Jewish Stereo Types

Today I have already received, by actual count, 347 Black Friday Sales emails. That does not count the Pre-Black Friday Sales emails I have received during the past week. That is just this morning. So there was really only one choice for opening up my season of Holiday-Songs-Written-by-Jews: "The Christmas Can-Can," lyrics and arrangement by Walter Chase, music (mostly) by Jacques Offenbach, sung by Straight No Chaser: Video posted by Today in Nashville *** In the past, I have noted that while there was nothing definitive available about the Jewishness or lack thereof of the arranger, Walter Chase. Well, I now have a definitive answer: No. He is not. As he says: In college, the ‘dreidel guy’ was a guy named Mike Itkoff, a nice Jewish boy from Columbus, OH. He was hysterical doing it. When the group re-formed back in 2008, Mike did the group for a year and then he left, and left a void of the ‘dreidel guy’ and that was passed down to me. I’ve been doing it ever sinc...

We've had this song before , but how could I resist? I mean, Black Friday was more than a week ago and my inbox is still overflowing with "BUY THIS HERE NOW!!!" emails, so... Here's "The Christmas Can-Can (Animated Version)," lyrics and arrangement by Walter Chase, music (mostly) by Jacques Offenbach, sung by Straight No Chaser: Video posted by Straight No Chaser *** Still nothing definitive about Walter Chase (although, as I said last year , it seems more likely than not that he is Jewish. As for the melody, I know that ( the Jewish ) Offenbach titled it "Infernal Galop" in his first full-length operetta, Orpheus in the Underworld , but what I see when I hear that music is neither Video posted by medici.tv (which makes me feel like I really must go see the full thing) nor Video posted by Petittwo , from the 1952 film Moulin Rouge but Video posted by ShopRiteStores What can I say? We are all products of our childhoods. Although j...

Welp, I just flipped my wall calendar (I'm old-fashioned that way) over to December, which means it must be time for my parade of Jewish winter-holiday-season music. Chanukah songs, yes, and an even larger number of Christmas/generalized-winter-holiday-season songs written by Jews. (And should I run across some Kwanza songs written by Jews, I will very definitely include them!) I've started with this song for the past several years because it makes such a nice segue from Black Friday and Cyber Monday, especially since based on my email inbox, both Black Friday and Cyber Monday have continued just-all-week-long. The song? "The Christmas Can-Can," music by Jacques Offenbach (with a judicious amount of mash-up), lyrics and arrangement by Walter Chase, sung by Straight No Chaser : Video by Straight No Chaser As noted above, Walter Chase ( originally Walter Shilanskas ) wrote the lyrics and arranged the piece. Is he Jewish? Well, in his band member bio , Chase list...