What do poisoning pigeons in the park and Yiddish have in common?

Well, this February at The Vilna, you can find out.

I don’t know if it was because my dad was an MIT guy, or simply the era I grew up in, but songs like “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park” and “The Masochism Tango” are part of the soundtrack of my life. They’re lodged somewhere deep in my memory, equal parts clever, absurd, and impossible to forget. You start humming along before you fully register just how delightfully irreverent and nerdy the lyrics actually are.

That’s why I was so sad when I learned that Tom Lehrer died in 2025. Lehrer’s work has always occupied a unique cultural space: comedic songs that are playful on the surface, but razor-sharp underneath. His music skewered politics, academia, love, war, and human folly with wit that was at once silly and devastatingly precise. He made smart funny, and funny smart, long before that was a cultural norm.

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When we heard about a touring tribute to Tom Lehrer, I knew I couldn’t be the only fan. Bringing this program to The Vilna felt like an obvious yes—not just because Lehrer is beloved, but because his work sits at the crossroads of so many things we care deeply about: Jewish humor, intellectual playfulness, cultural critique, and Boston history.

Like so many Jewish cultural programs, this event feels especially meaningful in The Vilna Shul space. Lehrer’s humor didn’t emerge in a vacuum. It draws from a lineage of Jewish comedic sensibility that overlaps deeply with Yiddish culture—where satire, irony, and wordplay have long been tools for survival, commentary, and joy. That tradition lives on in this performance through the presence of actor Bobby Underwood and Zalmen Mlotek, musical director of the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene, whose work has been central to keeping Yiddish music vibrant and alive for new generations, and grounds Lehrer’s satire in a rich Jewish musical lineage. 

There’s also something uniquely Boston about honoring Tom Lehrer here. Lehrer was very much a son of this city. He studied mathematics at Harvard University, taught at MIT and Harvard, and spent many years immersed in the academic culture that both shaped and inspired his work. His songs are filled with the fingerprints of that world, precise, analytical, and joyfully subversive.

Lehrer died in his home in Cambridge, making it feel especially fitting to pay homage to his comedic and scientific legacy just across the river, in a historic Jewish space that has witnessed generations of cultural evolution. In many ways, this program bridges past and present: Yiddish tradition and modern satire, sacred space and irreverent humor, Boston’s intellectual history and Jewish cultural life.

This February, The Vilna becomes the meeting point for all of it. Join us for “Thank You, Tom Lehrer” on Wednesday, Feb. 18, at The Vilna. Come laugh, hum along, and rediscover how a Boston-born Jewish satirist helped shape the way we think about humor, culture, and ourselves.

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