God Bless America an example of Berlin's "habit of interpolating bits of half-remembered songs into his own numbers." Berlin, born Israel Baline, had himself written several Jewish-themed novelty tunes. In 1938, with the rise of Adolf Hitler, Irving Berlin, who was Jewish and had arrived in America from Russia at the age of five, felt it was time to revive it as a "peace song," and it was introduced on an Armistice Day broadcast in 1938, sung by Kate Smith on her radio show. Berlin had made some minor changes; by this time, "to the right" might have been considered a call to
God Bless America (film) reviews. The review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes gave a 67% approval rating with an average rating of 6.2/10 based on 107 reviews; its consensus read: "A darkly comic polemic on modern culture, "God Bless America" is uneven and somewhat this but the ideas behind this revenge fulfilment journey has primal appeal." Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, gave an average score of 56 out of 100 based on 24 reviews, indicating "mixed or average reviews". "Chicago Sun-Times" critic Roger Ebert gave the film 2 stars out 4, and wrote: "this is a