One of the most influential and celebrated filmmakers of the current era, Taika Waititi has entertained us with his exceptional comedic intelligence and directorial prowess for over two decades.
Born on Aug. 16, 1975, in Wellington, New Zealand, as Taika David Cohen, Waititi has always been vocal about his upbringing and mixed heritage. He was raised in a multicultural home in the Aro Valley district of Wellington as well as the small village of Raukokore in the Bay of Plenty.
His father is a Māori of Te Whānau-ā-Apanui descent, who are the Indigenous Polynesian people of mainland New Zealand. While his paternal grandfather, also named Taika, is well-known for being a soldier in the Māori Battalion during World War II.
Even though his mother raised him most of the time after his parents divorced when he was about five years old, Waititi was raised with a strong connection to his Māori heritage. His mother, Robin Cohen, whom he takes his legal surname from, was a schoolteacher and traces an Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry instead.
As Waititi explained in a podcast interview, his mother’s paternal grandfather was a Russian Jew whose family came from Novozybkov, Russia. His mother’s family were “Russian Jewish, Irish, and other European ethnicities, while his father’s side was Māori and a little bit of French Canadian.”
But to set things straight, Taika Waititi identifies as both Māori and Jewish, describing himself as a “Polynesian Jew.” Since Judaism was not practiced in his household, Waititi identifies as an atheist who “puts more stock in indigenous beliefs” (via The Wall Street Journal).
Taika Waititi would have received less criticism for Jojo Rabbit if his Jewish ancestry was widely known
The “anti-fuckface satire” in Waititi’s own words, the 2019 film Jojo Rabbit set in Nazi Germany drove huge backlash to Waititi due to its sensitive subject. The film is a 1940s-set story of a ten-year-old child in the Hitler Youth Camp whose mother is secretly hiding a Jewish girl in their home. Though it won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, it left the critics and audience divided.
Alongside writing and directing the film, which was based on the book Caging Skies by Christine Leunens, Taika Waititi also portrayed a buffoonish version of Adolf Hitler as the main character’s imaginary friend, and his portrayal led to a backlash against him. In response, Waititi told Variety that there would’ve been fewer criticisms of the film had his Jewish heritage been more widely known:
“They did a press screening with a lot of Jewish press, and a lot of the comments were ‘I wish we’d known that he was Jewish before we’d watched the movie.’”
Nevertheless, Jojo Rabbit made Waititi the first Indigenous person to be nominated for and win an Oscar award for Best Adapted Screenplay. It also won him the Grammy Award for Best Compilation Soundtrack for Visual Media as a producer of the Jojo Rabbit soundtrack.
In the dedication of Jojo Rabbit’s production notes, Waiti also revealed how it was his mother who inspired him to make the film and also talked about experiencing “a certain level of prejudice growing up as a Māori Jew.” Still, Taika Waititi accepts his Jewish identity, and proudly embraces it.