A voice for his generation, Tom Lehrer found laughter even in the most sensitive aspects of Jewish life and history
Lehrer, who famously left show business behind to teach, has died at 97
Tom Lehrer sits beside the piano in his house in Santa Cruz, California, in 2000. Photo by AP Photo/Paul Sakuma
By Benjamin Ivry July 29, 2025
The American Jewish singer-songwriter Tom Lehrer, who died July 26 at age 97, drew on Yiddishkeit in his sardonic ditties, although perhaps not always as explicitly as some Jewish fans might have wished.
Lehrer’s dazzling presence followed European performance traditions, where satirical, musically gifted Jews entertained prewar audiences. This societal role was less acute in America of the Eisenhower and Kennedy eras, when Lehrer’s career flourished.
Marla Morris’ Jewish Intellectuals and the University notes that the Austrian Jewish essayist Jean Améry (born Hans Chaim Maier) accurately identified Lehrer as a chansonnier, or cabaret performer who writes and performs their own material, often with sociopolitical commentary.
Améry approvingly quoted Lehrer’s ironic observation about racist America’s National Brotherhood Week: “And the Catholics hate the Protestants and the Protestants hate the Catholics and the Moslems hate the Hindus — and everybody hates the Jews.”
So excoriating was Lehrer on the subject of antisemitism that in the official German translation of his song, to avoid unsettling postwar Teutonic audiences, the final line was altered to “And now they even hate the pope!”
Amid all the expression of ire, many Jewish fans revered Lehrer.
In a memoir, the Czernowitz-born Jewish writer and cabaret entertainer Benno Weiser Varon lauded Lehrer for his “all-around talent” in capably accompanying his own singing at the keyboard while interpreting songs for which he penned both words and music.
Lehrer’s skills were acquired early in a prosperous Upper East Side New York Jewish family, whose Yiddishkeit, he would later recall, had “more to do with the delicatessen than the synagogue.” Indeed, his pacifist tune “So Long, Mom (A Song for World War III)” includes the lines: “Remember, Mommy, / I’m off to get a Commie, / So send me a salami…” The allusion to processed meat echoed a WWII Jewish deli marketing ploy in which mothers were urged to “send a salami to your boy in the army.”
Around the same time, Lehrer was sent in summertime by his parents to Camp Androscoggin in Maine, patronized by New York families of German Jewish origin. Among the happy campers was Alan Jay Lerner, and when Lehrer later worked as a counselor, one of his charges was the musical theater overachiever Stephen Sondheim.
Although Lehrer claimed he spoke little to Sondheim because of a two-year age difference between them, Lehrer eventually worked on an aborted project to create a stage musical based on the story of Sweeney Todd, the vengeful homicidal barber; this theme Sondheim later exploited for one of his most acclaimed works.
He entered Harvard College at age 15, and studied mathematics with Irving Kaplansky, of Polish Jewish origin. And though he never completed a doctoral dissertation, when Lehrer did focus on a project, the results were often brilliant. A rare example of a completely Jewish-themed melody, “(I’m Spending) Hanukkah in Santa Monica” was first debuted around 1990, long after Lehrer had halted his performing career. Notably lacking the acidulous verve that vivified his earlier efforts, “Hanukkah in Santa Monica” nevertheless delighted Jewish fans, despite painful japes such as rhyming Yom Kippur with Mississippi.
To prepare this crowd-pleaser, Lehrer researched with scientific precision, and would inform friends that unexpectedly, the first Broadway tunesmith to kvell over Jewish holidays was the decidedly non-Jewish Meredith Willson (who wrote The Music Man) in a show, Here’s Love, in which a lyric rhymes “love” with “Tisha B’av.”
Although the Jewish lyricist Carolyn Leigh deemed the love/Tisha B’av juxtaposition the “most desperate rhyme I’ve ever heard,” Lehrer clearly retained the concept of wildly rhymed Jewish holidays, and decades afterwards, a song emerged to enchant his fans.
With other numbers, Lehrer appears to have operated on instinct rather than rational planning. In a song skewering the ex-Nazi rocket designer Wernher von Braun, who was later co-opted for the U.S. space program, full information was lacking about the scientist’s wartime misdeeds, SS membership and use of concentration camp laborers.
Yet as von Braun’s biographer Michael Neufeld implies, Lehrer felt there was something innately amiss with von Braun’s sudden change of allegiance. So he followed the example of Bronx-born Stanley Kubrick, who lampooned von Braun in the film Doctor Strangelove. Lehrer began his dissection with ominous noodling on the piano with the melody for the “Germany Song,” known for its words “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles” (“Germany, Germany above all”), defused by Lehrer’s use of a Yiddish locution with von Braun responding to accusations by saying “Nazi, Shmazi!”
For all his mercilessness in some contexts, Lehrer clearly relished retreating to a Jewish world of childhood where, as he states in “Hanukkah in Santa Monica,” “like a baby in his cradle / I’ll be playing with my dreidel…”
Writing and performing in his own little sound universe, Lehrer indeed played with his dreidel until around age 40 or so, when he began to take the world too seriously to find levity in the subject matter, or so he asserted.
He claimed to consider hiring an actor to substitute for him at recitals, and even settled on a candidate, the English actor Roddy McDowell, supposedly for his clean-cut, collegiate appearance at the time. This odd project was never carried out, and although there have been several attempts by others to perform Lehrer’s creations onstage, they mostly lack the personalized intimacy that their author as one-man band could convey.
One possible exception was the surreal, exultantly bizarre English Jewish comedian Marty Feldman, who managed a version of the Catholic-bashing “Vatican Rag” which, like Lehrer’s original, appears to want to obtain revenge for nearly two millennia of church antisemitism.
At his apogee, Lehrer spared no one, including Jews, and at a concert in Denmark, he even warned the crowd that his appearance might be a means for America to get even with the omnipresent Danish Jewish musical comedian Victor Borge, who had arrived in New York as a wartime refugee.
Despite such astringency, Lehrer’s posterity is secure, with later comic songwriters like the English Jewish comedian Matt Lucas (of Little Britain fame) clearly learning from the lilting mock-calypso that Lehrer wrote to discuss the topic of pollution.
More surprisingly, in a late play, Arthur Miller’s Broken Glass (1994), about a Brooklyn Jewish couple traumatized by Kristallnacht in Europe, a character adopts speech rhythms heard earlier in Lehrer’s “everybody hates the Jews” lyric. Miller’s character, a doctor, suggests that everyone is persecuted, including Catholics by Protestants and vice versa, and “of course all of them by the Jews.”
This reversal of Lehrer’s message, decades later, depicts Jews as persecutors rather than targets of odium. Yet the overall discourse matches, in which at least for a time, Tom Lehrer lastingly found laughter in even the most sensitive aspects of Jewish life and history.
