The 'Oy' in 'Holidays': Good for the Jews

| Print Post This | Like (0) | Comments (0)

ROB TANNENBAUM TAKES A LOT OF CRAP about his name, especially come December. "Eleven months of the year, I have to spell my last name for people," he says. "And then one month of the year, everybody sings to me."

"Sometimes people do say, 'What is a Jew doing with a last name that means "Christmas tree?"' There's really a pretty simple etymological explanation, and that is: A Christmas tree is, at most, 2007 years old, but the name 'Tannenbaum' is four or five thousand years old, probably, and it actually translates from the German as 'fir tree.'"

You heard it here first. Christmas trees are older than Christmas.

There'll be other lessons from shul when Tannenbaum and David Fagin pull into the Birchmere this weekend as Good for the Jews, currently on its Heeb magazine-sponsored Putting the Ha! in Hanukkah Tour.

"I like to use the word 'band' because it feels more impressive. It's kind of a size-inferiority thing," Tannenbaum explains. "'Duo' doesn't sound like much for your entertainment dollar; 'band,' however, is lofty."

Expect such MySpace faves as "They Tried to Kill Us," a scrambled history lesson in which Moses marches with Martin Luther King Jr., and "JDate," a power-pop field guide to the only online dating service you can bring home to Mama: "It's like Amazon.com but with chicks instead of books."

Longing for a Hebraic Rat Pack "88 Lines About 44 Women"? Try "Hot Jewish Chicks." Pomp-punk hate speech is directed at "Jews for Jesus," sung, for reasons not immediately apparent, in a self-important British accent. Speaking of which ...

Like nearly everyone else's, Tannenbaum's eyes glazed over (you can hear this over the phone) at what must be called Christopher Hitchens' Talmudic evisceration of Hanukkah earlier this month in Slate.

Still, the broadside is not unwelcome. "It makes me feel that Jews have truly arrived. Jeez, for the last five or six years, everyone on Fox News has been bitching and moaning about the War on Christmas," Tannenbaum observes.

"And that's how you know when you've reached a huge level of popularity, is when people start attacking you."

» Birchmere, 3701 Mt. Vernon Ave., Alexandria; Fri. & Sat., 7:30 p.m., $19.50; 800-551-7328.

Written by Express contributor Glenn Dixon
Photos by Seth Kushner