The name appears in almost every Alan Arkin obituary. Almost none of them get her story right.
When Alan Arkin died on June 29, 2023, at 89, tributes ran across Variety, PBS, the New York Times, the BBC. They covered his Oscar for Little Miss Sunshine, his Tony Award, his seven decades of work. Most noted his three marriages. His first wife, Jeremy Yaffe, got a sentence. Two if the obituary was generous.
What those sentences left out: she was a founding member of a folk recording group on Vanguard Records. She raised Arkin’s two oldest sons alone in California after their divorce. She trained as a nurse, rebuilt her life from nothing, and spent more than six decades without once seeking a camera. The story is longer than a sentence.
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Quick Facts: Jeremy Yaffe
| Born | 1937, Massachusetts, USA |
| Education | Bennington College, Vermont |
| Married Alan Arkin | December 1955 |
| Divorced | 1961 |
| Sons | Adam Arkin (b. Aug. 19, 1956), Matthew Arkin (b. Mar. 21, 1960) |
| Recording Career | The Baby Sitters, Vanguard Records (1958–1964) |
| Post-Divorce Career | Registered Nurse |
| Later Marriages | Remarried at least three more times after 1961 |
Who Is Jeremy Yaffe?
Jeremy Yaffe is an American woman born in 1937 in Massachusetts, best known as the first wife of Oscar-winning actor Alan Arkin. She is the mother of actors Adam Arkin and Matthew Arkin, and a founding performer in The Baby Sitters, a children’s folk music group that recorded four albums for Vanguard Records between 1958 and 1964. After her divorce from Alan Arkin in 1961, she retrained as a nurse and lived privately in California for decades.
Bennington College: Where the Story Begins
In the early 1950s, Jeremy enrolled at Bennington College in Bennington, Vermont. The school had a specific character at the time. Founded in 1932 as a women’s institution, it became the first college in America to place the visual and performing arts on equal academic footing with traditional subjects. Dancers had been choosing Bennington since the 1930s. By the time Jeremy arrived as a music and dance student, the college had a genuine reputation as a destination for young artists who took creative work seriously.
Alan Arkin had also enrolled at Bennington, following studies at Los Angeles State College from 1951 to 1953. The two met on campus. At the time, Arkin was an aspiring actor and guitarist with no significant career behind him.
In December 1955, they married. Jeremy was 18. Arkin was 21. In his 2011 memoir An Improvised Life, Arkin wrote that Bennington was “not pleased” about the wedding. They left school and headed to New York City with, by his own account, no plan at all.
New York, Financial Pressure, and The Tarriers
New York put the marriage under immediate strain. Arkin could not find acting work. He wrote in the memoir: “Floundering in New York with a pregnant wife to care for, I tried looking for acting work to no avail. I wanted desperately to be responsible.”
Adam Arkin was born on August 19, 1956. To keep the family afloat, Alan joined The Tarriers, a folk trio with Erik Darling and Bob Carey. The group co-wrote “The Banana Boat Song” in 1956, which reached No. 4 on the Billboard chart that year, outperforming Harry Belafonte’s version on the pop charts. They followed it with “Cindy, Oh Cindy” and toured Europe. Jeremy and Adam joined Alan on part of that tour.
Arkin left The Tarriers in early 1958 to pursue acting. What came next is the chapter of Jeremy Yaffe’s life that almost every published account misses.
The Baby Sitters: Jeremy Yaffe’s Own Recording Career
In 1958, Lee Hays, a founding member of The Weavers and a central figure in the American folk revival, wanted to build a children’s folk music group. He brought in Alan Arkin and, alongside him, Jeremy Yaffe as a founding performer. The fourth member was lyricist Doris Willens Kaplan. The group became The Baby Sitters.
They recorded for Vanguard Records, one of the leading independent folk labels in the country. Jeremy performed as a credited artist on every release, listed on the vinyl as “Jeremy Arkin.” The debut album, Folk Songs for Babies, Small Children, Parents and Baby Sitters, came out in 1959. A second record followed the same year.
The instrumentation was deliberately stripped back: acoustic guitar, toy piano, toy xylophone, and household objects including pots and pans. A young Adam Arkin sang on several tracks alongside both his parents. His Wikipedia page records that he “joined his parents singing in the children’s music group the Baby Sitters.” Both parents.
AllMusic’s biography of the group describes The Baby Sitters as doing “much to popularize traditional folk songs for children in the late ’50s and early ’60s.”
Jeremy Yaffe was a working, credited recording artist on a major independent folk label. That fact is almost entirely absent from the published record about her.
When she and Alan divorced in 1961, Barbara Dana, who became Alan’s second wife, took Jeremy’s place in the group. The same woman replaced her both as a spouse and as a member of The Baby Sitters. The group recorded its final album in 1968.
The Divorce
Matthew Arkin was born on March 21, 1960. Within months of the birth, the marriage ended. Alan Arkin wrote in An Improvised Life that financial instability had become “too much for Jeremy” and that she “took the children and left.” Matthew was three months old at the time of the separation. The divorce was finalized in 1961.
Jeremy was 23 years old, with two children under five, no income, and a career in the arts she had effectively set aside for six years.
Building a New Life: Nursing and Remarriage
After the divorce, Jeremy moved both boys to California. Matthew’s Wikipedia page confirms he “was raised by his mother in California until age 7,” after which he moved to New York to live with Alan and Barbara Dana in Greenwich Village. Adam made a similar transition in the early 1960s.
Jeremy went back to school and trained as a nurse, building an independent career in healthcare with no connection to the entertainment industry. According to Alan Arkin’s obituary in The Independent, she remarried after the divorce and went on to marry a total of three more times. All of those relationships stayed entirely out of public view.
By March 2000, when the New York Times profiled Matthew Arkin, Jeremy was single. Matthew reflected on his upbringing in a 2014 interview: “My life was crazy: a lot of divorces, a lot of moving between different configurations of family.”
Adam and Matthew Arkin: The Sons She Raised
Both of Jeremy Yaffe’s sons built serious, long-running careers in American entertainment.
Adam Arkin (b. August 19, 1956, Brooklyn) is best known for playing Dr. Aaron Shutt on Chicago Hope (CBS, 1994–2000), which brought him three primetime Emmy nominations. He received a Tony Award nomination in 1991 for I Hate Hamlet and won a Daytime Emmy in 2002 for directing My Louisiana Sky. His directing credits include The Americans, Grey’s Anatomy, Justified, and Fargo. On the film side, he appeared in the Coen Brothers’ A Serious Man (2009) and the FX series Sons of Anarchy as villain Ethan Zobelle.
Matthew Arkin (b. March 21, 1960, Brooklyn) graduated with honors in English from Wesleyan University and earned a law degree from Fordham Law School before leaving a law practice in White Plains, New York to act. His Broadway debut came in 1993 in Neil Simon’s Laughter on the 23rd Floor. He received a Drama Desk Award nomination for Dinner with Friends (2000) and has recurring credits in Get Shorty, Rescue Me, and 100 Centre Street. He published the detective novel In the Country of the Blind in 2016 and currently serves as Director of the Acting Intensive Program at South Coast Repertory in California.
In 1969, before either son had a professional career, Alan directed both boys in People Soup, a 12-minute short adapted from his own published short story. Adam was 13. Matthew was 9. The film received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film.
Alan Arkin’s Death and His Sons’ Statement
Alan Arkin died on June 29, 2023, at his home in San Marcos, California, from heart problems. He was 89. Adam, Matthew, and Anthony Arkin — Anthony being Alan’s son with Barbara Dana, not Jeremy — released a joint statement calling their father “a uniquely talented force of nature, both as an artist and a man” and “a loving husband, father, grand and great grandfather.”
Where Is Jeremy Yaffe Now?
As of March 2026, Jeremy Yaffe would be in her late 80s. There are no confirmed public appearances, no interviews on record, and no social media presence of any kind. No verified reports of her death exist. The privacy, at this point in her life, appears entirely intentional.
What the record does show: her name pressed into four Vanguard Records albums as a credited performer in the late 1950s and early 1960s; two sons with serious, decades-long careers across film, television, and Broadway; a nursing career built from scratch after a divorce with two young children; and a complete, deliberate absence from the public eye while the man she once shared a stage with became one of the most decorated actors in American film history.
Most people who knew Alan Arkin’s work never knew her name. The albums are still out there.
Frequently Asked Questions About Jeremy Yaffe
Who is Jeremy Yaffe?
Jeremy Yaffe is an American woman born in 1937 in Massachusetts. She is best known as the first wife of actor Alan Arkin, whom she married in December 1955. She is also the mother of actors Adam Arkin and Matthew Arkin, and was a founding member of The Baby Sitters, a children’s folk group on Vanguard Records.
Did Jeremy Yaffe have a career in music?
Yes. She was a founding and credited performer in The Baby Sitters, a folk music group that recorded four albums for Vanguard Records between 1958 and 1964. Her name appears on the original vinyl as “Jeremy Arkin.” She left the group after her divorce from Alan Arkin in 1961.
Why did Jeremy Yaffe and Alan Arkin divorce?
In his 2011 memoir An Improvised Life, Alan Arkin wrote that financial instability during his early acting career became “too much for Jeremy.” She left with their two sons within months of Matthew Arkin’s birth in 1960. The divorce was finalized in 1961.
How many times did Jeremy Yaffe marry?
She married at least four times in total: first to Alan Arkin in December 1955, followed by three additional marriages after their 1961 divorce, according to Alan Arkin’s obituary in The Independent. She was single as of March 2000.
Is Jeremy Yaffe still alive?
There are no confirmed public reports of Jeremy Yaffe’s death as of March 2026. She would be in her late 80s. She has lived entirely out of public view for decades, and her current status is not publicly known.
Sources: Alan Arkin, An Improvised Life (2011); Wikipedia — Alan Arkin, Adam Arkin, Matthew Arkin, The Baby Sitters (folk group), Doris Willens; IMDB; AllMusic; Vanguard Records album credits via Discogs and Amazon; PBS NewsHour; Variety; ABC News; ITV News; Al Jazeera; The Independent (Alan Arkin obituary, cited by AmoMama); People; Hollywood Life; New York Times (March 2000, cited by AmoMama); Chapman University faculty bio; IBDB Broadway Database.
