How Jewish is Lena Dunham?

Lena Dunham, the love-her-or-hate-her writer and star of the hit 2011 series Girls, may be on the cusp of another television triumph.

Thanks to the release of Dunham's new Netflix comedy series Too Much, inspired by her 2021 move from New York City to London, the much-lauded TV wunderkind is back on the scene in a big way, this time with a Jewish main character and plenty of goy-related quips.

But just how Jewish is this once-called “voice of a generation”?

Dunham, 39, was born in New York City to Protestant father Carroll Dunham, a painter, and Jewish mother Laurie Simmons, a photographer and artist. Simmons was born to first-generation Jewish Americans “in a very kind of idealised Jewish community on Long Island,” according to an interview Dunham did with Huffpost in 2010, and Dunham and her younger sibling Cyrus were raised in a culturally Jewish environment.

Dunham told the Jewish Journal in 2012: “I went to Hebrew school for, like, two weeks, and then didn’t get the part I wanted in the play and quit. But I’ve always had a great love of all the holidays that we celebrate together as a family: Passover, Chanukah. I’ve spent a good amount of time in temple, and I definitely feel very culturally Jewish, although that’s the biggest cliché for a Jewish woman to say.”

Dunham attended school in Brooklyn, where she met fellow matrilineal Jew and Girls co-star Jemima Kirke. She then went to university at Oberlin College in Ohio, graduating with a degree in creative writing in 2008. Her film career kicked off with several low-budget independent shorts published on YouTube, dealing largely with the same themes for which she has become renowned: sexuality, friendship and relationships.

(L-R) Zosia Mamet, Lena Dunham, Jemima Kirke and Allison Williams attend the "Girls" Season 2 premiere in 2013. (Photo by Andrew H. Walker/Getty Images)Getty Images

Dunham’s first breakthrough came in 2010 with the feature film Tiny Furniture, a semi-autobiographical comedy-drama in which Dunham stars as a dispirited film school graduate and her real-life mother and sibling play her fictional mother and sister.

The success of Tiny Furniture introduced Dunham to Jewish TV writer and producer Jenni Konner and Jewish director and screenwriter Judd Apatow, both of whom became involved in writing and producing Dunham’s hit HBO series Girls.

The acclaimed series, which ran from 2011 to 2017 and spanned six seasons, catapulted Dunham to mainstream success. Her portrayal of the protagonist Hannah Horvath, a 20-something writer living in New York City, was again inspired by her own life. The show’s unvarnished depiction of the relationships, sexual discoveries, struggles and joys of four friends– played by Dunham, Jemima Kirke, Allison Williams and Zosia Mamet - has played an outsized role in shaping the cultural zeitgeist of the mid 2000s and conversations around feminism and body politics.

In response to criticism over the four main characters’ lack of racial diversity after the release of season one, Dunham told IndieWire: “I am a half-Jew, half-WASP, and I wrote two Jews and two WASPs. Something I wanted to avoid was tokenism in casting... I really wrote the show from a gut-level place, and each character was a piece of me or based on someone close to me.”

Dunham has apparently been on an ongoing journey with regards to her Judaism, saying in 2012 that an "amazing” trip to Israel brought her closer to her Jewishness and taught her a lot “both spiritually and personally.”

In 2017, Dunham said she had been engaging with Judaism through the poetry of modern Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai, writing in an Instagram post: “This past year a special person helped me connect to my Judaism in a new way, beyond bagels and sample sales and crushing guilt.”

She added that the death of her grandmother prompted “a desire to understand what the religion that meant so much to her had to offer her granddaughter, even if my world view is far less cleanly structured than hers.”

Lena Dunham and her husband Luis Felber attend the UK Special Screening for "Too Much" at the Barbican Centre on June 23, 2025. (Photo by Justin Palmer/Getty Images)Getty Images

The loss of her grandmother also inspired her to take part in the 2024 film Treasure, in which she and fellow Jewish icon Stephen Fry play a father and daughter embarking on a moving trip to Poland to revisit the concentration camp where Fry’s character, Edek Rothwax, was interned with his late wife during the Holocaust.

Dunham, who discovered during a 2024 episode of PBS’s genealogy series “Finding Your Roots” that her family had personal connections to the Holocaust, told the JC last year: “To be Jewish, you don’t have to expressly have a relationship with God - it’s so deeply about community.”

Dunham moved to London in 2021, where she met and later married half-Jewish English-Peruvian musician Luis Felber in a Jewish ceremony at Soho’s Union Club.