https://www.thefp.com/p/eli-lake-jews-wrote-your-favorite-christmas-songs-irving-berlin
Click here for Eli Lake's artilce on why Jews wrote your favorite Christmas Songs," a portion of which follows. On the left, Frank Loessr, who wrote "Baby, It's Cold Outside."
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What’s most surprising, however, is that the Americans who wrote those two Christmas standards ["Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow" and "The Christmas Song" that begins "Chestnuts tosstong on an open fire"]—and most of the other seasonal classics—were, like Jesus himself, Jews.
They were often children of parents who fled Russia and elsewhere in Eastern Europe during the great wave of immigration between 1880 and 1920. There’s Sammy Cahn, who wrote “Let It Snow.” The son of Galician Jewish immigrants, Cahn rose to become Sinatra’s favorite lyricist. There’s also Mel Tormé, the singer and songwriter who, with Bob Wells, penned “The Christmas Song,” more commonly known as “Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire.” His father, William Torma, a Jewish cantor, emigrated from Belarus in the early 20th century. Frank Loesser, a titan of Broadway and Hollywood musicals who composed the slightly naughty “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” was born into a middle-class Jewish family. His father left Germany in the 1890s to avoid serving in the Kaiser’s military.
Johnny Marks gave us “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” “A Holly Jolly Christmas,” and “Rockin’ Around The Christmas Tree,” a yuletide bubblegum favorite introduced in the 1950s by Brenda Lee. Marks, too, was one of the chosen ones. “He was Jewish and didn’t even believe in Christmas,” Lee told Billboard Magazine years later. “And all that would come out of him was Christmas music!”
“All everyone’s favorite Christmas songs were written by Jews, and this is a fact,” David Lehman, a poet and editor and the author of A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs, told me. “The most famous example being “White Christmas” by Irving Berlin.”