2: The Holidays Strike Back (check out Greil Marcus’ essay here for more on this one). For now, you can find both of these, and other songs that were in the mix, on our website (idelsohnsociety.com), where we also encourage you to chime in with your own suggestions for the ultimate December playlist.

As we began collecting and selecting songs, the questions started to mount: Are the Hanukkah songs the Jewish songs? Or are the Christmas songs the most Jewish songs of all? Are the Christ-mas songs proof of full-scale assimilation and Jewish invisibility? Or, as Philip Roth suggested in Operation Shylock, are they in fact Jewish covert ops, sonic strikes on gentile America? Our goal with this compilation is not to answer those questions with dogma or judgment, but to offer a soundtrack for considering them. The title we’ve chosen, ‘Twas The Night Before Hanukkah, is itself a reference to both the classic 1822 Clement Clarke Moore Christmas poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” and to a track from a 1962 comedy album by Stanley Adams and Sid Wayne. One holiday is not elevated over the other. Both are there for the celebrating, and as American Jews have done for well over a century, we invite you to sing along.

Musically yours,The Idelsohn SocietyRoger Bennett, Courtney Holt, David Katznelson, and Josh Kun

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A Note on Spelling Hanukkah

Hanukkah means rededication. Although it only has five letters in the

original Hebrew, there are at least 16 ways to spell it in English, including:

Channuka, Channukah, Chanuka, Chanukah, Chanuko, Hannuka, Hannukah, Hanuka, Hanukah,

Hanukkah, Kanukkah, Khannuka, Khannukah, Khanuka, Khanukah,

Khanukkah, and Xanuka. We have chosen to spell it Hanukkah, unless quoting an original source that uses

one of the other fifteen.

From the Archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York

14 Shirley Cohen, Chanukah Music Box, 1951

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Let’s Hear it for Those Mirthful MaccabeesJenna Weissman Joselit

Judaism 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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Hebrew school classroom. Whether commercially released or the handiwork of Harry Coopersmith, the musical director of the Jew-ish Education Committee of New York, American Jewish children were increasingly exposed to Jewish holiday music that was peppy, up-tempo, and lively, a world away from the “melodically alien” and doleful cadences of Eastern Europe. As Menorah Records explained in connection with its album, Chanukah Song Parade, the songs were

Gladys Gewirtz, Chanukah Song Parade, c. 1960s

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chosen “for the sheer fun they provide.” Thanks to its recordings, as well as those produced by Ktav, and to music anthologies and songbooks issued by the Jewish Education Committee and the Work-men’s Circle, Jewish history became something to sing, not just sigh, about: the woeful gave way to the wondrous. The newly musicalized Hanukkah lifted the spirits, animated the imagination and helped to frame the holiday as a giant caper in which candles not only flickered but danced, latkes leapt about and frolicked in hot oil and Maccabees marched gaily rather than soldiered on.

The artwork featured on Jewish recordings furthered the association between fun and festivity. While some album covers re-mained wedded to a rather static and traditional aesthetic in which an oversized candelabrum took up most of the picture plane, others featured a series of pint-sized characters romping freely through space or holding aloft a banner that read “Chanukah Party.” Still others drew on a contemporary palette of chartreuse and orange to enliven the ancient Hebrew characters that spelled out the letters of Hanukkah or to enhance a backdrop with symbols of the An-cient Near East. Elsewhere within the visual universe of 45 rpm singles, youngsters with eager beaver expressions on their faces whipped up a batch of latkes in the kitchen (oh, what fun!); a young girl, her wavy brown hair adorned with a cheery red checked bow that matched her dress, presided over a coterie of smiling candles, and Dad looked on contentedly in the living room as the members of his family exchanged presents.

Affability ruled the roost, sonically as well as ceremonially. The music that emanated from the family’s turntable was pleasing and accessible, the American Jewish equivalent of easy listening. Although cantorial renditions of the traditional standards such as “Ma-oz Tzur” (“Rock of Ages”) could still be found, women’s voices seemed to vibrate the loudest, especially when it came to the pro-liferation of brand new, English-language songs such as “Candle

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Dance,” “Let’s Make Latkes,” and “Chanukah Rhythms.” In gentle, lilting tones that verged on the conversational, Gladys Gewirtz and other female vocalists encouraged their young listeners to “skip and dance,” clap their hands, shout “hurray” and pretend to be a dreidel spinning madly around the room. At once interactive and instructional, this was music that energized its audience. What’s more, it demanded little of them. None too complicated or heavily orchestrated, its sweet, earnest melodies were picked out on a piano, an accordion or a guitar; now and then, a recorder and a hint of percussion were added to the mix to give the tunes a suitably Israeli feel.

As the repertoire of Hanukkah songs expanded, so, too, did the languages in which it was sung. The holiday’s battery of tunes catered to virtually every one of American Jewry’s linguistic prefer-ences. Little by little, cheerful ditties rendered in modern Hebrew such as “Chanukah, Chag Ya-feh” became increasingly available in the marketplace, where they introduced American Jewish young-sters to the patter of Israeli speech and to a smattering of simple Hebrew words and exclamations. Although outnumbered by English and Hebrew creations, Yiddish holiday songs held their own, especially among American Jews committed to yidishkayt and its cultural universe of afternoon schools and summer camps. Songs such as “Ikh Bin a Klayner Dreydl” not only nourished a connection to Yiddish among American born kinder but also kept the language contemporary, snappy and fresh.

Whatever form it assumed, Hanukkah became known as a decidedly “happy holiday,” where it was the “custom to give gifts and to hold merry family and community gatherings.” As malleable as a ball of clay, the week-long festival generated a sense of well-being that left its participants feeling good about themselves and Jewish tradition. “I love latkes,” declared one of the characters in the song, “Let’s Make Latkes.” “How about you?”

20 Barbra Streisand, A Christmas Album, 1967

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Silent Night by Greil Marcus

Phil 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;

Moishe Oysher, The Moishe Oysher Chanukah Party, c. 1940

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Gerald Marks: Hanukah This Michigan-born Tin Pan Alley composer, pianist and bandleader was best known for co-writing “That’s What I Want for Christmas” in 1936 and “All of Me,” which he wrote with Seymour Simons. That song was recorded by countless artists including Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Count Basie, Willie Nelson and Frank Sinatra. This track, “Hanukah”, was lesser known and from his later album The Musical Calendar: Stories of the Jewish Holidays in Song, released in the 1950s.

Woody Guthrie: Hanukkah DanceNo one croons “Clap your hands, Happy Hanukky” quite like Woody Guthrie. The legendary folk artist moved to New York in 1940, eventually settling in Coney Island with his second wife, Marjorie (Greenblatt) Mazia. His mother in law, Aliza Greenblatt, a respected Yiddish poet, introduced Guthrie to the Jewish community and the singer crafted a series of Jewish inflected songs on the themes of culture and history which he recorded for Folkways Records founder, Moses Asch, in the late 1940s.

Yossele Rosenblatt: Yevonim Cantor Yossele Rosenblatt, born in 1882, was a cantorial sensation from the age of twelve in his Ukrainian hometown of Biela Tserkov, where he developed his signature sobbing

sound. He was eventually lured to New York City when a Harlem synagogue made him the world’s highest paid cantor on a salary of over $5,000 a year. Rosenblatt’s ability to shift between warm baritone, bright tenor and a startling falsetto turned services into spec-tacles, and he was known to coax rounds of applause from congregants mid-prayer. His abilities led him first to Carnegie Hall and then to the vaudeville circuit. Talking movies killed his entertainment career and he passed away in poverty in 1933, his life a symbol of the conflict between the sacred and the pro-fane, the Jewish and the universal. His 1916 version of the traditional Hanukkah melody “Yevonim” (“The Greeks”) is a startling tes-tament to his incomparable vocal abilities.

Cantor David Putterman: Rock of AgesKnown in Hebrew as “Ma’oz Tzur,” this Hanukkah classic, a perennial children’s favorite, is usually recited immediately after the lighting of the menorah. The words were composed in the 12th or 13th century Europe, and have, over time, been set to a variety of melodies. The narrative recounts the multiple occasions God has delivered the Jewish people from their foes and the fifth verse covers the story of Hanukkah. This 1938 version, from the YIVO Archives, was performed by legend-ary Cantor David Putterman (1900-1979) who hailed from Antapol in Belorussia and found fame at the Park Avenue Synagogue in New York City.

The Songs of Hanukkah and Christmas

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Klezmer Conservatory Band: KlezzifiedFounded in 1980 by multi-instrumentalist and composer Hankus Netsky, the Klezmer Conservatory Band have taken the genre to a series of surprising venues, from A Prairie Home Companion to Showtime, propelling the fading tradition back to life in the process. This vivacious track is from 1989’s holiday celebration album, Oy Chanukah.

Gladys Gewirtz: A Chanukah Quiz Gladys Gewirtz was a pioneer in the field of Jewish children’s music. After attending Jul-liard and the Jewish Theological Seminary, she graduated from Columbia University and became music director for the first Camp Ra-mah in the Conservative Movement’s camp system. This track was included on the 1960s album Chanukah Song Parade released on Menorah Records.

Ella Jenkins: Dreidel, Dreidel, DreidelThe creative African-American performer, Ella Jenkins, began life as a “freelance rhythm specialist” to become known as “the first lady of the children’s folk song.” Born in St. Louis in 1924, Jenkins has travelled the world inspiring young audiences to ex-plore global music. Her career has spanned 32 albums and was capped by the award of a lifetime achievement Grammy in 2004. This spare version of prolific Jewish songster, Samuel Goldbarb’s 1920 standard, “Dreidel, Dreidel, Dreidel” appeared on her 1990 Smithsonian Folkways album, And One and Two, a disc targeted at pre-school and prima-ry children. Versions of “I’m Going to School Today” and “Marching to a Harmonica Melo-dy” co-exist with “Raisins and Almonds” and “My Little Blue Dreidel.”

Temple B’Nai Abraham of Essex County Children’s Choir: Svivon Sov Sov SovReleased on the prolific Tikva Records label in the 1950s, this version of the Hebrew chil-

dren’s classic was recorded in Livingston, New Jersey and features narration by Dr. Joachim Prinz, the German born rabbi who dedicated his energies to the Civil Rights movement. The song, which means “Dreidel, Spin, Spin, Spin” was written by Levin Kipnis, a prolific children’s author and poet who was born in the Ukrainian city of Ushomir in 1894, and arrived in Israel in 1913. Kipnis wrote over 800 stories and 600 poems in Hebrew and Yiddish, earning the Israel Prize in 1978.

Stanley Adams and Sid Wayne: ‘Twas the Night Before Chanukah The American actor and writer, Stanley Ad-ams, who appeared in over 35 movies and countless more television shows, was per-haps best known for playing Cyrano Jones in Star Trek: The Original Series. Sid Wayne was a songwriter who became musical director at CBS, creating countless soundtracks for day-time game shows. The liner notes of the duo’s 1962 album, Chanukah Carols, claims to be “a hilarious, legendary, revision of Jewish American humor,” in which “the listener will once again be able to recapture the beauty, warmth and laughter of a fast disappearing era, when Chicken Soup was King, and Potato ‘kugel’ was the staff of life!”

Flory Jagoda: Ocho Kandelikas Flory Jagoda is a Sephardic Jew born in Sara-jevo, Bosnia, who learned Balkan Jewish folk traditions and Ladino songs from her grand-mother. After moving to the United States af-ter the Second World War, she dedicated her life to preserving the generational memory of Ladino folklore and culture. The music has Spanish roots but the rhythms are Balkan, soaked up from the surrounding areas of Tur-key, Greece and Bosnia. The 1983 counting song “Ocho Kandelikas,” which means Eight Little Candles in Ladino, was written by Jag-oda in the style of the compositions she heard during her upbringing.

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Mickey Katz: Grandma’s DreidelMickey Katz is perhaps best known as the musical comedian behind rambunctious and hilarious Yinglish parodies of 1950s pop songs like “Duvid Crockett,” “Haim Afen Range,” and “Don’t Let the Schmaltz Get in Your Eyes.” But on occasion the deft Cleve-land clarinetist schooled in jazz and klezmer styles played it (somewhat) straight, most no-tably on his 1958 Capitol release Mickey Katz Plays Music For Weddings, Bar Mitzvahs, and Brisses. This languid, slow-stomp ode to “Grandma’s Dreidel,” one of his few Hanuk-kah themed compositions, penned by Katz and his pianist Nat Farber not only proves Katz’s clarinet chops but is a showcase for violinist Bennie Gill and the trumpet skills of Ziggy Elman and Mannie Klein.

Debbie Friedman: The Latke Song (live)Friedman was an American folk musician and composer who fused Jewish texts to con-temporary folk-inspired melodies. Known as “the Joan Baez of Jewish song,” her melodies became omnipresent in synagogues around the world. Before her untimely death in 2011, she recorded over 20 albums and sold half a million copies. Although much of her music was politically progressive and strongly femi-nist, “The Latke Song,” from her 1998 album, Miracles and Wonders, is happy being full of the giddy confection of ritual wonder.”

The Klezmatics: Hanukah TreePioneers of the Klezmer resurgence, the Klezmatics, formed in 1986, have released ten albums including the Grammy-winning, Wonder Wheel, in which the band set a dozen previously unrecorded Woody Guthrie lyr-ics to music. In 2006, Guthrie’s daughter Nora asked the band to repeat the process with a set of lost Hanukkah songs she had recovered eight years earlier. The album, Woody Guthrie’s Happy Joyous Hanukkah, was the result.

Shirley Cohen: Maccabee MarchShirley Cohen was a teacher supervising Jew-ish preschools in New York City who had a side-career as singer, recording three albums of Jewish holiday songs for children. Her 1951 album, Chanukah Music Box on Kinor Records, claimed to be “the first Chanukah record designed primarily as a participation record. It’s purpose is to encourage the ac-tive participation of young children through singing and dramatization. With a little en-couragement from you, your child will do all of the things he hears sung on the record. In this way, the holiday will become a real and enjoyable experience.”

Sol Zim: Mo’Oz TsurBorn of five generations of cantors, Sol Zim’s lung-busting artistry, interpretive skills and awe-inspiring productivity have left an indelible mark on the Jewish musi-cal world and provided it with some its most spectacular record covers. The liner notes of this 1979 Zimray Productions release, The Joy of Chanukah proclaim the disc to be “Sol Zim’s gift of music to the Festival of Lights.”

Don McLean: DreidelThe American singer-songwriter will forever be known for “American Pie” and “Vincent,” but this 1972 song, the loopy “Dreidel,” was his follow up single from that chart topping album. “Dreidel” made it to number 21 on the Billboard charts. The jaunty composition be-lies the dark tinged lyrics in which McLean examines the confusion of modern living, which, he complains, leaves him feeling like “a spinning top or a dreidel.” Critic Robert Christgau was damning of the tune writing, “more dreck from your unfriendly doomsay-ing hitmaker. Question: Why does he say ‘I feel like a spinnin’ top or a dreidel’ without explaining how a dreidel differs from a spin-ning top?”

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Jeremiah Lockwood, Ethan Miller, and Luther Dickinson: Dreidel Jeremiah Lockwood is one of the most interesting and inspiring talents of this generation, having been both mentored on guitar by bluesman Carolina Slim and deeply inspired by his grandfather, can-ter Jacob Koningsberg. As leader of Sway Machinery and player in Balkan Beat Box, Lockwood has created truly unique, otherworldly, Jewish sounds. When the Idelsohn Society produced a Hanukkah event at our Tikva Records pop-up store in 2011- the first of its kind- Lockwood was paired with Southern slide guitar virtuoso Luther Dickinson, of the North Mississippi All-Stars and The Black Crowes, and Ethan Miller, lead singer of The Howlin Rain and Comets On Fire. The trio combined the Jewish soul of Lockwood, the Southern gris-gris of Dickinson and the New Weird American sounds of Miller and created a signature version of Dreidel Dreidel that is truly both Jewish and American, link-ing musically the Maccabees to the Mardi Gras Indians. Dreidel, dreidel…iko iko.

Lou Reed: Holiday I.D.When Lou Reed sings about Christmas, the results are not typically mirthful. There was Christmas’ appearance in the sleepless solitude and hospital visits of “All Through The Night,” and on “Xmas in February,” the tree was full of body bags and unemployment left from the Vietnam War. So it’s nice to hear him as warm as a belly full of eggnog on this brief holiday greeting that appeared on the 1988 War-ner Brothers promotional album, Winter Warnerland.

The Ramones: Merry Christmas (I Don’t Wanna Fight Tonight)The first time Joey Ramone sings the words “Merry Christmas” there’s a growl in his voice, like it’s a threat, not a pledge of holiday cheer. But the more he sings it, the more we hear his ache, the more it becomes closer to a passive aggressive apology, an earnest hope that the bickering and heart breaking can be put on hold long enough for the Christmas presents to be opened. Recorded for The Ramones’ 1989 album Brain Drain, the song shows that the Jewish kid born as Jeffry Ross Hyman in Forest Hills, Queens (whose tomb-stone bears both a Star of David and a music note) knew a thing or two about the domes-tic blow-ups that Christmas is another word for. “Where is Santa?” Ramone croaks, “At his sleigh? Tell me why is it always this way? Where is Rudolph? Where is Blitzen, baby?” The band’s video for the song, which also fea-tures a Rabbi as a Christmas Eve guest, offers one answer: Santa is in the bathroom, puking into a toilet bowl.

Mel Tormé: The Christmas SongThe music to the Christmas song, the song that’s as close to being a Christmas sweater that a song can get, was written in 1944 by Mel Tormé, the Chicago son of Russian Jewish im-migrants (Bob Wells was responsible for the roasting chestnuts and the nose nipped by frost). It’s the most performed Christmas song of all time and was first recorded in 1946 by the Nat King Cole Trio, who went on to record it three more times. Tormé himself recorded it four times (this version from 1955), includ-ing an extra wintry version that appeared on Christmas Songs, his sole Christmas album that he waited until 1992 to record.

Bob Dylan: Little Drummer BoyIt’s not surprising that Bob Dylan recorded a Christmas album. What’s surprising is that it took him so long. Dylan’s relationship to

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his Jewishness has always been in flux — a small-town bar mitzvah boy, a born again Christian, an observant pilgrim at the Wailing Wall, a surprise star of a Chabad telethon — but his 2009 Christmas in the Heart didn’t come off as commentary, cri-tique, or satire. It was an earnest yuletide ode to the carolers and church bells he grew up hearing as a kid in Minnesota, full of songs that, as Dylan has said, were “part of my life, just like folk songs.”

Theo Bikel: Sweetest Dreams Be ThineIn the early days of Elektra Records, the legendary label was often known as “the House that Theo Built.” On his 18th album for Elektra, 1967’s Songs of the Earth, the polyglot Jewish folksinger, activist, actor, and co-founder of the Newport Folk Festival, teamed up with New York women’s choral group The Pennywhistlers. Bikel called their approach to Eastern European vocal music “the closest to the real thing in authenticity in the United States.” Bikel takes the lead on their harpsichord and flute-fluttered ver-sion of Jim Friedman’s “Sweetest Dreams Be Thine,” a Christmas favorite praising “the new-born king,” delivered in the bilingual Hebrew and English mix that Bikel had be-come famous for.

Richard Tucker: O Little Town of BethlehemThe greatest archive of 1960s and 70s Christ-mas pop songs just might lie somewhere in file cabinets of the Goodyear Tire company. From 1967 to 1977, Goodyear (with help from Columbia Records) released 17 albums of Christmas songs that featured everyone from Barbra Streisand and Mahalia Jackson to John Davidson and the New York Philhar-monic. The fifth installment, which sold for just a dollar in Goodyear stores, was issued in 1965 and included this Richard Tucker rendition of the 19th century carol that put Jesus’ hometown in the pop spotlight. Tucker

began his career as a cantor (most notably at the Brooklyn Jewish Center) but like so many of his peers he straddled the synagogue with the concert hall. By 1965, he was a confirmed opera crossover voice, as at home singing Puccini as he was “Kol Nidre” and, well, Christmas songs for a tire company.

Ray Brenner and Barry E. Blitzer et al: The ProblemJews celebrating Christmas may be no joke, but it was turned into serious comic fodder on the 1967 album Have a Jewish Christmas…?, which put a Frosty the Snow-man Star of David on its cover. Written by Ray Brenner and Barry E. Blitzer and recorded “live in Hollywood” with a cast of TV and Hollywood regulars (Lennie Weinrib, Benny Rubin, Christine Nelson, among them) the series of vignettes cov-ered everything from Christmas cards to Christmas machers but never strayed from the (real) Jewish question: “If Santa Claus is true, his joy is fun for everyone, but what’s a Jew to do?”

Dinah Shore: The Twelve Days of ChristmasAt the end of 1941, a Tennessee born daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants hosted an episode of her own national NBC radio show that she titled “A Merry American Christmas.” It began with her singing a song of the same name that de-clared “it’s Christmas time in the land of liberty.” Dinah Shore was a frequent am-bassador of Christmas pop, whether it was her recordings of “The Merry Christmas Polka” and “We Need a Little Christmas” or the mistletoe hit parade she covered on her 1954 Chevrolet Christmas Show. Shore could swing when she wanted to but for the 1965 Goodyear LP, she delivered a defer-ential, if often stiff as a turtleneck, version of this famous piece of look-what-I-got-for-Christmas braggadocio.

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Benny Goodman: Santa Claus Came in the SpringIn 1955, Benny Goodman performed “Jingle Bells” on a national NBC radio broadcast. That same year, the swing king clarinet-ist who took his first lessons at a Chicago synagogue recorded this version of Johnny Mercer’s “Santa Claus Came in the Spring” as a single for the Bluebird label. The song was written for the RKO film To Beat The Band and was an early example of just how secularized Christmas had already become in the American pop vernacular. Far from a religious holiday, Christmas was climate and folklore- snow, sleigh bells, and reindeer, not holy nativity. “Santa Claus came when the skies were blue,” Joe Harris sings over Good-man’s nimble big band, “And now it’s Christ-mas ev’ry day.” The son of God was no com-petition for Santa.

Larry Harlow: El Dia de la NavidadThis is the closest that the Brooklyn-born pia-nist, salsa great, and Santeria devotee Larry Harlow (the Lawrence Ira Kahn who became known as “El Judio Maravilloso”) ever came to recording a Christmas song. Featuring leg-endary Puerto Rican salsa singer Cheo Feli-ciano on vocals, “El Dia de la Navidad” was tucked into the opening scenes of Hommy, a historic attempt by Harlow and his Fania re-cords colleagues to turn The Who’s Tommy into the first-ever salsa opera. In the song, the deaf, dumb, and blind kid who plays a mean conga faces early rejection from neighbor-hood kids on Christmas day. The opera was performed live at Carnegie Hall in 1973 and recorded later that year.

Danny Kaye: O Come All Ye FaithfulIn 1954, Danny Kaye starred alongside Bing Crosby in White Christmas, the second fea-ture film built around Irving Berlin’s hit song (Holiday Inn was the first). Crosby sang it in White Christmas, but just over ten years

later, Kaye—born to Ukrainian immigrants in Brooklyn as David Kaminsky—had grown into Christmas pop’s leading court jester, respon-sible for both the perky “A Merry Christmas at Grandmother’s House (Over the River and Through the Woods)” and the lisp-tacular “All I Want For Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth,” both duets with The Andrews Sisters. You could hear his teenage Catskills training on both of those numbers, but for his Goodyear take on this evergreen 13th century hymn, Kaye reigned in his elasticity and played it close to the sacred vest.

Eddie Cantor: The Only Thing I Want For ChristmasRecorded in 1939, this socially-conscious WWII Christmas ode performed by Broad-way, radio, and film star Eddie Cantor turns the holiday’s consumer blitz on its head. He wants less, not more. “There’s a lot of unhap-piness in the world today,” Cantor says at one point, interrupting the coos of his back-up singers, “but we still have peace over here. In this country, we really have Christmas 365 days each year.” The song was written by Vick Knight, Johnny Lange, and Lew Porter. Can-tor-- born Edward Israel Iskowitz to Russian-Jewish immigrants in New York-- delivers its message with a subtlety and restraint he’s not usually known for: the gifts that matter most (family, friends, “loving arms”) don’t come wrapped in a ribbon and bow.

Sammy Davis Jr.: It’s Christmas All Over the WorldBroadway writer Hugh Martin penned this rarely recorded ode to Christmas interna-tionalism (the discography of his “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” however is a mile long). Sammy Davis Jr. was one of the few to take it on, maybe because its poly-glot jet setting fit easily within his winking Rat Pack sensibility. After he converted to Judaism in the late 1950s (inspired by both

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a car accident and a chat with Eddie Cantor), Davis told Ebony Magazine, “I became a Jew because I was ready and willing to under-stand the plight of a people who fought for thousands of years for a homeland, giving their lives and bodies, and finally gaining that homeland.” Davis knew that becoming a Jew also meant recording Christmas songs. He was named B’Nai Brith’s Man of the Year the very same year he recorded “It’s Christ-mas Time All Over the World.”

The Ames Brothers: I Got a Cold for ChristmasThe more familiar Three Stooges version of this beloved slice of yuletide novelty played it, as you would expect, for obvious laughs (sing-ing with a plugged-up nose, for example). The more staid, serious 1957 version by the four Ukrainian Jews from Massachusetts better known as The Ames Brothers, included on their popular There’ll Always Be A Christmas LP, almost turned it into a blues. Though they keep their vocal arrangements locked in the vanilla croons that made them 1950s princes of polite pop, there’s a creeping sadness beneath the sheen. When they sing this line straight, “All the other girls and boys, ran downstairs to get their toys, but all I did was sneeze and sniff, and use my Christmas handkerchief,” it’s hard not to feel their pain.

Eddie Fisher: Christmas Eve in My HometownBetween 1950 and 1956, Eddie Fisher, another Russian-Jewish immigrant son turned nation-al teen idol, had 35 songs on the Top 40 charts. This one-off, string-swept slice of Main Street, USA holiday nostalgia — originally written by two former NBC pageboys Stan Zabka and Don Upton — never got that far, but it didn’t matter. Fisher had already released the 10” al-bum Christmas With Eddie Fisher, and would later record the full-length Mary Christmas in 1965, the same year he issued the first com-

mercial recording of the Fiddler on the Roof shtetl showstopper, “Sunrise, Sunset.”

Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass: Jingle BellsOn the first ten mega-selling Tijuana Brass albums, Jewish Los Angeleno trumpeter Herb Alpert had mostly posed as either a bullfighter or a mariachi (or in one case, as Beethoven), but it wasn’t until 1968’s Christ-mas Album that he traded the sombreros and charro pants for a Santa Claus hat and a fake beard. The album included a take on the classic Mexican birthday sing-a-long “Las Mañanitas,” but it was mostly loaded with Anglo holiday classics like “Jingle Bells,” all delivered in the “south of the border,” marim-bas-and-trumpets trappings that by then the Tijuana Brass had become synonymous with. Alpert’s version makes sure that we keep mis-taking a 19th century song originally written for Thanksgiving for the ultimate soundtrack to a Christmas sleigh ride.

Mitch Miller: White ChristmasMitch Miller didn’t include Irving Berlin’s transformation of the birth of Christ into a song about snow and sleigh bells (for a movie about army buddies) on his first Christmas album, Christmas Sing-Along with Mitch. But it did show up on his second, the double album Holiday Sing Along With Mitch, which featured the ever-goateed Miller doing a poor Santa impression on its cover. Don’t let the title fool you: by “holiday,” Miller meant rein-deers and boughs of holly. He meant Christ-mas, not Hanukkah. Like Berlin, Miller was of Russian-Jewish stock, the son of a seamstress and an ironworker but instead of songwriting, Miller became a performer (his much-paro-died sing-a-longs on national TV were mass media staples) and became a music industry titan at Columbia Records, where he was one of the most influential A&R men in the history of 20th century American popular music.

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Mastered by: Gary Hobish at A. Hammer Mastering, San FranciscoDesigned by: Studio Ours Produced by: The Idelsohn Society: Roger Bennett, Dana Ferine, Courtney Holt, David Katznelson, and Josh KunCover photo: Courtesy of Maya Benton. Photograph by Ralph Walters for the Chicago Sun-Times, dated December 25, 1959. Copyright clearance and licencing by Brooke Wentz, The Rights Workshop

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.

Der Groyser Kundes, 1921. Reb Hanukah carrying a bag of Hanukah gelt. Santa carrying a bag of Christmas presents. Caption below: “Both at once: ‘Go away. It’s my week.’” From the Archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York

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The Idelsohn Society for Musical Preserva-tion is an all-volunteer-run organization. We are a core team from the music industry and academia who passionately believe Jewish history is best told by the music we have loved and lost. In order to incite a new conversation about the present, we must begin by listening anew to the past. We do this in a number of ways: by re-releasing lost Jewish classic albums and the 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 exhibits that showcase the stories behind the music; and creating concert showcases which bring our 80- and 90-year-old performers back onstage to be re-appreciated by the young audiences they deserve. All of this work is driven by the passion and energies of our volunteer supporters and donors across the country, who share the belief that music creates conversations otherwise impossible in daily life. The Idelsohn Society would love to hear any memories you have of any of our other artists. Be in touch at www.idelsohnsociety.com and see our other albums and gift cards at www.idelsohnsociety.com. Follow us on Twitter@idelsohnsociety.

The Idelsohn Society is helmed by Roger Bennett, Dana Ferine, Courtney Holt, David Katznelson and Josh Kun, and supported by the thousands of individuals who have mailed in their vinyl records, shared their stories, and attended our events. The Idelsohn Society is a 501c3 nonprofit dependent on the support of those who believe in our mission. Make a donation at www.idelsohnsociety.com.

We are grateful to the following organizations for their critical support: The Casden Institute for the Study of the Jewish Role in American Life Contemporary Jewish Museum Jewish New Media Innovation FundJim Joseph FoundationThe Koret Foundation Kroll Family Foundation Nextbook/Tabletmag.com Reboot Richard and Rhoda Goldman FundRighteous Persons Foundation San Francisco Jewish Community Federation Skirball Cultural CenterThe Taube Foundation for Jewish Life and Culture

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Various ArtistsSongs for the Jewish-American Jet Set: The Tikva Records Story 1950-1973This album is a curated collection of the best of Tikva Records, the flagship inde-pendent Jewish record label of 20th century America. Featuring tracks from Leo Fuld, Leo Fuchs, Martha Schlamme, Marty Levitt, and many others. RSR 019

Various ArtistsBlack Sabbath: The Secret Musical History of Black-Jewish RelationsA groundbreaking fifteen-track compila-tion of black artists covering Jewish songs, exploring the myriad ways that Jews and African-Americans have coalesced and clashed, struggled against each other, and struggled alongside each other. Featuring tracks from Nina Simone, Jimmy Scott, Billie Holiday, Johnny Mathis, and others. RSR 018 Juan Calle and His Latin LantzmenMazeltov Mis AmigosLatin legends Ray Barretto, Charlie Palmieri and Clark Terry walk into a recording studio and cut this iconic album resounding Jewish classics into Latin time. RSR 017

CHECK OUT OUR OTHER CLASSICS AVAILABLE AT WWW.IDELSOHNSOCIETY.COM:

The Barry SistersOur WaySwinging songs such as “Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head” and “My Way” trans-lated and improved into perky Yiddish by this legendary sister act. RSR 008 Various ArtistsJewfaceRemastered from wax cylinders, giants of vaudeville, including Irving Berlin, show-case lost classics, featuring “When Mose with His Nose Leads the Band”. RSR 004 Fred KatzFolk Songs for Far Out FolkThe long-coveted 1959 jazz classic — back by popular demand. RSR 007

Rocking Idelsohn CardsFor every occasion, an Idelsohn card! These cards showcase some of our favorite album covers and celebrate events both major and minor, from bar mitzvahs and weddings to good old-fashioned happiness. And check our line of Hanukkah cards featuring some of the album covers in this book.

35Arthur Gilbert and Oscar Tarcov, Your Neighbor Celebrates, 1957

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Gerald Marks: Hanukah Woody Guthrie: Hanukkah Dance

Cantor Yossele Rosenblatt: Yevonim Cantor David Putterman: Rock of Ages

Klezmer Conservatory Band: KlezzifiedGladys Gewirtz: A Chanukah Quiz

Ella Jenkins: Dreidel, Dreidel, DreidelTemple B’Nai Abraham of Essex County Children’s Choir: Svivon Sov Sov Sov

Stanley Adams and Sid Wayne: ‘Twas the Night Before Chanukah Flory Jagoda: Ocho Kandelikas

Mickey Katz: Grandma’s DreidelDebbie Friedman: The Latke Song

The Klezmatics: Hanukah TreeShirley Cohen: Maccabee March

Sol Zim: Mo’Oz TsurDon McLean: Dreidel

Jeremiah Lockwood, Ethan Miller, and Luther Dickinson: Dreidel

Lou Reed: Holiday I.D.The Ramones: Merry Christmas (I Don’t Wanna Fight Tonight)

Mel Tormé: The Christmas SongBob Dylan: Little Drummer Boy

Theo Bikel: Sweetest Dreams Be ThineRichard Tucker: O Little Town of Bethlehem

Ray Brenner and Barry E. Blitzer: The Problem Dinah Shore: The Twelve Days of Christmas

Benny Goodman: Santa Claus Came in the SpringLarry Harlow: El Dia de la NavidadDanny Kaye: O Come All Ye Faithful

Eddie Cantor: The Only Thing I Want For ChristmasSammy Davis Jr.: It’s Christmas All Over the World

The Ames Brothers: I Got a Cold for ChristmasEddie Fisher: Christmas Eve in My Hometown

Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass: Jingle BellsMitch Miller: White Christmas

www.idelsohnsociety.com© Copyright 2012 Idelsohn Society for Musical Preservation