Jerry Seinfeld

Seinfeld was born on April 29, 1954, to a Jewish family in Brooklyn, New York City. His father, Kalmen Seinfeld, a sign painter, was from Hungary and collected jokes that he heard while serving in World War II. His mother, Betty (née Hosni) and her parents, Selim and Salha Hosni, were Mizrahi Jews from Aleppo, Syria. Their nationality was stated as Turkish when they immigrated in 1917, as Syria was under the Ottoman Empire. Seinfeld has an older sister, Carolyn. Salha's mother Garez Dayan, Seinfeld's great-grandmother, was a member of the Dayan rabbinic family, who claim ancestry back to the Medieval Exilarchs, and from the Exilarchs back to the Biblical King David. Seinfeld's second cousin is alternative metal musician and actor Evan Seinfeld. Seinfeld grew up in Massapequa, New York, and attended Massapequa High School on Long Island. At 16, he spent time volunteering in Kibbutz Sa'ar in Israel. He attended the State University of New York at Oswego, and transferred after his second year to Queens College, City University of New York, from which he graduated in 1976 with a degree in communications and theater.