A Fine Romance: Jewish Songwriters, American Songs by David Lehman (Schocken, 249 pages, $23.) At the moment, you can’t exhaust the subject of The Great American Songbook. Courtesy of the likes of Michael Buble, Diana Krall and, Lord help us all, Rod Stewart, you can’t even come close. Hot on the heels of Wilfrid Sheed’s marvelous 2007 “The House That George Built,” we’ve got poet and scholar David Lehman (previously comfortable with literary subjects as diverse as the “New York School” of poets and the Nazi-collaborating Yale critic Paul DeMan) dealing with the most obvious of needs: “Sooner or later you have to explain what is Jewish about American popular song— apart from the simple fact that a great many of the songwriters were Jews. A lot of it has to do with sound: the minor key, bent notes, altered notes, a melancholy edge.”

But there’s a lot more to it than that and Lehman knows it, which is why Jewish songwriters are close to a majority of those responsible for the best of the Great American Songbook, no matter whom you’re talking about: Irving Berlin, George and Ira Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Ted Koehler, Howard Dietz, Yip Harburg, Arthur Schwartz, Vernon Duke, Dorothy Fields, Frank Loesser, Sammy Cahn or the favorite of so many, Harold Arlen, born Hyman Arluck, the Jewish cantor’s son from Buffalo (the most significant exception, of course, is Cole Porter, who talked about “writing Jewish”).

Lehman’s approach is personal, almost to a fault. He writes that Kern and Arlen “were my uncles in the synagogue of my boyhood dreams, where I attended services regularly on Friday nights and Shabbos mornings until I went to college.” He interviewed Richard Rodgers while still a Columbia student and ends with a poem called “The Leonard Bernstein Sunday Luncheon Party Sestina” about “that rarest of literary creations, a story with a happy ending.”

—Jeff Simon