‘God Bless America’ and Irving Berlin

As America marks its 250th anniversary, I’ve found myself thinking about one of the nation’s most iconic songs, “God Bless America,” and the remarkable fact that it was written by a Jewish immigrant from the Russian Empire whose earliest memory was of lying beneath a blanket beside a road while his family fled a pogrom and watched their home burn. Born Israel Beilin in 1888, he arrived in New York with his family at the age of 5.

By the time the young immigrant became Irving Berlin, he would do something almost unimaginable: help teach America how to sing about itself.

For generations, Jews in the Russian Empire lived as permanent outsiders. Confined largely to the Pale of Settlement, they were denied equal rights, restricted in where they could live, study, and work, and periodically subjected to violent antisemitism. Families could spend generations there without ever fully belonging. America was hardly free of prejudice, but it offered something radically different: the possibility — not the guarantee — of becoming fully American.

Between 1880 and 1920, roughly two million Jews fled the Russian Empire for the United States. In “There Was a Fire: Jews, Music and the American Dream,” pianist, writer, and historian Ben Sidran captures the scale of that migration in one unforgettable sentence: “Not a family, but a whole people moved.” Many settled in New York, where they became merchants, publishers, labor organizers, comedians — and songwriters.

Sidran offers another beautiful observation. Stephen Foster, who was not Jewish, wrote “Swanee” despite never having seen the Suwannee River. He chose the name simply because it sounded right. But in the hands of the Jewish songwriters of Tin Pan Alley, “Swanee” became one of America’s great symbols of home and longing. They transformed an ordinary Southern river into what Sidran calls “a memory of a memory” … a kind of nostalgia for the America they hoped could exist and somehow already felt they remembered.

Irving Berlin also gave America “White Christmas” and “Easter Parade,” and Philip Roth later joked that Berlin “de-Christs” both holidays, turning Easter into “a fashion show” and Christmas into “a holiday about snow.” Berlin transformed holidays that were not his own into shared American experiences of seasons, family, ritual, longing, and home.

Berlin was also unusual among the great American songwriters in that he wrote both words and music. He arrived in New York unable to speak English, yet grew up to give Americans words for holidays, home, patriotism, and love. In “How Deep Is the Ocean?” he wrote one of the most beautiful expressions of love in the English language:

How far would I travel
To be where you are?
How far is the journey
From here to a star?
And if I ever lost you
How much would I cry?
How deep is the ocean?
How high is the sky?

His vision of America was never sentimental. In 1933, six years before Billie Holiday introduced “Strange Fruit,” Berlin wrote “Supper Time” for Ethel Waters — a heartbreaking song about the wife of a Black man who had been lynched, preparing to tell her children that their father would never come home. Even as Berlin imagined America at its best, he also made room for its hardest truths.

In 1918, while serving in the United States Army during the First World War, Berlin wrote “God Bless America” for the soldier revue, Yip Yip Yap-hank. Deciding it didn’t fit the show, he put it away in a drawer.

Twenty years later, as fascism spread across Europe, he took it back out.
Kate Smith introduced the song on “The Kate Smith Hour” on Nov. 10, 1938, an Armistice Day broadcast, while Kristallnacht was still unfolding across Germany and Austria. Synagogues were burning. Jewish businesses were being destroyed. Jews were being beaten, arrested, and murdered.

As Americans heard a Russian Jewish immigrant’s prayer for his adopted country, news of the Nazi assault was beginning to reach the U.S. Broadcasts like Smith’s included news, and while the surviving record does not tell us exactly what each listener heard that night, it is possible that some Americans first encountered, “God Bless America,” in the same radio hour that brought them reports of Kristallnacht.

Nearly 30 years later, Louis Armstrong expressed a similar idea more directly.

When Armstrong released “What a Wonderful World” during another period of war, racial injustice, and political division, some critics wondered how anyone could sing about such a wonderful world at a time like that. Armstrong eventually answered them himself: “Seems to me, it ain’t the world that’s so bad but what we’re doin’ to it.”

I think Berlin understood something similar. “God Bless America” wasn’t written because America had already become everything it promised to be. It was written because someone who knew what life looked like without that promise believed it was still worth praying for.