Team USA hockey player Quinn Hughes is having a busy Olympic debut.
When the Minnesota Wild defenseman isn’t busy seeing ghosts, he’s chasing a gold medal in his debut Olympics alongside his younger brother, New Jersey Devils forward Jack Hughes. In Team USA’s quarterfinal match against Sweden, he scored his first Olympic goal — an overtime screamer that sent the United States into the semifinal match with Slovakia.
@nbcolympics USA WINS IT IN OT! WHAT A GAME. 🇺🇸 #WinterOlympics
So perhaps you’re wondering are Quinn Hughes and Jack Hughes Jewish? Let’s take a closer look at these hockey phenoms!
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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. Do Quinn and Jack Hughes identify as culturally or religiously Jewish? And/or, do Quinn and Jack Hughes have Jewish ancestry? If the answer to either of those questions is a resounding yes, they’re members of the tribe!
Let’s start with their family. Quinn and Jack’s dad is Jim Hughes. Jim is a former hockey player and coach, originally from Hicksville, New York. Currently, he is the director of player development for CAA Hockey. According to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Jim has a Catholic background. So that’s a no on their paternal heritage.
Meanwhile, their mom is Ellen Weinberg-Hughes. She’s a former U.S. women’s national team hockey player, having won a silver medal with Team USA at the 1992 IIHF Women’s World Championship. Ellen is currently the U.S. women’s hockey team’s player development consultant which means, yes, she did just coach her team to a gold medal over Canada at the Olympics.
While we’re listing all of Ellen’s accolades, we might as well mention that she played three sports for the University of New Hampshire (hockey, soccer and lacrosse), worked in sports broadcasting at the Olympics and the 1999 FIFA Women’s World Cup, raised three NHL hockey players (youngest brother Luke is a defenseman for the New Jersey Devils) and was inducted into the International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame in 2024.
Wow.
So yes, Ellen is Jewish. According to her brother Adam, they’re from a Southern Jewish family with roots in St. Louis (where Ellen was born), Dallas (where she grew up), Arkansas (where their grandparents lived) and Tennessee (where their father was born). Thanks to Ellen’s parents’ wedding announcement and Ethniceleb.com (take the latter with a grain of salt), Ellen’s Jewish ancestors hail from Russia, Poland, Austria and Lithuania.
Despite Ellen’s family experiencing “discrimination because of their faith and culture,” according to brother Adam, the Jewish value of tikkun olam, or healing the world, seems to run in the Weinberg family. Ellen’s father, Dr. Warren A. Weinberg, was a prominent doctor and “pioneer in the field of learning disabilities.”
“My father spent a lot of time trying to get schools to understand that the problem wasn’t with kids who couldn’t sit still but the problem was the structure of schools,” Adam told HuffPost in 2016. “If the schools were student-centered rather than administrator centered the kids would thrive.”
Adam also relayed to Denison University’s magazine that his grandfather did solidarity work in his community. “When the local banks would not lend to African-Americans, he worked with others to run a bank. He was not a banker. He sold clothes. But when he saw a problem, he got people together, and they worked to resolve it,” he explained.
All that to say: Yes, Quinn Hughes and Jack Hughes have Jewish ancestry.
So now the question remains: How do they identify?
The answer to this question remains harder. In a 2019 interview on “The Michael Kay” on ESPN Radio, Jack shared that his family did Passover when he was younger. Also, per the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, he had a bar mitzvah. However, in recent years neither Jack nor Quinn have spoken about their religious identity. They have also not publicly shared anything to suggest a cultural connection to Jewishness.
Verdict: Yes, Quinn and Jack Hughes (and their little brother Luke) have Jewish heritage on their mother’s side. However, it’s unclear as to whether they identify as culturally or religiously Jewish now.
