From Powerline<\/a>, Garrison Keillor’s latest column:<\/p>\n Unitarians listen to the Inner Voice and so they have no creed that they all stand up and recite in unison, and that’s their perfect right, but it is wrong, wrong, wrong to rewrite “Silent Night.” If you don’t believe Jesus was God, OK, go write your own damn “Silent Night” and leave ours alone. This is spiritual piracy and cultural elitism, and we Christians have stood for it long enough. And all those lousy holiday songs by Jewish guys that trash up the malls every year, Rudolph and the chestnuts and the rest of that dreck. Did one of our guys write “Grab your loafers, come along if you wanna, and we’ll blow that shofar for Rosh Hashanah”? No, we didn’t.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n Christmas is a Christian holiday – if you’re not in the club, then buzz off. Celebrate Yule instead or dance around in druid robes for the solstice. Go light a big log, go wassailing and falalaing until you fall down, eat figgy pudding until you puke, but don’t mess with the Messiah.\u00a0 (Emphasis added, but hardly needed – ed.<\/em>)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n I sympathize with Keillor\u2019s disdain for the secularization of Christmas.\u00a0 But White Christmas, The Christmas Song, <\/em>and Rudolph<\/em> are harmless enough.\u00a0 I might as well complain about Sunrise, Sunset <\/em>being played at Orthodox weddings.<\/p>\n But what on earth does the secularization of Christmas have to do with the religion of the songwriters?<\/em> Nothing.\u00a0 Mel Torme, Johnny Marks, and Irving Berlin were part of a wave of Jewish popular songwriting in the last century.\u00a0 But there were plenty on Christians writing secular Christmas music, amd the Christians who recorded all these songs didn\u2019t seem to mind.<\/p>\n I used to like Garrison Keillor.\u00a0 He loved, recreated, and advanced the art form of radio.\u00a0 I listened to Prairie Home Companion<\/em> through college and until he retired from it.\u00a0 He was largely single-handedly responsible for the revival of storytelling in this country. The audio version of WLT, a Radio Love Story<\/em> was great company on long road trips.\u00a0 Some of his work will live forever, and deserves to.<\/p>\n But he has long since traded his wistful, sweet notalgia for a poisonous bitterness driven by a country he can no longer understand, and spiced with a political nastiness all too common on the left.<\/p>\n Unlike if a conservative had said these things, there\u2019s no likely recourse here.\u00a0 Good luck getting the ADL to condemn these comments, and don\u2019t hold your breath waiting for the many Jews (or the management) at NPR to ask for a \u201cclarification\u201d of his remarks.<\/p>\n This casual enabling will have long-term consequences for Jews, none of them good.\u00a0 One hesitates to discern a pattern based on two data points, but this is the second time in a week that liberals have gratuitously brought up the Jewishness of someone whose activities they didn\u2019t approve of.\u00a0 Jonathan Chait of The New Republic <\/em>and Lee Siegel of The Daily Beast<\/em> both attributed Joe Lieberman\u2019s opposition to the health care bill to his Orthodoxy, without a shred of evidence.\u00a0 (In Siegel\u2019s case, religion was less a vehicle for an attack on Lieberman than Lieberman was a vehicle for an attack on Orthodoxy.)<\/p>\n If Jews are unable to take certain political positions, indeed engage in certain common cultural activities without having their Jewishness attacked, it represents a watershed change in the American political culture, one that is not “progressive” in any positive sense, but “regressive,” back to the culture of Europe that so many of our ancestors fled.\u00a0 These attacks are coming from the Left, and it’s up to the Left to clean its own house, although I suspect they consider this a feature more than a bug.<\/p>\n And just in case Keillor happens to be visiting any public space or listening to any music radio in the next few days, I wouldn\u2019t want him to enjoy a Christmas song under the delusion that it wasn\u2019t composed by Jews.\u00a0 So here\u2019s a list<\/a>:<\/p>\n Merry Christmas, and happy listening, Garrison!\n
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