Short answer: No. Martha Stewart was born Martha Helen Kostyra in 1941 to Edward Kostyra and Martha Ruszkowski, both of Polish Catholic background, and she has written on her own blog about receiving Holy Communion and being confirmed in the Catholic Church. No Jewish parentage is documented in any reputable source. The question persists mostly because her surname came from her first husband, Andy Stewart, who is Jewish.
What the record actually shows
- Born August 3, 1941, in Jersey City, New Jersey, the second of six children of Edward Kostyra and Martha Kostyra (née Ruszkowski), described as of Polish-Catholic ancestry. Her father was a pharmaceutical salesman, her mother a sixth-grade teacher, and the family moved to Nutley, New Jersey when she was about three. (Encyclopedia.com, aggregating print reference works)
- Her mother's Catholic household is documented in her obituary. Martha Kostyra, born September 16, 1914, in Buffalo, died November 16, 2007, at Norwalk Hospital at 93. The obituary describes her Polish family and says she raised six children in a middle-class Catholic household, with her funeral held at St. Francis of Assisi Church in Weston, Connecticut. (WestportNow)
- Stewart described her own Catholic sacraments in a blog post dated February 21, 2014, writing about a return trip to Nutley: "I received my Holy Communion at Saint Mary's and was confirmed here at Our Lady of Mount Carmel." She also noted that her family attended Holy Family Church in Nutley before switching to Our Lady of Mount Carmel. (The Martha Blog)
- She married a Jewish man in July 1961. Martha Kostyra took the name Stewart when she married Andrew "Andy" Stewart, a Yale Law student, while she was a 19-year-old Barnard undergraduate, as TODAY has reported. Their daughter Alexis was born in 1965. They separated in 1987 and divorced in 1990, though Newsweek has reported the divorce as finalized in 1993. Andy Stewart went on to a publishing career, serving as president of art publisher Harry N. Abrams and later founding Stewart, Tabori & Chang.
- Her father objected to the marriage on antisemitic grounds, as she recounted in the Netflix documentary Martha, directed by R.J. Cutler and released October 30, 2024: "But I went home and told my dad, and my dad slapped me. And he slapped me hard on…on my face and said, 'No. You're not marrying him. He's a Jew.'" She added of her father, "I was not at all surprised because he was a bigot. And he was impulsive," and said she told him, "I'm gonna get married no matter what you think." (Salon, The Jerusalem Post, Haaretz)
- A Jewish news service has stated plainly that she is not Jewish. In an April 18, 2014 piece, JTA's Jewniverse described Stewart making chocolate-covered matzah with Joan Rivers, after not being invited to a Passover seder some years earlier, and wrote that Stewart, "though not a Jew herself," wanted in on the Passover traditions. Rivers called the result "WASPy matzah." (JTA Jewniverse)
- She has engaged warmly with Jewish community institutions. On May 8, 2024, Stewart was the featured guest in a moderated conversation at the 19th annual Jewish Family Service of Colorado Executive Luncheon in Denver, an event that also honored Temple Emanuel during the congregation's 150th anniversary year. (Jewish Family Service of Colorado, Boulder Jewish News)
Why people ask
The biggest driver is the name. "Stewart" is not a family name at all, it is her first husband's, and Andy Stewart is Jewish. Once people learn that detail, and especially after the 2024 Netflix documentary put her father's antisemitic reaction to the engagement on screen, the search for whether she herself is Jewish follows naturally. The documented answer runs the other way: her parents were Polish Catholics, her mother's obituary describes a Catholic household, and Stewart herself has written about her Communion and confirmation.
Two other things push the query along. "The Jewish Martha Stewart" has been a stock epithet for decades. JTA used it on November 15, 1999, when profiling author Rita Milos Brownstein and her book Jewish Holiday Style: "Dubbed the 'Jewish Martha Stewart,' Rita Milos Brownstein has written a beautiful book just in time for holiday entertaining and gift giving." The phrase has been applied to many people since, and it keeps the words "Martha Stewart" and "Jewish" bound together in search. Separately, a humor column by Mark Miller on Aish.com joked that she might be "half-Jewish, having changed her name from 'Stewartstein'." That was written as satire, but the punchline has been repeated as if it were a fact. It is not.
Martha Stewart and Israel
Stewart traveled to Israel for the first time in early September 2011, hosted by Israel's Ministry of Tourism along with her nephew Christopher Herbert. On her blog she wrote that she went for "a wedding and also to do a lot of location scouting for my television show," called it "my first visit to Israel," and reported that "What we experienced was astounding!" She toured the Israel Museum with then-director James Snyder, the father of the bride, and her itinerary included Yad Vashem, the Mahane Yehuda market, the Old City, Bet She'an, Capernaum and the Mount of Beatitudes (The Martha Blog). On October 13, 2023, six days after the Hamas attack, she posted on Instagram about that 2011 trip. Her most extended public comment touching antisemitism is her account of her father's reaction to her engagement, described above. Full details are in our companion piece Does Martha Stewart Support Israel?
The bottom line
Martha Stewart is not Jewish. She was born to two Polish Catholic parents, was raised in a Catholic household her mother's obituary describes as such, and has written in her own words about receiving Holy Communion and being confirmed. Her connection to Jewish life runs through her first marriage to Andy Stewart and through her later appearances alongside Jewish organizations, not through her own background.
Celebrate your own story
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Last updated August 2026. We update these profiles as the record changes.
