Peter Yarrow performs at City Vineyard in 2020. Photo from Getty Images

By Benjamin Ivry
January 7, 2025

American Jewish singer-songwriter Peter Yarrow, who died Tuesday at age 86, illustrated the paradoxes of assimilation in the world of popular music. Although he was never bar mitzvahed after a secular upbringing, he wrote and performed the popular Hanukkah song “Light One Candle” with his group Peter, Paul and Mary as a pacifist response to the 1982 Lebanon War.

The tune is more like a serious Broadway or Off-Broadway number than a true folk tune in its allusion to the books of Maccabees and represents the ambiguous relationship of PP&M, as Yarrow called the trio, to traditional music. PP&M was founded, or in the opinion of some music connoisseurs, “manufactured” in 1961 by impresario Albert Grossman, a Jewish Simon Cowell of his time. The formation of PP&M involved auditioning and rejecting highly individual folk types such as Dave Van Ronk and Carolyn Hester, who later went on to have more niche, careers.

But already in a feature in May 1964 Saturday evening postYarrow impatiently dismissed purists’ complaints about her restrained, sanitized versions of rougher songs by Bob Dylan and others. Yarrow insisted post: “That’s not who we are “Authentic” and therefore it would be “hypocritical” to attempt to sing in a style other than their own. PP&M deliberately adopted what Yarrow called a “casual” tone of understatement, seeking to “affirm” rather than “protest.”

To this end, PP&M was formed with Yarrow and Paul Stookey as singing acolytes, paying homage to the group’s strongest presence, Mary Travers, who humorously referred to herself as “The Towering Shiksa.”

Influenced by the Weavers, an older, 50% Jewish quartet, the pop cool of Yarrow (PP&M’s only Jew) differed from the earlier ensemble, which leaned more heavily into hard musical origins. The Weavers played stirring music by African-American singer Huddie Ledbetter (Lead Belly) rather than Dylan’s more distant interpretations of Piedmont blues as promoted by PP&M.

Mary Travers, for all her talent, could not match the monumental voice of the Weavers’ American Jewish star, Ronnie Gilbert, and Yarrow also could not challenge the trained musicianship of the Weavers’ other Jewish talent, Fred Hellerman. Perhaps for this reason, on the rare occasions when Yarrow and his team overtly expressed Yiddishness, such as on “Light One Candle,” the life-giving passion of the Weavers’ early hit “Tzena, Tzena,” a Hebrew composition by Issachar Miron, was missing from 1941.

To their credit, PP&M were a constant presence at civil rights protests and famously sang Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” at the March on Washington (1963), using their cool pop sound to normalize, homogenize and even calm the crowd gathered to ban racial inequality and segregation.

On this occasion, the impassioned tones of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech followed on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. But a similarly distant, otherworldly attitude in Yarrow’s biggest hit song, the ever-popular “Puff, the Magic Dragon,” led some listeners to assume that it must be hallucinogenic substances, something Yarrow always strictly denied.

Instead, the group’s longevity was credited by Yarrow in a 2002 edition Atlanta Jewish Times as well as due to their actions as “the Tikkun Olam Trio”. There was also a degree of chutzpah at work, such as when PP&M sang Irish-American civil disobedience activist Anne Feeney’s anthem “Have You Been to Jail for Justice?” when they learned that Yarrow had been imprisoned under different circumstances.

As he discussed in the Baltimore Jewish Times In April 2006 and elsewhere, Yarrow was arrested and convicted in 1970 of what he called “immoral and inappropriate liberties” with a 14-year-old girl who visited his hotel room after a concert. He served three months in prison and eleven years later he sought a presidential pardon, which was granted by Jimmy Carter.

Still in May 2021, The Washington Post headlined another story: “Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul and Mary, pardoned by Carter for molesting girl, may have sexually assaulted others.”

In his petition to Carter, Yarrow wrote that he wanted to show his own children “that society has forgiven their father” and “their father did something very wrong (but) their father also did a lot for society, about hardship and inequality.” “to eliminate” where he saw it.”

In this context, another chutzpah could be his decision to accept the 2018 Lifesaver Award from ELEM Youth in Distress in Israel, an organization that “helps troubled youth in Israel, including the homeless and those suffering from substance abuse, crime, prostitution and suicidal thoughts suffer”. Tendencies.” Yarrow had campaigned vigorously against school bullying, which he often claimed was due to Yiddishism.

His estranged father (the family name was originally Yaroshevitz) was a co-founder of Radio Free Europe, among other CIA connections, while Yarrow’s stepfather, Harold Wisebrode, was executive director of the Central Synagogue in Manhattan.

The sense of tzedakah, perhaps inherited from an older generation, had been linked to music since the age of eight when his mother took him to see the Jewish violinist Isaac Stern perform. He tried taking lessons from the wife of Mischa Mischakoff, one of Arturo Toscanini’s concertmasters at the NBC Symphony, as explained in an April 2024 interview. Eventually, Yarrow gave up the violin and switched to the less strenuous guitar.

In the same chat, Yarrow claimed to have been motivated by Leonard Bernstein as a teenager Youth concertswhich only began in 1958, when Yarrow was already an adult. More certain early inspiration came from the Austrian Jewish folk singer Theodore Bikel, whom Yarrow described as “like the Jewish Pete Seeger.” As he recalled, his first encounter with anti-Semitism occurred in his first year at Cornell University Jewish Journal in 2004; In the dorm, someone called Yarrow a “dirty Jew” and slapped him “hard in the face.”

The Saturday evening post described his performance in 1964 as “Talmudic.” But in 2009 he told another journalist that for him, being Jewish meant “living by justice, and that is a burden.” It was necessary to “develop our own morals and values ​​and live by them.” This was clearly a lifelong preoccupation of Yarrow’s, as he outlined in 2017, stating that he wanted to be remembered “as a person with feet of clay.” Yarrow apologized for his actions, which violated his “ethical standards” (though he did not appear to express regret directly to the victims in any published interviews), and tried to set an example “as a person who worked on this has to make things better.”

A long-time resident of New York’s Upper West Side, after a visit to Israel during the First Intifada, Yarrow began attending High Holy Day services at the Manhattan Romemu and B’nai Jeshurun ​​congregations without officially joining a synagogue. There he may have pondered the book of Daniel 2:33, in which the eponymous hero interpreted King Nebuchadnezzar’s dream, which was as confusing as any career path in popular music. In the Bible, the feet of a statue made of clay and iron symbolize a future kingdom that would be strong as iron and weak as clay.

How Peter Yarrow’s melodic contributions and personal transgressions, iron and sound, will be weighted and remembered is now left to posterity.