Peter Yarrow sang the soundtrack to my Jewish childhood
He never led with his Jewishness, but consistently invoked the mandate of ‘tikkun olam’
Peter Yarrow plays acoustic guitar as he performs in 2017 during a Vietnam peace commemoration. Photo by Getty Images
By Abigail Pogrebin January 7, 2025
I always felt like I’d lived through musical history at age 16, because it was at my family’s annual Hanukkah party in 1982 that Peter Yarrow played “Light One Candle” for the very first time — and, even more memorably, asked our opinion on the lyrics he was still rewriting.
He told the 60-some people packing my parent’s living room on Manhattan’s Upper West Side that night that he wanted to make sure, in a climate of politicized Jewish opinion — even back then! — that the words wouldn’t alienate “so everyone would hear them.” And that’s how what began as a response to the Lebanon War raging at the time became a rousing, lasting reminder of miraculous Jewish endurance.
His final version threaded the needle from pacifism to patriotism so beautifully that it’s no wonder it became a kind of new anthem for the Jewish holiday:
Light one candle for the Maccabee children
With thanks that their light didn’t die
Light one candle for the pain they endured
When their right to exist was denied
Light one candle for the terrible sacrifice
Justice and freedom demand
But light one candle for the wisdom to know
When the peacemaker’s time is at hand
Peter, who was 86 when he died on Tuesday — less than a week after the final Hanukkah candle — was to me not just part of the legendary folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary but a dear friend of my parents, the feminist writer and activist Letty Cottin Pogrebin and labor lawyer Bert Pogrebin (he sang at my father’s funeral last spring). He was a man who never led with his Jewishness, but consistently invoked the mandate of “tikkun olam” – the obligation to repair the world, which he said encapsulated his personal ethos before he learned it was a core Jewish one.
Indeed, Peter’s politics – whether against American policy in Vietnam or Nicaragua, or on behalf of the downtrodden anywhere and everywhere — felt inseparable from his musical performances. Every concert felt like a crying-out – not so much for social uprising but for strenuous responsibility to those in trouble anywhere.
I was raised to see political activism as synonymous with Judaism; maybe that’s why I raised my own children to sing “Light One Candle” more often than “Maoz Tzur” — it felt more aligned with our contemporary Jewish DNA.
The Yarrows lived just a few doors down from our apartment building on West 67th Street and Peter would often turn up for dinner, never without his guitar. His slightly stooped gait and worn face looked to me to have been weathered and wearied in the shtetl.
Peter, Paul and Mary provided the soundtrack of my Jewish childhood: “If I Had a Hammer,” “This Little Light of Mine,” “Puff the Magic Dragon,” “Blowing in the Wind,” “Lemon Tree,” “This Land is Your Land.” My father, an amateur guitarist, would play these songs like they were a kind of liturgy while we sat at his knees singing along. I realize now that I fully equated my parents’ oft-emphasized values of compassion, decency and equality with the messages of Peter’s canon.
While both my parents were close to Peter and his kinetic daughter, Bethany, (so much hipper than I could ever be,) it was Dad whose eyes sparkled most whenever he listened to Peter in person, who knew every stanza of “Stewball” and “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” I can picture Dad listening to our record player on a Sunday afternoon with his third cup of coffee and The New York Times spread in front of him all day.
Peter’s voice was unmistakable – soft, soothing, reassuring — and I recall so vividly how he could talk at the same time as he strummed, introducing each song with the history behind it, giving almost a mini-sermon between verses.
His celebrity was quiet but powerful. I remember seeing my 3-year-old nephew, Ethan, freeze to the point of paralysis when he met Peter for the first time in 2000 — and a group of New York City cantors I’d invited to accompany Peter on “Light One Candle” at a Jewish Theological Seminary event in 2015 react pretty much the same way. Any time I watched someone watch Peter strum and sing with such pathos, I saw them well up with tears as if his voice was piercing something primal and pure.
The two most poignant examples came just last winter, when Peter visited my ailing father, who could no longer go comfortably to a restaurant. Peter sat at the dinner table long after dinner had been cleared, guitar on his lap, patiently playing Dad’s favorites for just six people. Mom used her iPhone to record my father – who, despite having trouble speaking fluidly, was singing along with every word.
Then in March, at the memorial service, Peter played one of Dad’s standards, “Sweet Survivor.” As Peter walked slowly to the bimah of Manhattan’s Congregation B’nai Jeshurun, his voice was not at its steadiest or strongest. But his affection came through in every line.
Carry on my sweet survivor, carry on my lonely friend
Don’t give up on the dream, and don’t you let it end.
Carry on my sweet survivor,
Though you know that something’s gone
For everything that matters carry on.
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