Judge Joseph Wapner, Star Of ‘The People’s Court,’ Dies At 97
Image by Getty Images
(JTA) — Joseph Wapner, the retired judge who starred in the first television reality show, has died.
Wapner died on Sunday at his home in Los Angeles at the age of 97.
Wapner was the star of “The People’s Court,” which premiered in September 1981. He heard thousands of cases during his 12 years on the show, according to the entertainment website TMZ.
Before appearing as a judge on television, Wapner served as a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge.
Wapner’s father was an immigrant to the United States from Romania who became an attorney, and his mother an immigrant from Russia. He was born and grew up in Los Angeles.
Wapner is a graduate of the University of Southern California and the USC Law School..
He was appointed to the Los Angeles Municipal Court in 1959 and two years later to the Los Angeles County Superior Court, where he served for 18 years before retiring in 1979. He also served as president of the California Judges Association.
Wapner received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2009. He wrote a popular memoir titled “A View from the Bench.”
It’s our birthday and we’re still celebrating!
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news.
This week we celebrate 129 years of the Forward. We’re proud of our origins as a Yiddish print publication serving Jewish immigrants. And we’re just as proud of what we’ve become today: A trusted source of Jewish news and opinion, available digitally to anyone in the world without paywalls or subscriptions.
We’ve helped five generations of American Jews make sense of the news and the world around them — and we aren’t slowing down any time soon.
As a nonprofit newsroom, reader donations make it possible for us to do this work. Support independent, agenda-free Jewish journalism and our board will match your gift in honor of our birthday!
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
