Seth Rogen — actor with roots in the Russian Empire
Seth Rogen was born in Vancouver in April 1982 to Mark Rogen, who worked for non-profits and was an assistant director of the Workmen's Circle, and Sandy Belogus, a social worker. His parents describe themselves as radical Jewish socialists and met on kibbutz Beit Alfa in Israel. The family's Jewish line runs back to emigrants from Ukraine and Russia who left in the early twentieth century, from Kyiv and from Zinkov, a small town in Podolia inside the Pale of Settlement.
He started comedy at twelve, in a workshop taught by Mark Pooley, doing material about bar mitzvahs, his grandparents and camp counsellors, and was performing at bars and parties as a teenager with his mother driving him. He came second in the Vancouver Amateur Comedy Contest at sixteen. He began writing Superbad with his schoolfriend Evan Goldberg at thirteen; it was released fourteen years later.
Freaks and Geeks gave him his first screen work in 1999 and connected him to Judd Apatow, who cast him in The 40-Year-Old Virgin and then made him a lead in Knocked Up. What followed - Superbad, Pineapple Express, This Is the End, Neighbors - defined a decade of American screen comedy and established a writing partnership that has outlasted the genre it was built on. He and Goldberg founded Point Grey Pictures in 2011, which produced Sausage Party, The Boys and Invincible, and in 2025 he created and starred in The Studio, which won him a Golden Globe for best actor in a television comedy and took the series award as well. He has five Primetime Emmys, two Screen Actors Guild awards, and Writers Guild and Directors Guild awards.
He and his wife Lauren Miller Rogen founded Hilarity for Charity, which funds Alzheimer's care and research and grew out of her mother's early-onset diagnosis; he has testified before the United States Senate on it. He also co-founded the cannabis company Houseplant.
Rogen has credited the immigrant Jewish household directly and specifically as the source of the comic voice - the reflex to meet a difficulty with a joke, the argument conducted as affection, the socialist politics taken as ordinary rather than remarkable.
"Grandparents' families emigrated from Kyiv and Zinkov in the early twentieth century"
Migration storyTracing the roots — Kyiv / Zinkov
His parents, Mark Rogen and Sandy Belogus, describe themselves as radical Jewish socialists and met on kibbutz Beit Alfa. Rogen has credited that household directly as the source of his comic voice.
Jewish family from Ukraine and Russia; the recorded places of origin are Kyiv and Zinkov, a town in Podolia inside the Pale of Settlement. The family emigrated in the early twentieth century, when both were in the Russian Empire.
.svg?width=900)
Kyiv / Zinkov. At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.