Short answer: It's complicated for Teller, and no for Penn Jillette. Teller's father was of Russian-Jewish descent and his mother was Methodist, and Teller has never described himself as Jewish. Penn Jillette grew up in a churchgoing Christian family in Greenfield, Massachusetts, has no Jewish parentage documented in any reputable source, and has called himself an atheist since he was about sixteen.
What the record actually shows
- Teller was born February 14, 1948, in Philadelphia, as Raymond Joseph Derickson Teller. His father, Israel Max "Joseph" Teller (1913 to 2004), was born in Brooklyn and was of Russian-Jewish descent. His mother, Irene B. Derrickson (1908 to 2004), came from a Delaware farming family and was Methodist. His parents met as painters at the Samuel S. Fleisher Art Memorial. (Wikipedia)
- In an interview published February 5, 2014 with Gerri Miller for InterfaithFamily, now 18doors, Teller said he was raised "a sort of half-assed Methodist," referring to his mother's religion. The article notes that his father was of Russian Jewish descent but not observant. (18doors)
- In that same interview Teller declined a heritage identity outright: "Sometimes we went to church…I decided I wasn't interested in it. To me, what America is about is forgetting your heritage and defining who you are, and I think that was true of both my parents." (18doors)
- He did credit his father's family for one thing. Speaking of his grandfather, who spoke Russian and taught himself English, Teller said: "He was an English literature nut. My interest in Shakespeare comes largely from the volumes of Shakespeare that he had. That's a very Jewish thing, education and reading." (18doors)
- Teller published a memoir about that father in 2000, "When I'm Dead All This Will Be Yours!": Joe Teller, A Portrait by His Kid, which collects his father's paintings and unpublished cartoons. It was reviewed by Publishers Weekly in August 2000. Teller has long identified publicly as a skeptic. (Wikipedia)
- Penn Fraser Jillette was born March 5, 1955, in Greenfield, Massachusetts. His mother, Valda Rudolph Jillette (1909 to 2000), was a secretary. His father, Samuel Herbert Jillette (1912 to 1999), worked at Greenfield's Franklin County Jail. No reputable source documents Jewish parentage or ancestry on either side. (Wikipedia)
- Jillette left the church at about sixteen, around 1971. He grew up in a churchgoing family, read the Bible cover to cover as a teenager, then told his pastor he was an atheist. As he recounted it, the pastor told his parents, "Your son is doing a better job at turning the children atheist than I am at turning them Christian," and the family was eventually asked to stop attending. Jillette says he "began referring to myself as an atheist at about sixteen years old." (The Humanist)
- On November 21, 2005 he stated his position for NPR's This I Believe in an essay titled "There Is No God," which opens: "I believe that there is no God. I'm beyond atheism. Atheism is not believing in God." He returned to the subject in his 2011 book God, No! Signs You May Already Be an Atheist and Other Magical Tales. (Texas Public Radio)
Why people ask
Magic has a heavily documented Jewish lineage, from Houdini to David Copperfield to David Blaine, a pattern The Forward has written about directly. Teller sits oddly inside that pattern. He legally changed his name to the single word "Teller." A one-word surname that reads as Ashkenazi, attached to a performer who is silent onstage and has spent decades declining to publicize a biography, is most of the reason the search exists. That is a search-behavior observation, not evidence of anything. The documented facts are narrower: Jewish ancestry on his father's side, a Methodist mother, and a man who has said he was not interested in inheriting either.
Penn Jillette gets asked for a different reason. He is one of the most visible commentators on religion in American entertainment, and Penn & Teller: Bullshit! ran episodes on "Creationism" (March 14, 2003), "The Bible: Fact or Fiction?" (May 6, 2004), "Holier Than Thou" (May 23, 2005) and "The Vatican" (August 27, 2009). Searches for what Penn believes route naturally into questions about Jewish identity. He has addressed the subject once at length, in a January 23, 2024 interview with Cracked, where he said that "because I'm in show business, many of my friends grew up Jewish" and that "none of them believe in Judaism," and acknowledged friends and relatives who hold that "if your mother was Jewish, you were Jewish, and there's no way around that." He was arguing against the cultural-Jewish identity claim, not claiming Jewish identity for himself. In the same conversation he made the case that opposition to antisemitism belongs to everyone: "Don't you want me on your side, too? Don't you want everybody to be against anti-Semitism?" He also said, "I have to constantly be reminded that anti-Semitism exists because it's such ancient history to me," while acknowledging in the same breath that "I know it's happening right now." One more note for searchers: most results pairing "Penn" with antisemitism concern the University of Pennsylvania, a name collision rather than the magician.
Penn & Teller and Israel
Neither performer has taken a public position on Israel, and we found no reputable reporting of either man performing there. The closest thing on record is Jillette's January 2024 Cracked interview, where he discussed antisemitism at length, said "I don't know how pacifism can work in Israel," and described antisemitism in Israel as very different from antisemitism in the U.S. Full details in our companion piece Does Penn Teller Support Israel?.
The bottom line
Teller has Jewish ancestry on his father's side only, was raised by a Methodist mother in what he called a "half-assed Methodist" household, and has never described himself as Jewish, which puts him in the it's-complicated column. Penn Jillette is not Jewish by any documented measure: Christian upbringing, no Jewish parentage on record, and an atheist since his teens. Both are alive and working. In a July 12, 2026 appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, they announced a three-year extension of their Rio Hotel & Casino residency in Las Vegas, playing Thursday through Sunday at 8 p.m. at the Penn & Teller Theater as the longest-running headliners in Las Vegas history. (Fox5 Vegas)
Celebrate your own story
If your own family story runs through a grandfather's bookshelf or a name that people ask about, there are quieter ways to carry it than explaining it. Our Star of David jewelry collection is made for wearing that history close, whatever shape yours takes.
Related
Does Penn Teller Support Israel? · Is Sigourney Weaver Jewish? · Is Emma Stone Jewish?
Last updated August 2026. We update these profiles as the record changes.
