Remembering Tom Lehrer -- Singer, Songwriter, Satirist, and Mathematician

Tom Lehrer, the master satirist of the 1950s and 1960s who was a big hit on college campuses and the nightclubs of Greenwich Village, died at 97 in Cambridge, Massachusetts on Saturday.

A Harvard-trained mathematician, his sarcasm touched on the major issues of that era, including, politics, the Cold War, and a variety of social issues.

Growing up in a secular Jewish home, he wrote two songs that had Jewish elements, Hanukkah in Santa Monica, and National Brotherhood Week. 

As Phylissa Kramer wrote for JTA,

“(I’m Spending) Hanukkah in Santa Monica” debuted in 1990, well after Lehrer’s peak as a performer, on a come-from-retirement performance on Garrison Keillor’s radio show.

Keillor commissioned the new song from Lehrer because, he observed, Jews had written many popular Christmas songs but none for their own holidays.

“There was thus a deplorable lacuna in the repertoire, which this song, a sort of answer to ‘White Christmas.’ was intended to remedy,” Lehrer said on air.

The resulting song — which also mentions spending “Shavuos in East St. Louis,” “Rosh Hashanah in Arizona” and “Yom Kippur in Mississippi” (try saying it out loud with a Southern accent) — has grown more popular in recent years. The writer Sarah Weinman attributed its rise to the New York City nightclub impresario Michael Feinstein, whom she said had turned the gossip columnist Liz Smith, composer Marvin Hamlisch and writer Nora Ephron on to the song. 

While “(I’m Spending) Hanukkah in Santa Monica” was the Lehrer song that put Judaism in the title, at least one other famous song contained Jewish content as well. The 1965 song “National Brotherhood Week,” which pilloried an event promoting togetherness at a time of rising tension over race, drew laughs when he got to the verse about religion.

“Oh, the Protestants hate the Catholics, And the Catholics hate the Protestants,” he sang. “And the Hindus hate the Moslems, And everybody hates the Jews.”

Here are two videos of Lehrer playing the songs. Enjoy!