Dennis Prager, Assimilation, And Deciding To Feel Excluded
12/24/2013
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Dennis Pragers Red Kettle Team Dennis Prager, who is Jewish, has a column titled Most Jews Wish You a Merry Christmas on RealClearPolitics [December 24, 2013] wishing for peace in the War on Christmas:
It doesn't matter with which religion or ethnic group you identify; Christmas in America is as American as the proverbial apple pie. That is why some of the most famous and beloved Christmas songs were written by guess who? Jews.

"White Christmas" was written by Irving Berlin (birth name: Israel Isidore Baline).

"Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer" — Johnny Marks.

"Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!" — composed by Jule Styne, lyrics by Sammy Cahn.

"Silver Bells" — by Jay Livingston (Jacob Harold Levison) and Ray Evans (Raymond Bernard Evans).

"The Christmas Song (Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire)" — Mel Torme and Robert Wells (Robert Levinson), both Jews.

"Sleigh Ride" — lyrics by Mitchell Parish (Michael Hyman Pashelinsky).

There are many others as well.

The notion that non-Christians are excluded is absurd.

Americans who feel "excluded" are not excluded. They have decided to feel excluded. Which is, of course, entirely their right to do; no one forces anyone to celebrate any American holiday. But attempts to remove Christmas from the public sphere are destructive to our society.

Steve Sailer did a column about this in 2005[Christmas, Jews, De-Assimilation And Decline] in which he examined
"a fairly recent ASCAP list of the most played Christmas pop tunes, it appears to me that of the top ten songs, Jews wrote five and co-wrote two more. Out of the top 25 songs, Jews were involved with at least 11 and possibly more. ...The Christmas songs that Jews wrote seldom involved religion, and some were simply ditties about cold weather, but nobody thought to label them generic "Holiday" tunes."
The problem is that that was the older generation—Dennis Prager is 65, and if "Let it Snow" author Sammy Cahn were still alive he'd be 100—and the younger generation has different views.

Sailer, in 2005, wrote

But this long, amiable tradition of Jews helping to enliven a Christian feast day seems, sadly, to be drawing to an end. American Jews, those exemplars of successful assimilation now seem to be de-assimilating emotionally, becoming increasingly resentful, at this late date, of their fellow Americans for celebrating Christmas.
The different views are very much on display implicitly in the 2003 movie Bad Santa, and explicitly in Adam Chandler’s December 17 article in the Jewish webzine Tablet:All-Star Team of Jews Defiles Christmas in Billy Bob Thornton’s ‘Bad Santa’.

Chandler [Twitter] thinks that the Christophobic attitude of the Coen Brothers' Bad Santa is a good thing. People of Chandler's generation won't sponsor the Salvation Army's Red Kettle campaign on his website the way Prager does. They're more likely to call the ACLU to complain about the Salvation Army.

So three cheers for Dennis Prager, but he's only one man.

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