JTA — Tom Lehrer never identified closely with his ancestral Judaism. But the famed satirist and mathematician, who died Saturday at 97, wrote one of the first popular songs about the Jewish festival of lights.

“(I’m Spending) Hanukkah in Santa Monica” debuted in 1990, well after Lehrer’s peak as a performer, in a comeback-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 song was a departure for Lehrer, who was born in Manhattan in 1928 and grew up in a secular Jewish family. He rarely spoke about his personal life, but in the liner notes of a compendium album released in 2000, he addressed his family’s relationship to Judaism.

“More to do with the delicatessen than the synagogue. My brother and I went to Sunday School, but we had Christmas trees, and ‘God’ was primarily an expletive, usually preceded by ‘oh’ or ‘my’ or both,” he said.

Lehrer enrolled in Harvard University at 15, where he studied math before joining the US Army and then returning to........

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