In “Girls,” the groundbreaking HBO show which first aired in 2012, Hannah Horvath (Lena Dunham) claims that she is the voice of her generation. “Or, at least,” she hilariously qualifies to her parents, “a voice of a generation.”
It’s a self-aware pronouncement written by and directed at the show’s creator, Lena Dunham, who throughout the run of “Girls” used Hannah as an alter ego. But, more than 10 years later, the joke is on us. Whatever you think of her, Lena Dunham was right. She is the voice of her generation. And now, “Too Much” — her first big TV show since “Girls” — is slated to come out next week on Netflix. According to her, the show is semi-autobiographical and about “what happens when a loud, messy, complicated Jewess descends on a city of deeply repressed people.”
But wait… does this mean that Lena Dunham is Jewish?
It’s time to investigate!
If you’ve been following along with our previous investigations of this nature, you know that we’re looking to check at least one of two boxes. Does Lena Dunham identify as culturally or religiously Jewish? And/or, does Lena Dunham have Jewish ancestry? If the answer to either of those questions is a resounding yes, she’s a member of the tribe!
Let’s start with the second question: Does Lena Dunham have Jewish ancestry? On her father’s side, the answer is no. Lena’s father is painter Carroll Dunham. Thanks to the Dunham Genealogy Research Society / Dunham-Singletary Family Connections, a very real organization with the goal of documenting the memory of the Dunham family tree, we know that Lena’s Dunham side is of mainly English Protestant stock. (You can read up on her full lineage here. Fair warning, it contains many, many ancestors named Carroll.)
Her mother’s side is a different story. Lena’s mother is Laurie Simmons, an artist and photographer who grew up on Great Neck, Long Island. Her parents, Samuel and Dorothy, were both the children of Russian and Polish Jewish immigrants. In 2024, she appeared on the PBS show “Finding Your Roots” with Henry Louis Gates Jr., in which she learned more about her Jewish family and the family she lost in the Holocaust.
So, does Lena Dunham have Jewish ancestry? Indeed she does.
But how does she identify, if at all? Thanks to Hey Alma’s partner site Kveller, we don’t have to look to far. In 2024, Lena spoke to Kveller about a movie she was starring in called “Treasure.” In the film, she played the child of a Holocaust survivor who was visiting Poland with her father for the first time since he left. In speaking about her own Jewish identity, Lena said, “I have always played Jewish characters, because I’m a Jewish person. And the characters that I wrote came from Jewish families, which is what I relate to, and what I connect to, but always in a way that was very cultural.”
“I came from a Reform Jewish family,” she went on. “It was very much a part of the culture every day; we went to temple exactly the days that you had to, no more, no less. But at the same time, those traditions formed me.”
In spite of a more cultural connection to Judaism, Lena and her husband Luis Felber still had a pretty Jewish wedding. (Luis is also Jewish via his paternal side.) The pair were married under a chuppah by Dr. Harrie Cedar, the Jewish chaplain at King’s College in London. They also circled each other three times (an egalitarian take on the traditional Jewish wedding ritual of the bride circling the groom seven times), Luis spoke in Hebrew and they broke the glass. Apparently, doing these Jewish rituals was a nod to Lena’s late grandmother Dottie, to whom they were important.
“We had the moment under the tallit, and that was my favorite thing, because we got to have this private moment in front of everyone, which was really incredible,” Lena told Vogue at the time.
Verdict: Yes, Lena Dunham is Jewish.
