Pete Seeger sings for Iraq!

Happy birthday, Pete Seeger! Yesterday was the legendary songwriter's 90th birthday, and a massive concert attended by 15,000 admirers was held in his honor this weekend in NYC to raise needed funds for the Hudson River Clearwater that Pete helped found almost 40 years ago. I grew up alongside the Hudson, regularly attending strawberry, pumpkin, and shad festivals hosted by the Clearwater, with free music provided by Seeger, other members of The Weavers, and plenty of other folk and bluegrass artists. One of my earliest childhood memories is of splitting a peanut butter & jelly sandwich with Pete Seeger, since my parents had told me he liked PB&J just as much as I did!

Pete was also honored in a unique way recently by a young Iraqi refugee named Taif Jany — a young man who is now spending his first year as a university student at Union College in Schenectady, New York. Jany is part of the first group of young Iraqis to come to the U.S. through a program called the Iraqi Student Project (ISP), which I wrote about last fall. ISP is now preparing to welcome a second group of Iraqi students this coming summer to the United States, most of whom have been living as refugees in Syria and Jordan. I am delighted that three other schools in the Hudson River valley have agreed to accept and provide free tuition to ISP youth as part of this national initiative — Bard College in Dutchess County, Manhattanville College in Westchester County, and Nyack College in Rockland County (just five minutes from the Fellowship of Reconciliation's national headquarters!).

In this video, filmed last week by local documentary filmmaker Andrew Courtney, Taif Jany presents Pete Seeger with an Iraqi version of the Woody Guthrie classic song "This Land Is My Land," which Seeger helped make a national sing-along favorite. It is well worth watching this 10-minute clip, both to see the nanogenarian statesman-musician sing alongside the 20-year-old Iraqi, as well as to learn more about ISP!