Is Josh O’Connor from “Challengers” Jewish? An investigation

Josh O’Connor is one of the hottest actors around right now. The Brit has risen to fame in recent years for his roles as a young Prince Charles in The Crown, Mr. Elton in Emma and Arthur in La Chimera. Of course, I mean hot in the sense of extremely physically attractive. After his role as Patrick Zweig in Challengers – a film in which his character almost has a threesome and is often half-naked – O’Connor has won fans for his looks.

A quick search on Twitter for “Josh O’Connor hot” shows tweet after tweet from people mourning O’Connor. And coincidentally, many are calling him “hot rodent lover” and comparing him to Remy from Ratatouille, Stuart Little, and Roddy from Flushed Away. So naturally, I was intrigued when I also saw this tweet claiming that calling Josh O’Connor a “hot rodent lover” would have dire consequences considering he’s Jewish.

WHAT?!

It’s time to investigate whether Josh O’Connor is Jewish or not.

As with previous investigations of this kind, to determine if Josh O’Connor is Jewish, we attempt to check at least one of two boxes. Does Josh O’Connor identify as culturally or religiously Jewish? And/or does Josh O’Connor have Jewish ancestry? If the answer to any of these questions is a resounding yes, he is a member of the tribe!

Let’s start with the first question. Does Josh O’Connor identify as Jewish culturally or religiously? We can find out pretty easily online that O’Connor does not identify as Jewish religiously or culturally. In an August 2023 interview with Vogue, O’Connor revealed that he was raised Catholic. (Though he alluded in the interview that he now considers himself areligious. “I kind of think, this is my God now,” he said, gesturing toward the stage at the National Theater in London.)

However, whether or not Josh O’Connor has Jewish ancestry is a whole other story. According to IMDb, O’Connor is of Irish, English, Scottish, Ashkenazi, and Sephardic Jewish descent. Upon closer inspection of this claim, it appears that O’Connor’s closest Jewish relative is his maternal great-grandmother, Nancy Kohnstamm. According to a genealogy website and EthniCelebs.com (which, as you know, should be taken with a grain of salt), Nancy’s parents were Rudolph Kohnstamm, a German Jew, and Emily Piza, a Sephardic Jew whose family originated from St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands, Curacao, and the Netherlands.

“O’Connor has never spoken about his Jewish heritage, as far as we know, but his maternal aunt, author Madeleine Bunting, wrote about it in her book ‘Love of Country: A Journey Through the Hebrides,'” wrote Lior Zaltzman, deputy editor of Kveller in 2020. “She is also the author of the book ‘The Model Occupation,’ about the events of the Nazi occupation of the British Isles, which she said played a small part in the Channel Islands acknowledging their Holocaust heritage.”

Interestingly, Josh O’Connor’s Jewish heritage is matrilineal, so Halacha, Jewish law, would technically consider him a Jew. Or, to put it another way, because Nancy Kohnstamm was Jewish, O’Connor’s grandmother is considered a Romola Jane Farquharson to be Jewish. This in turn means that O’Connor’s mother Emily Bunting is Jewish and Josh O’Connor is therefore considered Jewish.

To be clear, not all Jews use halacha as a standard to determine who is or is not Jewish. Many, many patrilineal Jews identify as Jewish without having gone through a conversion process. And we here at Hey Alma adhere to the rule that a Jew is a Jew, is a Jew, is a Jew.

All this is just to say…

Verdict: Yes! Josh O’Connor has Jewish ancestry and is technically Jewish under Jewish law. However, Josh himself does not appear to identify as Jewish and that decision should be respected.