Drake Ethnicity: African American and Ashkenazi Jewish Roots
Drake — born Aubrey Drake Graham — is one of the best-selling music artists of all time, and his background is as distinctive as his sound. Raised in Toronto by a Black father from Memphis and a Jewish Canadian mother, he grew up between two worlds. So, what is Drake’s ethnicity? He is biracial: his father, Dennis Graham, is African American, and his mother, Sandi Graham (née Sher), is a Canadian Ashkenazi Jew.
Table of Contents
- Quick Facts About Drake
- What Is Drake’s Ethnicity?
- Drake’s Father’s Ethnicity
- Drake’s Mother’s Ethnicity
- Is Drake Jewish?
- Is Drake Black?
- What Is Drake’s Nationality?
- Drake’s Jewish Identity in His Music
- Frequently Asked Questions
- Conclusion
Quick Facts About Drake
| Attribute | Details |
|---|---|
| Full Name | Aubrey Drake Graham |
| Date of Birth | October 24, 1986 |
| Birthplace | Toronto, Ontario, Canada |
| Nationality | Canadian and American (dual citizen) |
| Ethnicity | Biracial — African American (father); Ashkenazi Jewish (mother) |
| Parents | Dennis Graham and Sandra “Sandi” Graham (née Sher) |
| Profession | Rapper, singer, songwriter, actor |
What Is Drake’s Ethnicity?
Drake is biracial. His father, Dennis Graham, is an African American drummer from Memphis, Tennessee, who once performed with Jerry Lee Lewis. His mother, Sandra “Sandi” Graham (née Sher), is a Canadian Ashkenazi Jew who worked as an English teacher and florist. Drake was raised primarily by his mother in Toronto’s Forest Hill neighborhood after his parents divorced when he was five, and he has described navigating both Black and Jewish identities throughout his life and music.
That dual heritage made him, in the words of the Jewish Journal, “the ultimate outsider” who became the ultimate insider — a biracial Jewish-Canadian rapper who reshaped hip-hop.
Drake’s Father’s Ethnicity
Drake’s father, Dennis Graham, is African American, born and raised in Memphis, Tennessee. A drummer who played with rock-and-roll pioneer Jerry Lee Lewis, Dennis met Sandi while performing at Club Bluenote in Toronto. After the divorce, Dennis returned to Memphis, where he faced financial and legal troubles — including years of incarceration on drug-related charges — that kept him in the United States through much of Drake’s youth. Before that, he would bring young Drake to Memphis every summer. Drake’s uncles on his father’s side, Larry Graham (of Sly and the Family Stone and Graham Central Station) and Teenie Hodges, are also musicians, making music a paternal inheritance. The father-son relationship has been publicly complicated: Dennis has claimed Drake exaggerated his absence to sell records, which Drake denies.
Drake’s Mother’s Ethnicity
Drake’s mother, Sandra “Sandi” Graham (née Sher), is a Canadian Ashkenazi Jew — of Latvian Jewish and Russian Jewish descent, according to biographical sources. She worked as an English teacher and florist and raised Drake in Forest Hill, a heavily Jewish neighborhood of Toronto. Drake attended a Jewish day school and had a bar mitzvah at 13 (he has joked the song of the night was the Backstreet Boys’ “I Want It That Way”). He was, in his words, raised in his mother’s faith, and Jewish references — from his bar mitzvah to Hebrew phrases — surface throughout his music and public persona. His Jewish heritage is a defining thread of his identity, shared by other Jewish hitmakers like Benny Blanco.
Is Drake Jewish?
Yes. Drake is Jewish through his mother — under traditional Jewish law, Jewish identity passes through the maternal line — and he was raised Jewish, attending Jewish day school and becoming a bar mitzvah. He has embraced the identity publicly, at one point reaffirming his commitment to the faith as an adult. That makes him one of the most prominent Jewish figures in hip-hop, a genre where Jewish artists have a long but often behind-the-scenes history (as managers, producers, and label founders). Like fellow Toronto-raised star DJ Khaled, Drake’s background defies the genre’s stereotypes.
Is Drake Black?
Yes — Drake is biracial and Black through his African American father. He has spoken and rapped extensively about his Black identity, his relationship with his father, and moving between the wealthy, largely white Jewish world of Forest Hill and the Black Memphis world of his father’s family. Academics have even studied his “hybrid identity” — Black and white, Jewish and Catholic-raised-by-association, Canadian and American — as central to his appeal. He identifies with both sides of his heritage rather than choosing one. His mixed background parallels other biracial music stars like Sean Paul, whose heritage similarly crosses racial lines.
What Is Drake’s Nationality?
Drake is a dual citizen of Canada and the United States. He was born in Toronto, Ontario, and raised there — first acting as Jimmy Brooks on Degrassi: The Next Generation, then launching his music career with the mixtape Room for Improvement (2006) before So Far Gone (2009) made him a star. His American citizenship derives from his father. Though he is closely associated with Toronto (his OVO brand is a love letter to the city, “the 6ix”), he has lived extensively in the United States and is one of the best-selling music artists in history, with over 170 million records sold, 5 Grammy Awards, and Billboard’s Artist of the Decade (2010s) title. His cross-border identity mirrors that of fellow Canadian-American crossover stars like Bad Bunny’s genre-blurring peers.
Drake’s Jewish Identity in His Music
Drake’s Jewishness is not a footnote — it is woven through his art. He has referenced his bar mitzvah, rapped about his upbringing, and spoken in interviews about feeling like an outsider in both Black and Jewish spaces growing up. That in-betweenness became his superpower: as one academic study put it, he constructed an identity as “both black and white, Jewish and Catholic, Canadian and American,” performing Canadianness as multicultural hybridity. Songs like “Look What You’ve Done” meditate on his mother and their Forest Hill life; his public reaffirmation of his Jewish faith as an adult made headlines in Jewish media worldwide.
He is part of a long, if often overlooked, Jewish presence in hip-hop — from the Jewish managers and label executives who built the industry to artists like the Beastie Boys and Doja Cat (whose father is Jewish). But Drake’s case is distinctive: a biracial Black Jew raised by a Jewish mother, he embodies Jewish ethnicity in its fullest sense — not just religion but peoplehood, culture, and maternal lineage. His story illustrates the same ethnoreligious identity carried by Jewish artists like Benny Blanco: Jewishness as an ethnoreligious identity that persists across race, with Drake as arguably its most famous contemporary example in popular music.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Drake’s ethnicity?
Drake is biracial: his father, Dennis Graham, is African American, and his mother, Sandi Graham (née Sher), is a Canadian Ashkenazi Jew.
Is Drake Jewish?
Yes. His mother is Jewish, he attended Jewish day school, and he had a bar mitzvah. He was raised in the Jewish faith.
Who are Drake’s parents?
His father is Dennis Graham, an African American drummer from Memphis, and his mother is Sandi Graham, a Canadian Ashkenazi Jewish teacher and florist. They divorced when Drake was five.
Where was Drake born?
He was born Aubrey Drake Graham on October 24, 1986, in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
Is Drake Canadian or American?
Both — he holds dual citizenship of Canada (birth) and the United States (through his father).
What was Drake’s bar mitzvah like?
He had a traditional bar mitzvah at 13 in Toronto’s Jewish community; he has joked that the Backstreet Boys’ “I Want It That Way” was the song of the night.
Conclusion
Drake’s ethnicity is biracial: African American through his father, Dennis Graham of Memphis, and Ashkenazi Jewish through his mother, Sandi Sher Graham of Toronto. Raised Jewish in Forest Hill, spending summers in Memphis, acting on Degrassi, then conquering global music — his whole career has been a negotiation of that hybrid identity. In an industry that loves simple labels, Drake’s Black and Jewish, Canadian and American heritage remains one of pop culture’s most fascinating backgrounds.
For more, see Drake on Wikipedia and Ashkenazi Jews on Wikipedia.
