Short answer: No. Alexandra "Alex" Cooper, the host of Call Her Daddy and founder of Unwell Network, was raised Catholic and said so herself on the record in October 2024. No reputable source documents Jewish parentage, Jewish ancestry, or a conversion.
What the record actually shows
- Family background. Cooper was born August 21, 1994 and raised in Newtown, Pennsylvania, the youngest of three siblings. Her father is a TV sports producer and her mother is a psychologist, per her biographical record, with her Newtown upbringing corroborated by local outlet Newtown PA Now.
- Her own words, October 6, 2024. On the Call Her Daddy episode with Vice President Kamala Harris, Cooper said: "I was raised Catholic, and abortion is a sin." She went on to describe listeners who told her they had rethought the issue and asked, "But why should we control what someone else wants to do?" The full transcript carries the quote, and PBS NewsHour confirms the episode date. Catholics for Choice circulated the same line the following day.
- Catholic schooling. Cooper attended St. Andrew's Catholic School and then The Pennington School in Mercer County, New Jersey, before entering Boston University in 2013. The Bucks County Courier Times places her at St. Andrew School in Newtown, a kindergarten through eighth grade school, which is a parish school of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia.
- No Jewish parentage on record. Neither mainstream press nor the Jewish press (JTA, The Forward, Jewish Journal, Hey Alma, The Jewish Chronicle) has ever documented Jewish ancestry, a Jewish upbringing, or a conversion for Cooper. The pages asserting otherwise are automated celebrity-ethnicity sites that contradict one another.
- Marriage, April 6, 2024. Cooper married film and TV producer Matt Kaplan in the Riviera Maya, Mexico, in a ceremony officiated by her brother Grant, as reported by NBC News. No reputable outlet has documented Kaplan's faith, and no reporting describes a Jewish ceremony.
- Nothing on Jewish identity or antisemitism. Cooper has not addressed Jewish identity, antisemitism, or Israel in any documented on-record interview or reported statement.
- Where she is now. Cooper moved Call Her Daddy to SiriusXM under a deal announced August 21, 2024, reported at $125 million over more than three years. Her 2025 Hulu documentary Call Her Alex included her allegation that she was subjected to years of sexual harassment by her former Boston University soccer coach. On June 10, 2026 she spoke about expecting her first child ("I have never felt more ready"), and on July 30, 2026 she shared a gestational diabetes diagnosis.
Why people ask
The biggest driver is her 2024 marriage to producer Matt Kaplan, a surname readers often assume is Jewish. That assumption proves nothing about anyone, and in this case there is no reporting at all on Kaplan's religion, so it cannot say anything about Cooper either. The surname Cooper gets read the same way, and again no inference should be drawn from a name. Her New York and Los Angeles media milieu, and the Unwell Network she built there, add to the pattern.
A second driver is a genuine case of mistaken identity. A different public figure named Alex Cooper is the subject and co-author of the 2016 memoir Saving Alex, about a girl raised Mormon who was sent to a Utah conversion-therapy home after coming out at 15, later adapted by Lifetime. That story is entirely about religion, so it pulls faith questions toward the name and appears to be where stray claims about Utah roots attached to the podcaster come from. Add automated celebrity-ethnicity pages that rank for these queries and give contradictory answers, and searchers keep asking because nothing they find agrees.
Alex Cooper and Israel
There is no documented record here. Cooper has not made any statement on Israel, October 7, or antisemitism that has been reported by a mainstream or Jewish news outlet, and claims circulating on social media and activist lists are not verifiable. Full details in our companion piece Does Alex Cooper Support Israel?.
The bottom line
Alex Cooper is not Jewish. She described her own upbringing as Catholic on the record in October 2024, and she attended a Catholic parish school in Pennsylvania. No reputable source documents Jewish parentage on either side, and no conversion has ever been reported.
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Last updated August 2026. We update these profiles as the record changes.
