Jerry Springer

Gerald Norman Springer was born on February 13, 1944, in the London Underground's Highgate station while the station was in use as a shelter from German bombing during World War II. Springer spent his first years living on Chandos Road, East Finchley. His parents, Margot (née Kallmann; a bank clerk) and Richard Springer (owner of a shoe shop), were Jewish refugees who escaped from Landsberg an der Warthe, Prussia (now Gorzów Wielkopolski, Poland).

His maternal grandmother, Marie Kallmann, was killed in the gas vans of Chełmno extermination camp in German-occupied Poland. His paternal grandmother, Selma Springer (née Elkeles), died at the hospital in the Theresienstadt concentration camp in German-occupied Czechoslovakia. Selma Springer's brother, Hermann Elkeles, was a renowned Berlin doctor who also died at Theresienstadt concentration camp.

In January 1949, when Springer was five, his family emigrated to the United States, settling in the Kew Gardens neighborhood of Queens, a borough of New York City. He attended nearby Forest Hills High School. One of his earliest memories about current events was when he was 12 and watching the 1956 Democratic National Convention on television where he saw and was impressed by then-Senator John F. Kennedy.

Springer earned a Bachelor of Arts from Tulane University in 1965, majoring in political science. He earned a Juris Doctor from Northwestern University in 1968.