Short answer: No. Anderson Cooper has no documented Jewish parentage, ancestry, conversion, or religious practice in any reputable source. His mother, Gloria Vanderbilt, was baptized Episcopalian and raised Catholic, and his father, Wyatt Emory Cooper, came from a poor family with deep roots in rural Mississippi. No reputable source documents Jewish parentage, ancestry, conversion or practice on either side. Cooper has described himself on the record as "a WASP."
What the record actually shows
- Born June 3, 1967 to writer Wyatt Emory Cooper and artist and heiress Gloria Vanderbilt. His maternal grandparents were Reginald Claypoole Vanderbilt and Gloria Morgan Vanderbilt, and Reginald's patrilineal great-grandfather was the shipping and railroad magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt.
- His mother's documented religion was Christian, not Jewish. Gloria Vanderbilt (born February 20, 1924, died June 17, 2019) was baptized in the Episcopal Church, then after her father's death was confirmed and raised in the Catholic Church, her mother's faith. She was not a practicing Catholic in her later years.
- His father came from rural Mississippi. Wyatt Emory Cooper was born September 1, 1927 in Mississippi and grew up near Quitman, the son of Rixie Jane Annie Anderson Cooper and Emmet Debro Cooper. Wikipedia gives his birthplace as Pleasant Grove, Mississippi and describes him as coming from a poor family with deep Southern roots. He died January 5, 1978, when Anderson was 10.
- A televised genealogy dig found no Jewish line. On the PBS series "Finding Your Roots," in the episode "Our American Storytellers" that first aired October 7, 2014, Cooper learned of an ancestor, Burwell Boykin, who was a slave owner from the southern United States. That remains the most detailed public excavation of his ancestry, and it produced deep-South Anglo-American lineage with no Jewish line.
- September 21, 2022: speaking with Stephen Colbert on his CNN podcast "All There Is with Anderson Cooper," Cooper said, "Believe me, I'm a wasp. I push down all my emotions. That's why they bubble up in very uncomfortable ways." WASP stands for White Anglo-Saxon Protestant. Colbert's reply was, "You'd make a great Catholic, by the way. Doors always open."
- April 25, 2025: in the episode "Coming Back To Life," which Cooper framed from Rome in the days after Pope Francis died and built around an interview with Princeton religion professor Elaine Pagels recorded weeks earlier, Cooper said, "I'm not sure what I believe about what happens to us after we die, but I am certain that when someone we love dies, it is a new beginning for those of us left behind." No source documents a current religious affiliation for him.
- He has appeared before Jewish audiences without claiming Jewish identity. On June 4, 2017 he spoke at the Kaplen JCC on the Palisades in Tenafly, New Jersey, about American politics, current events, his life as a traveling journalist, and growing up as Gloria Vanderbilt's son, launching the JCC's Patron of the Arts program.
Why people ask
The question is driven mostly by visibility, not by anything Cooper has said. He has spent years anchoring some of the most prominent American coverage of Jewish life, antisemitism, and Israel. The November 12, 2023 edition of his CNN series "The Whole Story with Anderson Cooper" was "Antisemitism in America," reported by Dana Bash with Ambassador Deborah Lipstadt and the ADL's Jonathan Greenblatt. He also moderated the March 6, 2016 Democratic debate in Flint, Michigan, where he asked Bernie Sanders whether he was keeping his Jewish faith in the background of his campaign, prompting Sanders' answer that he is very proud to be Jewish. Reporting on a Jewish story tells you nothing about the reporter's own background.
Two other things feed the confusion. Cooper almost never discusses religion on air, and the vacuum gets filled by speculation. And his mother's third husband was the director Sidney Lumet, who was Jewish, a marriage that began in 1956 and ended in divorce in 1963, four years before Anderson Cooper was born to her fourth husband. Lumet was a stepfather by marriage to Cooper's older half-siblings and no blood relation to Cooper at all. The surname "Cooper" is an occupational English name that is also a common American Anglicization of Jewish surnames, but no source connects that to this family, and a surname is never evidence of anyone's Jewish status. One more correction worth making: the July 21, 2024 CNN remark that picking a Jewish running mate "could be some risks" was made by John King during a segment with Cooper, not by Cooper.
Anderson Cooper and Israel
Cooper has reported from Israel repeatedly. His in-depth report on the attack on the Nova music festival near the Gaza border, "Terror in Israel," premiered October 15, 2023. On June 23, 2025 he and his CNN crew evacuated to a bomb shelter live on air during an Iranian missile barrage in Tel Aviv, telling viewers, "We have about a 10-minute window to get down into a bomb shelter, and we'll continue to try to broadcast from that bomb shelter." He has stayed with the story since: his April 19, 2026 "60 Minutes" interview with Rachel Goldberg-Polin, mother of the murdered hostage Hersh Goldberg-Polin, revisited her grief and recounted that Cooper had called the family as soon as they were off air in 2023 to tell them about video of Hersh he had been shown at the festival site. Full details in our companion piece Does Anderson Cooper Support Israel?.
The bottom line
Anderson Cooper is not Jewish. What the record documents is a Vanderbilt mother baptized Episcopalian and raised Catholic, a father from a poor family with deep roots in rural Mississippi, and Cooper's own on-air description of himself as a WASP. He speaks about religion rarely, and when he does he describes uncertainty rather than affiliation.
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Last updated August 2026. We update these profiles as the record changes.
