Each holiday season in the U.S., Christmas cheer fills shopping centers and radio airwaves like an avalanche of fake snow. Growing up Jewish in this environment, one of my few respites from the stampede of Santas was Adam Sandler’s goofy ditty “The Chanukah Song.” His lyrics don’t deal so much with the cliched trappings of Hanukkah—menorahs, chocolate gelt, dreidels, the fist-size sugar-caked jelly doughnuts called sufganiyot—as with who might be celebrating it. It was that list of fellow Jews, whether yoked together puckishly (“Paul Newman’s half Jewish, Goldie Hawn’s half too / Put them together, what a fine-lookin’ Jew”) or crammed awkwardly into lines too short for their syllables (“The owner of the Seattle Supersonicahs / Celebrates Hanukkah”), that helped me feel less strange about the absence of a fir tree hung with glass balls in my living room.
Snider, 53, moved to Chicago from the Boston area in 1979 to pursue a degree in composition at Northwestern. After graduating in 1983, he worked odd jobs for several years, including a few with a yuletide bent—recording music for holiday-season commercials, for instance, and performing at Christmas parties. He was struck by the dramatic difference between the warm-and-fuzzy Christmas songs he played and the more traditional Hebrew music he’d heard as a kid during Hanukkah. “We would go to temple and it would be all dark—all these minor keys and kind of depressing,” he says. In 1989, when Snider was 28, he and his manager Craig Springer decided to try to make a different kind of Hanukkah song. “I thought it would be fun to take a stab at having a Hanukkah song that was fun and upbeat and had some of the sensibility of some of the fun Christmas music that’s out there,” Snider says.
These days it seems like there are more Jewish MCs than ever: just off the top of my head, I can name former chef and 90s throwback Action Bronson, orthodox convert Nissim, and former battle rapper Soul Khan. Jews on the Chicago scene include DJ RTC, aka Alex Fruchter, who helps run the killer indie label Closed Sessions; Louder Than a Bomb founder and Young Chicago Authors artistic director Kevin Coval, who’s mentored many fierce young Chicago MCs; and Netherfriends, aka Shawn Rosenblatt, who’s collaborated with loads of local rappers. Serengeti is half Jewish, though lately he’s recorded so much material as his fiftysomething blue-collar alter ego Kenny Dennis that it’s hard to remember his real name is David Cohn.
