Filmmaker Larry Weinstein is not the first to pay tribute to Jewish composers of popular Christmas songs, but his Dreaming of a Jewish Christmas, recently broadcast on PBS, may be the most disappointing and even obnoxious of such efforts. A simple internet search will yield articles on the subject, including an excellent 2014 piece by Nate Bloom showing that Jewish song-writers did not start the genre, but wrote about half of all leading pop Christmas tunes.

At first, it seems that Weinstein wants to convince us that popular Christmas songs are a kind of comeuppance to the Gentiles for making Jews feel excluded at Christmastime. His film is dedicated to his childhood Christmas activities and those, he suggests, of many Jews -- namely, visiting the movie theaters and Chinese restaurants, the only establishments open on Christmas back then. The film’s running sub-drama is clever in an overstated way. A Jewish family with adorable and expressive children is welcomed into a Chinese restaurant by waiters singing “Winter Wonderland” and other hit melodies. Ostensibly, these popular Christmas songs are sung in a way that the Young Weinstein would have imagined had he known as a child that they were written by Jews.

For affirmation of his childhood memories and current obsession, Weinstein cuts to Elena Kagan’s Congressional interview for her Supreme Court seat.  When asked, “Where were you on Christmas day?” she replied: “You know, like all Jews, I was probably at a Chinese restaurant.”  Jackie Mason gets to speculate at the outset that Jews probably wrote Christmas songs to cash in on them. (Later he actually compares writing Christmas songs to writing about cows.)  But another “pundit” explains that song writing was one of the few fields open to Jews, so it was inevitable that they would deal with various themes.

Robert Harris, a journalist, regards these song writers as “merging” the “outside” with the “inside” at a time when Jewish immigrants were very much on the outside, and felt like outsiders in their insides. Harris tears up while speculating that Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer was a link to his parents and grandparents and to his own treatment as an outsider as a child. But in the end Rudolph was accepted without having to get a nose job. “We don’t want to not be Jewish, but we don’t want to be alone.”

Weinstein finds a rabbi who says that Christmas is probably the favorite holiday of most Jews -- because they can express their Jewish identity more than on any other day of the year! He also finds a priest who testifies that he doesn’t mind the commercial aspects of Christmas because as a young man he used to work as a store Santa Claus. This priest puts a lot of stock in “acknowledge[ing] other people with gifts” in order to “make them happy.”

The one thing that Weinstein does not do here is to research the lives and writings of these song writers or to interview family members or associates in some detail regarding motivations and feelings and associations behind the songs. True, he does allow Mel Torme’s son to describe how his dad sat down during a heat wave to write a Christmas song after his partner, attempting to think cool thoughts, jotted down notes about Boston winters with “chestnuts roasting.” But was it their intention to write a Christmas song? Or did they write a winter song just to cool off?

That Weinstein neither asks nor pursues these questions reveals just how little even some basic research mattered to him for this feature. Indeed, as oral history or as historical background or even as psychological insight into the song writers themselves, this film is junk.  But, then again, PBS has trafficked in different genres of junk, including stylized self-help infomercials, for many years, justifying such productions as entertainment that prods thinking and self-analysis.

It might be that PBS, like Weinstein, was interested in featuring a cast of diverse backgrounds and singing talents, and to focus on a handful of show business and academic pundits to share their own quirky insights into the songs and into Jewish responses to Christmas.

Much is made of Mel Torme’s handing over his song to Nat King Cole in order to promote diversity. (Not because Nat King Cole was one of the leading singers of the time?)  We are told that the purpose of these songs was to forge a “national unity.” But shouldn’t PBS as an educational network, supported with Federal funds, insist on documented evidence of such theories?

If there is any thesis in the meandering and discombobulated interviews, narrative and variety shows of this film, it is that the Jewish writers of Christmas songs, beginning with Irving Berlin and his “White Christmas” (1941), fashioned a “mythic golden past that truly never existed anywhere but in the imagination of a Jew from Russia inventing a secular Christmas.” (Really? Did Berlin invent nostalgia for Christmases past?)  Jews manufactured this mythos, we are told, because they were made to feel left out. Chinese people “would never look down on Jews for being foreign.”  Chinese food is “Jewish” because it is “designed for sharing,” and Jews and Chinese people like to “talk loud and argue.” Are there really no other ethnic groups to whom all this applies, including some who observe Christmas? Also, is Weinstein not aware that many Chinese Americans are Christian?

One of the talking heads states defiantly (and repetitively) that Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer takes Christianity “out of the Baby Jesus and the manger and all that stuff” and creates “a new mythology.” But does reiterating the phrase, “new mythology” make the phrase true? The Santa Claus story has long been a bona fide Christmas tale.

Still, Weinstein is self-conscious enough about his thesis to insist that Jewish song writers were not “stealing” or exploring Christmas. Their purpose, as one of his talking heads puts it, was to “include everyone in the holiday.”

Weinstein warns that should Christians accuse the Jewish song writers of stealing the holiday, then they can be accused of stealing it, also. At first it was not a major Christian holiday, anyway. It was layered onto old winter solstice orgies, and was originally, in Britain and in other places, an “excuse for a drunken party,” for “abandoning all inhibitions.” Celebrating Christmas was, as Alan Dershowitz shares, illegal in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, which required people to work on that day in order not to fall into debauchery. Carols themselves were radical departures from church hymns. Therefore, we are given the silly platitude that “Christians stole Christmas, not Jews.”

Not only does this film threaten Christians with theft charges to make its point, but it also dismisses Chanukah. The ancient Festival of Lights is reduced to one allegedly paltry song, “I Have a Little Dreidl” (which is actually far cleverer and more literate than most of the songs featured here). But no one stops to observe that, in the words of Judaica scholar, Norman Golb, there would be no Christmas without Chanukah. As Elias Bickerman demonstrates in From Ezra to the Last of the Maccabees, Chanukah marks a battle, led by the priestly Maccabean family, first against Jews and then against Syrian rulers who wanted to impose a Hellenistic culture that could have undermined and diluted the monotheism which made Judaism and then Christianity (and Islam) unique and compelling. This early, major revolt for religious freedom provided a basis for the adaptation of non-biblical practices for the continuity of religious tradition. Recognizing the critical importance of the Maccabean rebellion, the oldest churches included the Books of the Maccabees in the biblical canon.

While one of Weinstein’s observers credits only Christians with being “good with the prettiness of their holidays,” Chanukah has always had its beauty. It was always a big deal with the Festival psalms (Hallel) and special additional prayers recited, and with a long history in modern times of fine choral music for all the liturgical additions. Music for holidays or worship is not about loss as much as it’s about praise and gratitude.

There are additional prayers and Torah readings for all eight days. And the melodies for “Maoz Tzur” (“Rock of Ages”) and other candle-lighting prayers have rivaled Christmas carols. That a lot of these pieces are not done in most American synagogues is more a sign of laziness than of lack of repertoire, and this may be true as well of some of the negative Jewish responses to Chanukah gleefully catalogued in this film. But surely Weinstein could have easily found an expert to make a case for Chanukah?

For centuries, churches have marked the Advent period in the month before Christmas with special ceremonies and songs. Old songs like “Deck the Halls,” though seemingly secular, became beloved parts of this observance. Indeed, to devout Christians there is no issue of “stealing” the season or the holiday because everything seen as advancing the Gospel and the Festival is welcome. This film hardly deals with what is welcoming about Christmas even when Christians have been stand-offish. But Alan Dershowitz’s observation rings true as to the possible motivation of at least some of the writers: “Jews have an amazing ability to get out of their own skins, out of their own culture, and write the most amazing things about other peoples’ cultures.”

Perhaps PBS was taken by all the attention given to Gloria Shayne Baker’s 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis peace song, “Do You Hear What I Hear?” That song, likely the only one with a political agenda, takes over the Jewish family story in the Chinese restaurant, where minorities bond for convenience and then for crafting rituals—to advance a social justice agenda? The resultant hand and cup dance rituals among Jews and Chinese and others are very telling, all the more so because so many Jews—and Christians—have embraced Buddhist practices, leaving the old monotheism behind as the Hellenizing Jews tried to do in the time of the Maccabees. Such current trends are brought to mind by a key image and dance of a Jewish crooner waiting for his (non-kosher) food order in the presence of a large statue of the Buddha. This film provides no traditional Jewish vocabulary to speak of, and even uses Yiddish, a language rich in classical Jewish values, merely as a setting for “Winter Wonderland.”

 Dreaming of a Jewish Christmas requires Christmas to define Jews as outsiders, even as it interprets the songs as a gift to Christian friends for what Christmas does for society, and suggests that Christmas would not be as good without those songs. But the truth is that America would not be as good without Christmas and without practicing Jews, and the numbers of committed Christians (and Jews) are declining. The rituals concocted here in a Chinese restaurant do not have a prayer of building a spiritually strong and socially aware America.