Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Forward 50 2015

Amy Schumer

2015 was the year of Amy Schumer.

When she wasn’t making viral waves on “Inside Amy Schumer,” being named one of Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People of 2015, writing and acting in the hit comedy “Trainwreck,” trading text messages with Jennifer Lawrence, winning Emmys and making surprise appearances at Billy Joel concerts, Schumer, 34, was busy advocating for gun control alongside her cousin Senator Chuck Schumer.

Oh, and there’s the matter of that $8 million book advance.

But before she was up onstage thanking her makeup artist for her smashing smoky eye, she was Amy Beth Schumer from Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

When she was 9, her father was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Three years later, with bankruptcy looming, her parents divorced. Schumer’s mother moved the family to Long Island, where they attended Central Synagogue of Nassau County in Rockville Centre.

Rabbi Jeffrey Salkin, who knew Amy then, described her as “a sweet, funny kid, who often asked probing and humorous questions in religious school.”

Schumer describes herself as a proud but lapsed Jew. “My experience of Judaism was this,” she told pop culture website Complex in July. “I went to temple every Friday, and went to Sunday school, you know, Hebrew school, and then I had my bat mitzvah, and then I think that might be the last time I was in a temple.”

That bat mitzvah? “I brought all my friends to Medieval Times,” she told Complex. “I guess it didn’t have a theme, but the theme was we had a blast and we ate chicken with our hands.”

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.

Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.