Adam Schiff — congressman with roots in the Russian Empire
Adam Bennett Schiff was born in Framingham, Massachusetts, on 22 June 1960, the son of Edward Schiff and Sherrill Ann, née Glovsky. The family moved to Scottsdale, Arizona, in 1970 and two years later to Alamo, California. His connection to the Russian Empire runs through his great-grandparents.
According to his own account and to published biographies, he is the great-grandson of Lithuanian Jews who left Eastern Europe for the United States. Lithuania was part of the Russian Empire until 1918. The towns they came from have not been named in print, nor has the year they left. Schiff has described how, while on a temporary assignment for the Justice Department in Slovakia, he decided to seek out the family's ancestral home in Lithuania and, despite advice against the journey, visited the towns his great-grandparents had left. He has said that he carries his grandfather's watch with him on Election Day; his father died in 2024 at the age of ninety-six, shortly before Schiff was elected to the Senate.
Schiff studied at Stanford University and Harvard Law School. He worked as an Assistant United States Attorney in Los Angeles, in the Central District of California. In 1996, at thirty-six, he was elected to the California State Senate for the 21st district, defeating the Republican assemblywoman Paula Boland, and became the youngest member of the chamber. During his four-year term he chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee and the Select Committee on Juvenile Justice, as well as the legislature's Joint Committee on the Arts, and wrote dozens of measures that became law.
In 2000 he was elected to the United States House of Representatives, where he represented districts in the Los Angeles area from January 2001 until December 2024. From 2019 to 2023 he was chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.
In November 2024 he was elected to the United States Senate for California, succeeding Laphonza Butler, and was sworn in on 9 December 2024 as the forty-eighth person to represent the state in the Senate, serving alongside Alex Padilla, twenty-eight years after he had first taken an oath of office in the California State Senate.
"Grandparents fled the Russian Empire circa early 1900s amid widespread anti-Jewish persecution."
Migration storyTracing the roots — Lithuania — great-grandparents (towns and year of emigration not published)
He is the great-grandson of Lithuanian Jews who left Eastern Europe for America. While on a Justice Department assignment in Slovakia he travelled to Lithuania to see the towns his great-grandparents had left; the towns, and the year of emigration, have not been published.
His father was born to a Jewish family with roots in the Russian Empire.
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Lithuania — great-grandparents (towns and year of emigration not published). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.