There's a revival of West Side Story playing on Broadway now. To add a more authentic feel to the Leonard Bernstein/Steven Sondheim classic, the producers had some of the songs translated into Spanish. But now they've decided to put some back into English:

The producers never formally asked audience members about the Spanish lyrics, let alone held a focus group, Mr. Seller and Mr. Laurents said. But Mr. Seller noted that, in postperformance conversations with friends and audience members, he was surprised by how many people had never seen “West Side Story,” with music by Leonard Bernstein, onstage or its film version and lacked a strong grasp of Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet,” which was the basis for the plot.

This depresses me on so many levels I almost don't know where to begin. But let me try.

The inescapable and ubiquitous Christmas songs, specials, etc -- and how us Jews helped create and embed them, have fought against them, and how some deal with it now -- fa-who dor-ay, fa-who dor-ay, ...

The white Christmases that Irving Berlin dreamed of weren't the earliest ones he used to know. ... watching his neighbors burn his family's house to the ground in a good old-fashioned, Jew-hating pogrom.
So it's no surprise that when Berlin got around to writing his great Christmas song in 1941, nearly half a century after his family had fled the shtetl of Mohilev for New York's Lower East Side, it was flatly devoid of Christian imagery. It is, for all that, a religious song. ...