Andrew Breitbart: Jewish, Irish, and Uniquely American

After his passing, conservatives around the world were quick to claim Andrew Breitbart as one of their own.

The website Irish Central said:

Andrew was adopted by Jewish parents who raised him in the upscale neighborhood of Brentwood California, but he was ethnically Irish by birth. The Irish bloodline shined through in his brilliance and fearlessness as he fought for what he felt his truth was later on in life.

Meanwhile, the Jerusalem Post wrote:

Adopted by a Jewish family in Los Angeles, Breitbart equated the preservation of liberty and freedom in the US with safeguarding liberties and security in the Jewish state. “Israel is in the right” and “If Israel goes, so will America,” he said during a lively speech last year at a meeting of Republican Jewish Coalition in Beverly Hills.

One of Andrew’s favorite patriotic phrases was E Pluribus Unum; “out of many, one.” Although he meant that on a national level, that motto fit Breitbart the man perfectly. 

Andrew’s identity was shaped by being adopted, Irish, Jewish, West Side Los Angelino, Californian and American–but Andrew believed in rugged individualism, and so he became a melting pot for these influences, not their slave.

Andrew and I once talked about how he found out who his birth parents were in college, including the fact that his birth mother was Jewish and his birth father was Irish.

Some of these influences affected his politics. For one thing, being adopted inspired Andrew’s pro-life stance. He told me in the first conversation we ever had that since he was born pre-Roe v. Wade, he wondered whether he even would have been born in a post-Roe world. 

On the other hand, his support of Israel seemed to come less from his Jewish heritage and more from his sense that the hatred of Israel arose from the same anti-Western Civilization impulses that drove so much of the nihilism of the Left.

It’s been incredible to see how many people were influenced by the self-made, self-styled American Andrew Breitbart–and testament to his personality that his reach extended around the world.