In Peter Yarrow’s legacy, an uneasy blend of Jewish values and personal transgressions
The folksinging Peter of Peter, Paul and Mary has died at 86
Peter Yarrow performs at City Vineyard in 2020. Photo by Getty Images
By Benjamin Ivry January 7, 2025
The American Jewish singer songwriter Peter Yarrow, who died Tuesday at age 86, exemplified the paradoxes of assimilating in the world of pop music. Although he was never bar mitzvahed, following a secular upbringing, he wrote, and performed with his group Peter, Paul, and Mary the popular Hanukkah song “Light One Candle” as a pacifist response to the 1982 Lebanon War.
Closer to an earnest Broadway, or off-Broadway, number than a true folk melody in its allusion to the Books of the Maccabees, the tune represents the ambiguous rapport of PP&M, as Yarrow termed the trio, to traditional music. Formed, or according to some music mavens, “manufactured” in 1961 by impresario Albert Grossman, a Jewish Simon Cowell of his day, PP&M’s creation involved auditioning and rejecting highly individual folkies like Dave Van Ronk and Carolyn Hester who went on to accomplished, if more niche, careers.
But as early as a May 1964 feature in the Saturday Evening Post, Yarrow was impatiently dismissing complaints from purists about their low-key, sanitized versions of more rough-hewn songs by Bob Dylan and others. Yarrow insisted to the Post: “We’re not authentics” and so it would be “hypocritical” to attempt to sing in any style other than their own. Deliberately adopting what Yarrow called a “casual” tone of understatement, PP&M sought to “affirm” rather than “protest.”
To this end, PP&M was formatted with Yarrow and Paul Stookey as crooning acolytes paying homage to the strongest presence of the group, Mary Travers, who humorously deemed herself “The Towering Shiksa.”
Influenced by the Weavers, an older, 50% Jewish quartet, the pop cool of Yarrow (PP&M’s sole Jew) was unlike the former ensemble that hewed closer to hardscrabble musical origins. The Weavers stirringly performed music by the African American singer Huddie Ledbetter (Lead Belly) rather than Dylan’s more distanced filterings of Piedmont blues as championed by PP&M.
Mary Travers, for all her talent, could not rival the monumental voice of the Weavers’ American Jewish star Ronnie Gilbert, nor could Yarrow challenge in learned musicality the Weavers’ other Jewish talent, Fred Hellerman. Perhaps for this reason, on rare occasions when Yarrow and team essayed overt Yiddishkeit, as in “Light One Candle,” it lacked the life-giving fervor of The Weavers’ early hit “Tzena, Tzena,” a 1941 Hebrew composition by Issachar Miron.
To their credit, PP&M were constant presences at Civil Rights protests, and famously at the March on Washington (1963) sang Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind” in an attempt to normalize, homogenize, and even tranquilize with their cool pop sound the crowd that had gathered to ban racial inequities and segregation.
They were followed on that occasion by the impassioned tones of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Yet a similarly removed, otherworldly stance in Yarrow’s biggest song success, the ever-popular “Puff, the Magic Dragon,” led some listeners to assume that it must refer to hallucinogenics, which Yarrow always staunchly denied.
Instead, the group’s longevity was ascribed by Yarrow in a 2002 issue of the Atlanta Jewish Times as due to their actions as “the Tikkun Olam trio.” A degree of chutzpah was also at work, as when PP&M intoned the Irish American activist Anne Feeney’s anthem for civil disobedience, “Have You Been to Jail for Justice?” when they knew that Yarrow had been incarcerated under different circumstances.
As he discussed in the Baltimore Jewish Times in April 2006 and elsewhere, Yarrow was arrested and convicted in 1970 for what were termed “immoral and improper liberties” with a 14-year-old girl who visited his hotel room after a concert. He served three months in jail and 11 years later he petitioned for, and was granted, a presidential pardon by Jimmy Carter.
As recently as May 2021, The Washington Post headlined another story: “Peter Yarrow, of Peter, Paul and Mary, pardoned by Carter for molesting a girl, may have sexually assaulted others.”
In his petition to Carter, Yarrow wrote that he wished to demonstrate to his own children “that society has forgiven their father” and “their daddy did something very wrong [but] their daddy has also done much for society to help eliminate want and inequality where he saw it.”
In this context, further chutzpah might be seen in his decision to accept a 2018 Lifesaver Award from ELEM Youth in Distress in Israel, an organization that helps “troubled youth in Israel, including homeless and those suffering from substance abuse, delinquency, prostitution and suicidal tendencies.” Yarrow had campaigned strenuously against school bullying, motivated, as he frequently asserted, by Yiddishkeit.
His estranged father (the family name was originally Yaroshevitz) was a cofounder of Radio Free Europe, among other CIA links, whereas Yarrow’s stepfather, Harold Wisebrode, was executive director of Manhattan’s Central Synagogue.
The sense of tzedakah possibly gained from an older generation was linked to music, starting when as an eight-year-old he was taken by his mother to hear the Jewish violinist Isaac Stern perform. He tried lessons with the wife of Mischa Mischakoff, one of Arturo Toscanini’s concertmasters at the NBC Symphony, as explained in an April 2024 interview. Eventually Yarrow abandoned the fiddle for the less stressful guitar.
In the same chat, Yarrow claimed to have been motivated as a youth by Leonard Bernstein Young People’s Concerts, which only began in 1958, when Yarrow was already an adult. More certain early inspirations derived from the Austrian Jewish folk singer Theodore Bikel, whom Yarrow referred to as “like the Jewish Pete Seeger.” An early brush with antisemitism occurred during his first year at Cornell University, as he recalled to Jewish Journal in 2004; in the student dormitory, someone called Yarrow a “dirty Jew” and punched him “hard in the face.”
The Saturday Evening Post described his appearance in 1964 as “Talmudic.” But in 2009 he told another journalist that for him, Jewishness meant “to live according to justice, and that’s a burden.” It was necessary to “form our own set of morality and values, and live by them.” Clearly this was a lifelong preoccupation of Yarrow’s, as he reflected in 2017, stating that he wanted to be remembered “as a person with feet of clay.” Apologizing for his actions that went against his “ethical standards” (although apparently never directly expressing regret to any victims in any published interviews) Yarrow sought to leave an example “as a person who worked to make things better.”
A longtime resident of New York’s Upper West Side, after a visit to Israel during The First Intifada, Yarrow began to attend High Holy Days services at the Manhattan Romemu and B’nai Jeshurun congregations, without formally joining any synagogue. There he may have reflected on the Book of Daniel 2:33 in which the eponymous hero interpreted King Nebuchadnezzar’s dream, as confusing as any pop music career trajectory. In the Bible, a statue’s feet of clay and iron symbolize a future kingdom which would be strong as iron and weak as clay.
How Peter Yarrow’s tuneful contributions and personal transgressions, iron and clay, will be weighed and remembered is now up to posterity.
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