Short answer: No. Sigourney Weaver has no documented Jewish ancestry on either side of her family, and she never converted to Judaism. She did live on an Israeli kibbutz in 1967 and later said she wanted to convert for a while, which is the single fact behind most of the confusion.
What the record actually shows
- Born October 8, 1949, in New York City as Susan Alexandra Weaver. Her father was Sylvester "Pat" Weaver, president of NBC from 1953 to 1955 and the creator of The Today Show. Her mother was the English actress Elizabeth Inglis, born Desiree Mary Lucy Hawkins on July 10, 1913, in Colchester, Essex, England, to Margaret Inglis (née Hunt) and Alan George Hawkins. Inglis married Pat Weaver in 1942 and died on August 25, 2007, in Santa Barbara (Wikipedia, Wikipedia).
- Her paternal ancestry is documented and contains no Jewish line. Pat Weaver was born December 21, 1908, in Los Angeles to Eleanor Isabel (née Dixon) and Sylvester Laflin Weaver, and died March 15, 2002. He "was of English descent and Scottish descent (possibly Clan MacFarlane), as well as of Ulster-Scots, Dutch and early New England ancestry" (Wikipedia). Weaver herself is described as of Dutch, English, German, Irish and Scottish descent through her father.
- 1967: she volunteered on a kibbutz in Israel. Shortly before turning 18, she left for Israel and joined a kibbutz for several months, as reported in a December 21, 2016 New York Observer profile by Drew Grant and noted in her Wikipedia biography. She then attended Sarah Lawrence, transferred to Stanford (English, class of 1972), and earned an MFA from the Yale School of Drama in 1974.
- Her one on-record statement about Judaism, from an interview published October 13, 2008: "I'm not big on organized religion, but I wanted to convert to Judaism for a while. I went and lived on a kibbutz in Israel, but it was so lame because it was very conservative and all the women worked in the kitchen" (TV Guide). She wanted to convert. She did not. No conversion in any movement is documented anywhere.
- No specific religious upbringing is documented by any reputable source. A number of celebrity-faith aggregator sites assert a denomination, but none cite anything. Discussing Prayers for Bobby in a January 2009 CBS News interview, in which she plays a devout Christian mother, the piece notes she was not raised with those kinds of beliefs, and quotes her: "I never felt judgmental of Mary. She meant the best for her son" (CBS News).
- Her household has no Jewish connection either. She married theater director Jim Simpson on October 1, 1984, having met him, as Parade and other outlets have recounted, at the Williamstown Theatre Festival in 1983. Their child, born in 1990, is nonbinary and goes by Shar, and the couple co-founded The Flea Theater in 1996 (Wikipedia). Simpson was raised in Hawaii in a missionary church context and has described himself in interviews as a "spiritual atheist."
Why people ask
Three things keep the question alive. The first is that 2008 quote, which gets excerpted constantly with the second half cut off. Read whole, it says the opposite of what the clipped version implies: she considered converting, spent months on a kibbutz, found the arrangement there not to her liking, and dropped the idea. Alongside it sits the kibbutz year itself, which for many readers is shorthand for a Jewish young adulthood even though volunteers of every background have passed through kibbutzim for decades.
The second driver is her first name, which sounds invented to a lot of searchers. It was, and she explained where it came from on a 1981 CBC talk show hosted by Bob McLean: "When I was about 14, I was reading The Great Gatsby and I picked it out of the book... I guess I was bored with my name, which was Susan" (CBC Archives). Sigourney Howard is a minor character in Fitzgerald's novel. There is no Jewish heritage in the story. The third is simply context: a long career in New York theater and Hollywood, and more recently a project with an Israeli director. None of that is evidence of ancestry, and inferring Jewishness from a name or a professional circle is exactly the error this question invites.
Sigourney Weaver and Israel
Her documented connection to Israel is biographical and professional rather than political. She volunteered on a kibbutz for several months in 1967, and on November 8, 2025 the trades reported that she will co-star with Meryl Streep in Useful Idiots, a New York-set thriller written and directed by the Israeli filmmaker Joseph Cedar (Beaufort, Footnote) and co-written with 60 Minutes producer Shachar Bar-On (Times of Israel, Jerusalem Post). No statement by her on Israeli politics, on the war, or on antisemitism could be located, and she does not appear among the reported signatories of the October 2023 Artists4Ceasefire letter or the 2025 Venice festival letter. Full details in our companion piece Does Sigourney Weaver Support Israel?.
The bottom line
Sigourney Weaver is not Jewish. No reputable source documents Jewish parentage on either side, and no conversion of any kind is on record. What is on record is a teenage interest in Judaism that she abandoned, a few months on a kibbutz in 1967, and her own line that she is "not big on organized religion."
Celebrate your own story
If your own connection to Jewish identity is something you would rather carry than explain, a piece you wear every day says it quietly and well. Our Star of David jewelry collection is made in Israel, and each piece supports the people who make it.
Related
Does Sigourney Weaver Support Israel? · /blogs/support/is-emma-stone-jewish · /blogs/support/is-george-clooney-jewish
Last updated August 2026. We update these profiles as the record changes.
