Birth Name: Jakob Luke Dylan
Place of Birth: New York City, New York, US
Date of Birth: December 9, 1969
Ethnicity: Ashkenazi Jewish
Jakob Dylan is an American singer and songwriter. He is the lead singer for the rock band The Wallflowers. Jakob is the son of model Shirley Marlin Noznisky and musician Bob Dylan. His parents are both Jewish.
Jakob’s paternal grandparents were Abram “Abe” Zimmerman (the son of Zigman Zisel Zimmerman and Anna Chana Greenstein) and Beatrice “Beatty” Stone (the daughter of Benjamin David Solemovitz/Stone and Florence Sara Edelstein). Zigman and Anna were from Odessa, in the Russian Empire, now in Ukraine. They emigrated to the United States following the anti-Semitic pogroms of 1905. Benjamin and Florence were Lithuanian Jews. They arrived in the U.S. in 1902.
Jakob’s maternal grandparents were Isaac Noznisky/Novoletsky and Bessie.
In his autobiography Chronicles: Volume One (2004), Bob Dylan wrote:
Originally, [my grandmother had] come from Turkey, sailed from Trabzon, a port town, across the Black Sea… Her family was from Kagizman, a town in Turkey near the Armenian border, and the family name had been Kirghiz. My grandfather’s parents had also come from that same area, where they had been mostly shoemakers and leatherworkers. My grandmother’s ancestors had been from Constantinople. As a teenager, I used to sing the Ritchie Valens song “In a Turkish Town” with the lines in it about the “mystery Turks and the stars above,” and it seemed to suit me more than “La Bamba,” the song of Ritchie’s that everybody else sang and I never knew why.
It is not clear if these statements about Turkish Jewish ancestry are accurate.
Sources: Genealogy of Jakob Dylan – https://www.geni.com
Jakob’s paternal grandparents, Abram “Abe” Zimmerman and Beatrice “Beatty” Stone, on the 1940 U.S. Census – https://familysearch.org
Photo by kathclick/Bigstock.com