by Steven Gimbel and Gwydion Suilebhan
Andrew Torba, Christian Nationalist founder of the rightwing social media site Gab, recently argued on his podcast that the fact that many of the most beloved Christmas songs were written by Jewish composers was part of a conspiracy to take Christ out of Christmas: to secularize one of the holiest Christian holidays and allow Jews to subtly infiltrate Christian-American culture with their own agenda. He might just be right.
There is, for example, a way of thinking about the 1964 stop-motion animated special Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer as a challenge to the White supremacist, Christian nationalist worldview that Torba champions. What if we thought of Rudolph as a progressive, inclusive retelling of Richard Wagner’s Ring cycle?
Rudolph’s Jewish Roots
We all know Dasher and Dancer, Prancer and Vixen, Comet and Cupid, and Donder and Blitzen, but can you recall the origin story of the most famous reindeer of all? Rudolph was created in 1939 by Jewish author Robert L. May, who was working as a copywriter for department store chain Montgomery Ward, which wanted to give holiday shoppers a Christmas-themed children’s book. In writing a seasonal twist on Hans Christian Anderson’s The Ugly Duckling, May dreamed up a new member of Santa’s team, and young Rudolph quickly became an indelible part of the American yuletide mythology.
May’s brother-in-law was a Jewish composer. Johnny Marks made his career creating some of the most iconic Christmas songs of all time, including “Rockin’ around the Christmas Tree,” “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day,” and “Have a Holly-Jolly Christmas.” In 1949, he put May’s story to music, and Gene Autry’s recording of Marks’ “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer” became both a chart-topping hit and a timeless American standard memorized by children across the country for generations.
In 1964, Rankin/Bass, a relatively new television production company, released the stop-animation classic Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer. The program was narrated by Burl Ives, who sang a number of Marks’ tunes, including “Silver and Gold.” Rankin/Bass went on to produce a wide range of long-running Christmas specials, including Frosty, the Snowman, Santa Claus is Coming to Town, and The Little Drummer Boy. Broadly speaking, their programs framed Christmas-based stories around themes of good and evil, inclusion and exclusion.
Liel Leibovitz recently wrote about them in Tablet:
“Watching Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town… I was struck by a fact that had somehow eluded me as a child, namely that the film’s villain is a Lederhosen-wearing, German-accented despot named Burgermeister Meisterburger who rounds up all the toys and burns them in the town’s square. His goons, dressed in Prussian army uniforms, stare impassively at the flames. A step or two away, a gaggle of kids, most of them dressed in tatters, look on with horror. A few scenes later, all the children, now forbidden from playing, are placed into forced labor scrubbing stockings.”
Given Rankin and Bass’ willingness to invoke Holocaust imagery in their Christmas specials—Bass was Jewish—it does not seem unreasonable to see in Rudolph a counterpoint to one of the most famous antisemitic works of art in the Western Canon, Wagner’s Ring cycle.
Richard Wagner, Antisemite
German nationalist and opera composer Richard Wagner never hid his antisemitism. In his 1850 article “Jewishness in Music,” he rails against the Jewish influence in art, calling for a holy war to cleanse Western works of the Jewish influence. “But if emancipation from the yoke of Judaism appears to us the greatest of necessities, we must hold it weighty above all to prove our forces for this war of liberation,” he wrote. “Now we shall never win these forces from an abstract definition of that phenomenon per se, but only from an accurate acquaintance with the nature of that involuntary feeling of ours which utters itself as an instinctive repugnance against the Jew’s prime essence.”
Wagner’s works were sacred texts for Adolf Hitler, who had an epiphany watching a production of Wagner’s Rienzi, the Last of the Tribunes that led him to change his life’s ambition from painting to politics. When Hitler’s hatred of Jews began to find an ever-enlarging audience after World War I, he was greeted warmly by Wagner’s widow, who kissed him. Wagner’s son-in-law, the arch-White supremacist Houston Stewart Chamberlain, told Hitler upon their meeting that he felt like John the Baptist anointing the new savior of the antisemitic movement. This encouragement led Hitler to launch his Beer Hall putsch, a failed insurrection that became a major step in the birth of the Third Reich.
Ring, Ring…Hello?
Wagner’s most famous work is the four-opera series Ring of the Niebelungen. The Niebelungen are a race of sleazy, weak, little, conniving dwarves—clearly intended by Wagner to represent Jews—who steal gold from the nymphs of the Rhine and use it to create an all-powerful ring allowing them to rule over the world, including the superior Germanic gods. Wotan, the master of the gods, takes the ring, but has to give it to the evil giants. The hero of the work is his human grandson, Seigfried, whose strength, beauty, and bravery represents the German people. Siegfried tries to claim the ring for those who deserve it, while the dwarf Hagen schemes to take it for himself.
The Ring cycle updated Germanic and Norse mythology for the 19th century, when German culture was ascendant. Long considered the backwater of Europe, Germany had seen all of the other nations take turns being the great empire. While Wagner was composing his cycle, German art, letters, science, and industry were coming into their own, and the future seemed to offer Germans a chance to become the hegemonic power of the globe. Wagner’s allegory was embraced by nationalists, providing them with a link to the past and a vision of the future that assured them of their rightful place. Hitler put that mythology in service to his ambitions.
Santa’s Ride of the Valkyrie
The story of Rudolph begins in Christmastown at the North Pole, a monarchy presided over by Santa Claus. For American Christians, the idea of a place in which the Christmas season lasts year-round—a magical land full of toys, wrapping paper, snow, ornaments, and all of the symbols of yuletide joy—should have inspired great happiness. You cannot watch the beginning of Rudolph, however, without cringing at the program’s depiction of toxic masculinity, entrenched patriarchy, and the mistreatment of labor.
Any warm-and-fuzzy feelings about jolly old St. Nick start dissipating in two early scenes. In the first, Santa tells Blitzen he should be ashamed of having a child with a physical deformity. In the second, the elves—who build toys all day in Santa’s sweatshop—reveal that they have used their free time to compose an anthem of devotion to Claus, only to have their work derisively dismissed by their boss: “Needs work,” Santa says, and the elven Judenrat manager quickly berates his underlings. All is not right at the North Pole.
We soon watch Rudolph get the cold shoulder from Santa, then get bullied and ostracized by his fellow reindeer because of his obvious physiological difference. Rudolph’s treatment clearly invokes the Nazis, who considered physiological differences of any sort to be indicators of inadequacy. (Was the fact that Rudolph’s difference is his nose–rather than, say, his antlers—a more subtle nod to antisemitism? Possibly, though Rudolph isn’t coded as Jewish in any other way.)
Scenes of Rudolph’s woeful treatment are interspersed with a similar subplot centered on the rejection of an elf named Hermy who does not enjoy building toys, but wants to be a dentist. Both of these sympathetic characters, Rudolph and Hermy, simply want to be their authentic selves, but because their identities clash with Christmastown social expectations, they are deemed inferior.
Rudolph would certainly be seen as enemies of the Third Reich, as would Hermy, the elf who rebelled against Santa’s caste system. (Hermy was voiced by Jewish actor Paul Soles.) In 1964, the idea of wanting to be a dentist smacked of Jewishness. While for generations before World War II, many Jews worked in factories for long hours and little pay, after the war—thanks to the GI Bill—Jews started to enter the middle class in large numbers. According to anthropologist Karen Brodkin, in Boston before World War II, just over 1% of Jewish men were doctors, but in the post-war generation, more than 16% went into the medical field. As a result, the professionalization of the working class—including a factory worker like Hermy—would have been recognizable as Jewish.
Hermy and Rudolph’s companion Yukon Cornelius—a prospector searching for silver and gold whose sleigh resembles a peddler’s wagon—might also have been recognizable as a Jew. Before post-war professionalization, the most common Jewish stereotype was a peddler who traveled in the backcountry in search of profit. (Jews as money-grubbers is, of course, a long-held antisemitic stereotype.) Together, Yukon Cornelius and Hermy seem to be updated—and far more sympathetic—versions of Wagner’s Niebelungen.
Rudolph, Hermy, and Yukon Cornelius aren’t the only cast-offs from the false façade of happiness in Christmastown. In fleeing from the Abominable Snow Monster—Rankin and Bass’ version of Wagner’s giants—they end up on the Island of Misfit Toys, a land of rejects from the perfectionist norms of Christmastown. Through no fault of their own, they have been exiled to a concentration camp of undesirables, just like the Jews, Roma, LGBTQ+ people, and socialists who were oppressed by the Nazis.
Ruling over the island is King Moonracer, a winged lion. His character seems to consist of a combination of two symbols. The winged lion comes from the Book of Daniel, in which it appeared as the prophet’s first vision. The lion with a crown is the symbol of the tribe of Judah, the Jewish priestly class, which was supposedly the clan from which both King David and Jesus of Nazareth descended. King Moonracer does not allow the Christmastown exiles to settle on the Island, despite the fact that Rudolph, Hermy, and Yukon Cornelius are misfits themselves, but does permit them to stay the night, if they agree to take the misfits’ work to Santa Claus.
They do, of course, and Santa begins to redeem himself by accepting Rudolph, especially once his physical deformity becomes useful in cutting through the fog of the great storm. It’s not until Santa announces his detour to the Island of Misfit Toys, however, that he cleanses himself and becomes the Santa we know and love. By fulfilling the will of the King, Santa becomes saintly. Interestingly, in the initial airing of the program, that part of the story did not appear. A flood of viewer letters demanded to see the scene, and Rankin/Bass remade the ending.
Richard Wagner and Rankin and Bass both told stories about magic, dwarves, and giants. Both used mythology to undergird new ways of structuring society. While Wagner’s Ring cycle informed exclusionary worldviews like those of Andrew Torba and Adolf Hitler, however, the special we watch every December seeks to undermine White Christian tyranny and foster an open and inclusive society in which those who are different are permitted to be who they are.