National Brotherhood Week, by Tom Lehrer (1965)
Contributed by: Tom Lehrer, Aharon N. Varady (transcription)
“National Brotherhood Week” by Tom Lehrer was first released on his album “That Was The Year That Was” (1965). National Brotherhood Week in February was first established in the 1930s by the National Conference of Christians and Jews as a means of promoting the values of inter-religious tolerance and civic interdependence. The week gained federal support from President Franklin Roosevelt during World War Ⅱ as a means of combatting fascist and nativist objections to a vision of democracy built on the foundation of a multicultural civil society. By the time Tom Lehrer lampooned the civic commemoration in 1965, the McCarthyite oppressions of the Red Scare and Lavender Scare during the Cold War, the manufactured Vietnam War, lingering anti-Semitic prejudice and suspicion, the continued struggle for civil rights with its continued lynchings, the assassination of JFK and increasing political violence had all exposed National Brotherhood Week for many young adults as phony, a historical relic that had lost the import of any cultural imperative it might have once possessed. . . .