I don’t know about Adam Sandler’s movies. I haven’t seen any of them, with the exception of The Wedding Singer, whose silliness = sweetness I rather liked. I have, though, listened to “The Chanukah Song” dozens and dozens of times; it gets at Jewish ambivalence about Jewishness, at my ambivalence about Jewishness (about simultaneously wanting to be a part of the moronic goyish culture surrounding us and wanting to be apart from it), as acutely as anything I know.
Virtually every cut from Sandler’s CD What the Hell Happened to Me?—even the title mimics Jewish angst—is a barely disguised ode to dispossessed people, animals, and things, such as a chained goat, a piece-of-shit car, a neurasthenic Southerner, a senile grandmother. Sandler begins “The Chanukah Song” by telling a live audience of college students that there are many Christmas songs but not very many Chanukah songs (Jewish apology for being Jewish in a Christian culture). So, Sandler informs us, he wrote a song for all the nice little Jewish kids who don’t get to hear any Chanukah songs. This is Jew as victim, Jew as “nice.” Is it important to Sandler to create a little distance between himself and nice little Jewish kids? Is it important to me to do the same? If so, why?
In the first stanza, Sandler says that Chanukah, festival of lights, is coming and is fun, so everybody should put on their yarmulkes. Repetitively strumming an electric guitar, unable to carry a tune, he sings these lines with good-Jewish-boy poignance, sweetness, yearning. (Parts 2 through 4 of “The Chanukah Song,” on other CDs, don’t work for me at all. The balance between feeling and mockery, which Sandler maintains so delicately in the first version, tips over completely into parody in the later version and is therefore, given my emotional geography—bound by ambivalence—off the map.) He undermines the whispery solemnity, though, when he says “eight crazy nights” with a self-conscious, Steve Martin-esque craziness. Chanukah isn’t about “crazy nights”; neither is Judaism; neither am I. The song is going to make the case that Jews are capable of Dionysian craziness, and what makes the song so appealing to me is that even as Sandler makes this assertion, he also winks about it, knowing it’s not especially true. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve ever been drunk or high. Okay, two hands.
In the second stanza, Sandler says that Kirk Douglas, James Caan, Dinah Shore, and David Lee Roth are Jewish “just like you and me.” Sandler sings these lines with ostensible self-pity, which he—again—undercuts by laying on way too much schmaltz. This list of people who are Jewish is, of course, a send-up of Jewish head-counting, of “what’s good for the Jews,” and yet it’s also genuine boast. Sandler is a creature of popular culture, so it’s natural for him to name celebrities, but to me—only to me, because I look like, or at least strive to look like, a Jewish intellectual?—it’s heartbreaking that none of the four people he mentions “looks Jewish,” and they all are, or were, sex symbols, based more or less on their Aryan good looks. Here are people we’re proud of, Sandler seems to be saying, but we’re proud of them because they look like you—the audience of college kids at the University of California at Santa Barbara to whom he’s singing, blonder than whom there doesn’t exist. The audience goes wild, clapping in rhythm. We love you for being Jewish, Adam, I seem to hear them saying, Jewish just like us (blonde beauties; when a girl calls out to him that she loves him, he doesn’t say anything).
The third stanza does pretty much the same thing, with Paul Newman and Goldie Hawn—both half-Jewish—the new blond, blue-eyed gods. “Put them together, what a fine-lookin’ Jew,” Sandler says in Sammy Davis mode, reminding listeners (at least listeners my age or older) of Sammy’s conversion, lampooning the sentiment at the same time that the upbeat music screams celebration. The next stanza gives us Captain Kirk and Mister Spock: “both Jewish,” Sandler says in old-Jewish-man voice, mixing caricature with anti-caricature, as does the entire song. I remember how loudly my mother laughed, sitting in the bathtub and reading Portnoy’s Complaint the summer it was published, but how she couldn’t help but wish that only Jews would be allowed to read it, since it reinforced so many stereotypes.
In the fifth stanza he head-counts Rod Carew, Harrison Ford, Ann Landers, and Dear Abby, and outs former Seattle SuperSonics owner Barry Ackerley (I long wondered whether he was Jewish; is it only in Seattle that his Jewishness would have been such a closely guarded secret?). The audience cheers wildly when Sandler informs them that O.J. isn’t Jewish; the performance was recorded only a few weeks after the verdict. As O.J. is the anti-Jew (unreflective to the point of being out of control; can I say that?), Rod Carew is the anti-O.J.—one of the greatest hitters in baseball history, whose success depended at least as much upon his mental agility as his physical prowess. No surprise about Ann Landers and Dear Abby—advice-giving yentas. Harrison Ford—the unJewish quarter-Jew. Sandler is riven by the same ambivalence that I am: affirm Dear Abby (Mom) or Harrison Ford (not-Dad)?
In the next stanza we learn that the Three Stooges were Jewish and some people think Ebenezer Scrooge is; “Well he’s not,” Sandler says with transparent and, thereby, oddly moving defensiveness. We’re tired of fighting that image of ourselves; we’re about the joyful lunacy of the Stooges, not the miserliness of Scrooge. This rather upbeat message gets rather fully contradicted, of course, as it must, since we’re Jewish. Some consolation: Tom Cruise isn’t Jewish, but his agent is. The stereotype—money-grubber—is true?
In the final stanza, Sandler deepens the paradox by refusing to resolve it, combining “harmonicah,” “gin and tonicah,” “marijuanakah,” and “Chanukah.” This constitutes very modest wordplay, to be certain, but it’s crucial, because through the repetition he’s ridiculing his—my, our—need to Chanukahize everything, to declare that we’re Jewish in a season when no one wants to be. At the same time that Sandler’s pretending to affirm Jewish capacity for what I think he knows and what I know I know are unJewish Dionysian pastimes—getting drunk, getting high, getting crazy (Milton Berle, turning down a second drink at a Catholic charity event: “Jews don’t drink; it interferes with our suffering”)—what he’s really affirming are his (my) own self-consciousness, cleverness, involution, ambivalence, pride, shame: Jewishness.