As a life-long Jew, I like to think I have pretty good Jew-dar. (Or, in other words, the intuition that another person is culturally, religiously or ancestrally Jewish.) But every now and again, I get humbled. It’s an important reminder that no matter what my intuition might tell me, what Jews look like and act like is as wide as the range of human appearance and behavior itself. Most recently, I was humbled when this tweet popped up on my For You tab on X:
Wait, what? For those unfamiliar, Jake Paul is a 28-year-old content creator with 20.9 million subscribers on YouTube, 28.7 million followers on Instagram and 18.5 million followers on TikTok. He is one of the highest-paid social media influencers currently online. Jake and his brother Logan first gained traction on the now-defunct Vine app around 2013, but nowadays they are mostly known as influencers, with one being a professional boxer (Jake) and the other a professional wrestler (Logan). Jake notably boxed against Mike Tyson — and won — in a high-profile match streamed on Netflix last November.
It had never even occurred to me to investigate whether or not Jake Paul is Jewish… but better late than never, I suppose.
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 Jake Paul identify as culturally or religiously Jewish? And/or, does Jake Paul have Jewish ancestry? Based on the above post on X, the answer seems to be yes, but I wanted to see if I could learn more about Jake Paul’s Jewishness.
Let’s first look at his family. Jake is the son of Pamela Stepnick and Gregory Paul. While his ancestry is predominantly Welsh, Irish, German and French, it turns out that he has Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry via his great-grandmother Lillian Mae Meredith (née Buxbaum) and her father, Isidore “Harry” Buxbaum. “You have a little bit of Jew in you,” Paul’s mother told her older son in a YouTube video from 2016. When Logan expressed surprise, she explained, “Grammy was a Buxbaum and her dad was a Buxbaum.”
“The Buxbaums came to the United States from Germany, settling in Massachusetts,” JTA reported in 2024. “Isidore, who died in 1949, is buried in Moses Mendelsohn Cemetery in West Roxbury, a neighborhood in Boston.”
So does Jake Paul have Jewish ancestry? Yes he does. But what about cultural or religious observance?
According to Jerusalem Post, Jake grew up “in a Christian household, attending church regularly with his family.” However, Chabad Rabbi Yossi Farro, who is known for wrapping tefillin on celebrities, recently posted a video of himself wrapping phylacteries on Jake Paul. In the video, he tells the kippah-clad Jake that they just celebrated his bar mitzvah.
So is Jake a religious or cultural Jew? Maybe this is the beginning of him exploring that side of his heritage, but otherwise the answer to this question seems a bit unclear. Still, ultimately:
Verdict: Yes, Jake Paul has some Jewish ancestry, has participated in at least one religious Jewish ritual and claims a Jewish identity.
