Garrison Keillor is known to fans on both sides of the pond as a teller of sweet and dryly amusing tales. So I've been amazed to read that his wit can also be quite savage.
He has used his well-read syndicated newspaper column to take a swipe at those of us who don't celebrate Christmas as he would wish. His main target is Unitarian Christians but he also objects to how Jews are supposed to have added to the commercialisation of the Festive Season. This is what he said:
" ... all those lousy holiday songs by Jewish guys that trash up the malls every year, Rudolph and the chestnuts and the rest of that dreck. Did one of our guys write ‘Grab your loafers, come along if you wanna, and we’ll blow that shofar for Rosh Hashanah’? No, we didn’t.”
"... White Christmas by that “Jewish guy” Irving Berlin, isn’t just shlock, it's an assault on truly religious Christians."
All I know of Keillor is courtesy of Wikipedia and the occasional BBC Radio broadcast of his stories.
But it's interesting to note how he has hijacked coarse Yiddish phrases ("dreck", "shlock") to attack the Jewish contribution to the season. But he's probably forgotten that not only is Jesus his Messiah, he was first and foremost a nice Jewish boy!
msniw
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