Short answer: It's complicated. Richard Engel has Jewish ancestry on his father's side, and he wrote in his 2008 memoir War Journal: My Five Years in Iraq that he is "half," that his father is Jewish and his mother is not. There is no documented conversion and no documented religious practice or upbringing.
What the record actually shows
- His own words, published 2008. In War Journal: My Five Years in Iraq (Simon & Schuster), Engel recounts being asked about his background and answering: "Half," I said. "My father is Jewish. My mother is not, but in the region they would consider that not to be Jewish." The passage is searchable in the book's full text via Open Library's Search Inside, and the book record sits at the Internet Archive.
- Family. Engel grew up on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. His father, Peter, is a former Goldman Sachs financier, and his mother, Nina, ran an antiques store, per his Wikipedia entry, the only source that carries these details. His older brother, David, is a cardiologist at New York-Presbyterian.
- A 2012 column's secondhand account. Nate Bloom's syndicated Jewish-celebrity column wrote in December 2012 that Engel had told the Washington Post in 2008 he is Jewish. No 2008 Washington Post article carrying such a statement can be located, and Bloom himself hedged: "I'm not sure if Engel regrets telling the press (the Washington Post in 2008) that he is Jewish. But he did and that fact can now be found pretty easily on the internet." That column ran in December 2012.
- No documented religious life. No reputable source documents a bar mitzvah, synagogue affiliation, Jewish education, religious upbringing, or a conversion of any kind. His marriage to producer Mary Forrest on May 29, 2015 was a civil ceremony at New York City Hall, as The Hollywood Reporter reported at the time.
- Career context. Engel graduated from Stanford in 1996, moved to Cairo, learned Arabic, and freelanced there for four years before working out of Jerusalem until 2003, per the same Bloom column. He was named NBC News chief foreign correspondent in April 2008 and still holds that title as of August 2026, per his NBC News author page.
- March 2026 AI hoax. A false claim spread that Engel had been injured while reporting in Israel. Snopes rated it false on March 13, 2026, tracing it to AI-generated slop. On a March 10, 2026 podcast episode Engel said: "I just saw a photograph of me laying on my back in a hospital bed with tubes and Mary, my wife, looking lovingly in my eyes as if this is some sort of final moment. Totally not true." He said there were "serious consequences here," and added: "They either want me dead, or to sow doubt, or just confuse people. It's a very, very bad precedent."
Why people ask
Two things drive the question. The first is the December 2012 kidnapping. Engel and his crew were abducted in Syria on December 13, 2012 and freed on the evening of December 17 after five days, reaching Antakya, Turkey the next morning. The Jewish Press covered it under the headline "NBC's Jewish Reporter Kidnapped in Syria, Freed in Gunfight," writing that "Engel, who is Jewish, was interviewed this morning by NBC, shortly after he arrived in Antakya, Turkey," a framing that treated his background as an added danger. Worth noting: NBC's original account blamed a Shiite militia loyal to Assad, but in April 2015, after New York Times inquiries, Engel and NBC revised it and concluded the captors were a Sunni group with criminal ties who had staged a ruse. Engel wrote that "the group that kidnapped us was Sunni, not Shia." The revised account is summarized on Wikipedia's page for the incident, and Engel's own first-person telling, published by Vanity Fair on March 20, 2013, gives the original account of Shiite captors that he and NBC later corrected.
The second driver is the beat itself, plus the surname. Engel has spent more than two decades reporting on Israel and the wider Middle East, and "Engel" is a surname common among both Jewish and non-Jewish German and Scandinavian families. The name proves nothing on its own. (Searches for "Richard Engle" turn up the same person, and Wikipedia keeps a disambiguation page for others who share the name.) The only reliable evidence here is what Engel himself wrote, and he was precise about it: Jewish father, non-Jewish mother, and by the standard applied in the region, not Jewish.
Richard Engel and Israel
Engel worked out of Jerusalem until 2003 and covered the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war as NBC's senior Middle East correspondent and Beirut bureau chief. He reported on the Hamas attack the same day it happened, on October 7, 2023, and reported from the raided kibbutz of Kfar Aza in a dispatch NBC News published on October 11, 2023. He has continued reporting from Israel since, including a subscriber Q&A filed while on assignment there in May 2026. Full details in our companion piece Does Richard Engel Support Israel?.
The bottom line
Richard Engel has Jewish ancestry on his father's side and has described himself in print as "half." His mother, by his own account, is not Jewish, and no conversion is documented anywhere in the record. That places him in the genuinely mixed category rather than a clean yes or no.
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Related
Does Richard Engel Support Israel? · /blogs/support/is-kevin-hart-jewish · /blogs/support/is-bill-murray-jewish
Last updated August 2026. We update these profiles as the record changes.
