Study: Hanukkah Music More Annoying Than Christmas Music

The results will surprise many people.

Haifa, November 27 – A comprehensive examination of popular winter-holiday music has led scientists to conclude that despite a strong candidacy, the irritating qualities of Christian seasonal music fall short of those that its Jewish counterpart boasts, a new article says.

Writing in the journal Yule, the authors from the Haifa Technion and the University of Göttingen lay out their case following a study of Christmas and Hanukkah songs and an exhaustive comparison of their negative qualities. The authors found that while certain prominent Christmas songs get so annoying the mere mention of them causes hair to stand on end, on the whole the genre takes a back seat to Hanukkah songs in terms of juvenile perspective, didactic misjudgment, melodic insipidity, cultural baggage, cloying lyrics, and just plain dumbness. The overall effect, explain the scientists, makes Hanukkah music a far more potent source of annoyance.

Lead study author Professor Timor S. Bisti cautioned in a telephone interview that the study covers only Western Christian music, and that the Eastern churches and other denominations might play or sing more annoying Christmas music, but no serious scholarship has examined that corpus. “What I can say is that the few tolerable pieces of Hanukkah music owe their aesthetic acceptability to non-Jewish origins, he observed. ” Bisti cited as examples the most popular melody for the liturgical poem Maoz Tzur, based on a German folk tune, and a choral section from Händel’s oratorio Judas Maccabeus, adapted into Hebrew.

Professor Bisti conceded that the study results will surprise many people. “You can’t expect everyone to be familiar with Hanukkah music,” he noted. “Not when Jews are such a tiny portion of the general populace, and even then most of those Jews have a profound ignorance of their own heritage. But ‘Jingle Bells’ can’t hold a candle to ‘I Have a Little Dreidel,’ so to speak, when it comes to vomit-inducing stupidity. It may come as quite a shock to discover that there’s an entire genre of music that’s even more atrocious than ‘The Little Drummer Boy’ and John Lennon’s ‘Happy Xmas War Is Over’ put together, but there you have it. And my team and I had to listen to all of it, some of it several times over, even ‘Sevivon Sov Sov Sov’ in both its Diaspora and Israeli versions.” He shuddered at the recollection.

“Looks like a couple of post-doc fellows in my department are going to get a little extra gelt in their stockings this year for going through that,” he added.

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