Rachel Maddow, Surging MSNBC Host, Has Surprising Jewish Roots
Image by getty images
Rachel Maddow, the liberal MSNBC host, comes from a family of practicing Catholics. But that’s not the whole story – she has one paternal Jewish grandparent from modern-day Lithuana.
Maddow, who now anchors one of the highest rated programs in cable news, has a hodgepodge of European heritage. Her mother is from Canada and mostly descends from English and Irish stock.
On her father’s side, her grandmother is of Dutch extraction – with her husband as the Jewish link in the chain, and also the source of the Maddow family name.
Maddow is of course an Anglicization, though – the original surname is said to have been “Medwedof.”
Maddow is coming off a great week – one of the first in which she beat Fox News in the 9 p.m. time slot when her show airs. The Stanford University alum and Rhodes scholar started on the network in 2008. She lives in New York with her partner Susan Mikula.
Contact Daniel J. Solomon at [email protected] or on Twitter @DanielJSolomon
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
