Happy Birthday to Jerry Seinfeld! This is a photo from his 1972 yearbook, the year he graduated from Massapequa High School. Jerome (Jerry) Seinfeld was born in Brooklyn on April 29, 1954, and raised on Long Island. His father, Kalman, was of Austrian Jewish descent, and his mother, Betty, was the daughter of Syrian Jews from Aleppo.
Jerry describes growing up in a Jewish home, saying, “Went to temple, kept kosher, two sets of dishes.” In 1971, as a teenager, he volunteered on a kibbutz in Israel. He made his stand-up debut in 1976 and appeared on The Tonight Show in 1981. By the late 1980s, Seinfeld had become one of the most high-profile stand-up comedians in the U.S. He soon teamed up with Larry David to co-create the sitcom Seinfeld, which first aired on July 5, 1989. And the rest, as they say, is history.
