Short answer: No. No reputable source documents any Jewish parentage or ancestry for Florence Pugh, and she has never described herself as Jewish. The family lines traced on camera in a 2025 genealogy series, all on her mother's side, are English (Yorkshire), Welsh and Dutch, and The Times of Israel noted in passing that she is not Jewish.
What the record actually shows
- Born January 3, 1996, in Oxford, England, to Clinton Pugh, a restaurateur behind Oxfordshire restaurants including Café CoCo and Kazbar, and Deborah Pugh (née Mackin), a dancer and former ballet dancer and aerobics instructor. Her siblings are actor and musician Toby Sebastian, actress Arabella Gibbins, and Rafaela "Raffie" Pugh. (Wikipedia, with the mother's maiden name corroborated by People, via Yahoo.)
- No religious upbringing is recorded anywhere in her biography. She had tracheomalacia as a child, the family moved to Manilva, Spain when she was three and returned to Oxford when she was six, and she attended Wychwood School and St Edward's School in Oxford. Faith is simply not part of the documented record. (Wikipedia)
- February 2025: she traced her family history on camera in an episode of No Taste Like Home with Antoni Porowski for National Geographic and Disney+. The research, which traced her mother Deborah's side, surfaced her maternal 3x great-grandfather James Tose, landlord of the Red Bear Hotel in the sheep-farming town of Thirsk, Yorkshire, who hosted Bob Carlisle there in 1879 and was bankrupt by 1883. (Who Do You Think You Are Magazine)
- The same episode documented Dutch and Welsh lines. Her maternal ancestors Mauritz Becht and Anna Maria van den Berg were Dutch immigrants who arrived in Britain in the 1860s, and, remarkably, the Pugh name also appears on her mother's side, through a Welshman (rendered "Louis Pugh" by People and "Lewis Pugh" by Who Do You Think You Are Magazine) who married her ancestor Johanna. Her surname itself comes from her father, Clinton Pugh. No Jewish ancestry appears anywhere in that research. (People, via Yahoo)
- Her reaction on discovering an earlier Florence Pugh, born November 25, 1882, who died at four: she said "there's already been a Florence Pugh" and told the camera she felt "quite emotional," adding, "My parents have no idea." (People, via Yahoo)
- October 22, 2022: she condemned antisemitism publicly. After the white-supremacist Goyim Defense League hung a banner reading "Kanye is right about the Jews" over Interstate 405 in Los Angeles, with people performing Nazi salutes beside it, Pugh posted a photo of the banner to her Instagram Stories captioned "Absolutely appalling," and wrote: "Any form of hate speech only encourages it, it grows and spreads like a disease. Any whisper of antisemitism is dangerous and needs to be addressed and taken down." (The Independent, via Yahoo, and Us Weekly, via Yahoo, which reports she shared her statement alongside photos from a Los Angeles demonstration against antisemitism.)
- Claims that she is Christian are not documented. That assertion circulates only on content aggregators, never in a mainstream outlet, an interview, or her own words. The accurate statement is that her religion is not on the record at all.
Why people ask
Three things put the question in circulation, and none of them touch her ancestry. The first is her relationship with Jewish actor Zach Braff. They met on the short film In the Time It Takes to Get There, went public on April 12, 2019, and Pugh confirmed the breakup on August 16, 2022 in a Harper's Bazaar piece, saying they had quietly separated some months earlier. She publicly defended their 21-year age gap. The Jewish outlet Hey Alma covered the relationship for exactly that reason, writing, "Anyway, Zach is Jewish, so we decided that was enough for us to investigate their relationship." Nothing in that piece concerns Pugh's own religion.
The second is her casting as Charmian "Charlie" Ross in The Little Drummer Girl, the six-part John le Carré adaptation about an English actress recruited by Mossad to infiltrate a Palestinian militant cell, which premiered on BBC One on October 28, 2018 and aired on AMC that November. She discussed the research with the UK's Jewish News in an interview published October 25, 2018: "I made sure I knew what was going on. I wanted to educate myself further, because how am I going to understand these characters, if I don't understand it like they do?" The third is Marvel. She plays Yelena Belova opposite Scarlett Johansson's Natasha Romanoff, and because Black Widow's cast included two Jewish leads, Johansson and Rachel Weisz, Jewish-press coverage of the film pulled Pugh into the same searches. The Times of Israel's own June 2021 piece on that cast noted it in passing: "And since we're rolling, let's add that second-billed Florence Pugh may not be Jewish, but she's famously dating one Zachary Israel Braff, aka That Nice Boy From 'Scrubs.'"
Florence Pugh and Israel
Pugh has a documented record here. On October 20, 2023 she was one of 58 Hollywood figures who signed the Artists4Ceasefire letter to President Biden, which urged the administration "to honor all of the lives in the Holy Land and call for and facilitate a ceasefire without delay," per The Times of Israel. On September 17, 2025 she spoke at the sold-out Together for Palestine benefit at OVO Arena Wembley in London, organized by Brian Eno, which raised roughly £2 million distributed by Choose Love (details here), telling the crowd, per Variety, "Silence in the face of such suffering is not neutrality. It is complicity." Her separate 2022 statement against antisemitism, quoted above, is part of the same public record. Full details in our companion piece Does Florence Pugh Support Israel?
The bottom line
Florence Pugh is not Jewish. Her ancestry, traced on camera and reported by mainstream outlets, runs through Yorkshire England, Wales and the Netherlands, with no Jewish line anywhere in it, and no reputable source records a religious upbringing of any kind. The question persists because of a former partner, one Mossad thriller and a Marvel cast, not because of anything in her family history.
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Last updated August 2026. We update these profiles as the record changes.
