Scarlett Johansson is one of the most versatile actresses in the entire entertainment industry in Hollywood, and surprisingly enough, this versatility isn’t exactly restricted to her onscreen roles. As it turns out, her family roots with respect to where she comes from and her religious beliefs are as diverse as her onscreen acting credits.
For quite some while now, fans have been curious about the family roots of the Manhattan-born New Yorker, who has been a part of numerous major hit franchises, including the Marvel Cinematic Universe. To answer those very questions, here’s the truth about whether Johansson is actually Jewish, as many speculate, or not.
So, is Scarlett Johansson actually Jewish?
Well, yes – from her mother’s side. Scarlett Ingrid Johansson, the daughter of Copenhagen architect Karsten Olaf Johansson and New Yorker producer Melanie Sloan, is considered a Jew through her mother. This is because Sloan is of Ashkenazi Jewish descent, which means her family’s roots are in Eastern Europe.
Per Finding Your Roots on PBS, she comes from a Jewish family originally surnamed Schlamberg, who fled Poland and Russia. Since traditional Jewish law considers individuals with a Jew mother to be Jew too, thus, the Black Widow star’s Jew heritage is based on her maternal lineage. Karsten, meanwhile, is Danish.
When it comes to her upbringing, Johansson grew up with basic Jewish practices like celebrating Shabbat and holidays like Chanukah. Talking about her siblings, the actress, 40, has an older sister and brother named Vanessa and Adrian, respectively. She even has a twin brother named Hunter, if you didn’t already know.
The episode that strengthened Scarlett Johansson’s bond with her Jewish ancestry
While she already knew that her mother’s side of the family was set in the Jewish community in Eastern Europe, Scarlett Johansson didn’t know much else about her ancestors in the respective community. However, appearing on a 2017 episode of PBS’ Finding Your Roots really helped strongly clear that out for her.
As it turns out, in 1910, The Avengers actress’ maternal great-grandfather Saul Schlamberg immigrated from a small town in Poland to New York City to settle on Ludlow Street in the city’s Lower East Side, which was full of Jew immigrants at the time. He was believed to have sold bananas at a market, being very poor at the time.
However, things took a much darker turn for them as Schlamberg’s brother Moishe and his family, which included 10 children, ended up in the Warsaw Ghetto by the year 1942, after he left them behind in Grojec, Poland. Heartbreakingly enough, by that time, Grojec’s Jews had either been killed or deported.
In a testimony from one of Moishe’s daughters, which was received at the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum in Israel years later, it was unveiled that Zlata, 15, and Mandil, 17 – two of Moishe’s other children – both faced their ends in the Warsaw Ghetto. This revelation had even the Lucy actress breaking down into tears. She said:
I promised myself I wouldn’t cry, but it’s hard not to. It’s crazy to imagine that Saul would be on the other side selling bananas on Ludlow Street and how different it would be being in America at that time. The fate of one brother versus the other. It makes me feel more deeply connected to that side of myself, that side of my family. I didn’t expect that.
Of course, the Holocaust has been one of the most harrowing events in history, so to know that some of her ancestors had to go through that at a point in their lives must have been nothing short of devastating for Johansson. But that episode is what made her feel more connected to her Jewish ancestors’ history at the same time, so that’s that too.
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