(Jewish Group) No, she wasn't Jewish, but Betty White had a very Jewish century
There was nothing Jewish about Betty White.
I mean yes, she had a blind date with Carl Reiner in 2010 on “Hot in Cleveland” when they were both 88. Yes, she played one of four retired “Golden Girls” living together in Florida, none of whom were Jewish but, y’know. And yes, she was on the “William Shatner Roast” making fun of his expanding girth — “Darling, you were supposed to explore the galaxy, not fill it!” But those are not connections to Judaism; they are the occupational hazards of having spent a century in American showbiz.
White, who died Dec. 31, 2021, at age 99, was featured on the radio before Hitler came to power. She already had her own radio show when David Ben-Gurion read the Declaration of Israeli Independence in 1948. By the time Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal in 1956, White had her own television show and production company. She’s been making and appearing on television shows for 70 years and been in people’s homes for each of the past 10 decades (the decade before that, you had to go to the theater to see her).
White was born in 1922 in Oak Park, Illinois, just near the then-new synagogue building of Washington Boulevard Temple of B’nai Abraham Zion (now Oak Park Temple B’nai Abraham Zion) dedicated the previous September. White’s parents moved out to Alhambra, California, in 1923 and eventually to Los Angeles. It was a westward move followed by immigrants, farmers and millions of others in the ’20s and ’30s. In 1924, a fledgling MGM had just been founded when Metro Pictures, Goldwyn Pictures and Louis B. Mayer Pictures merged. Based in Beverly Hills, where White went to grade school, it would become one of the most famous movie production companies in history.
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