The secret Jewish history of the JFK assassination: Jack Ruby was once Jacob Rubenstein
He ran a Dallas nightclub, showed up for minyan and once gifted his rabbi a puppy. Then Jack Ruby became an indelible part of American history
Jack Ruby, born Jacob Rubenstein, murdered Lee Harvey Oswald on live television. Courtesy of Wikimedia
By Benyamin Cohen March 19, 2025
Jack Ruby was the sort of Jew who brings a puppy to the rabbi’s house and insists he adopt it. This is not a metaphor. This is Dallas in the early 1960s, and Ruby — born Jacob Leon Rubenstein to Polish-Jewish immigrants in Chicago — once showed up at Rabbi Hillel Silverman’s front door with a litter of puppies, pressing one upon the rabbi’s family. When the Silvermans went to Israel for the summer, Jack looked after the dog.
He was, in other words, not your typical congregant.
The Trump administration on Tuesday released 63,000 pages of JFK assassination records. And tucked inside them is a reminder of one of the most improbable Jewish footnotes in American history: Jack Ruby, who on November 24, 1963, walked into the basement of Dallas Police Headquarters and shot Lee Harvey Oswald dead on live television.
Ruby’s motivations, like so much in the Kennedy assassination lore, are constantly debated. Conspiracy theorists and official reports alike have turned him into a kaleidoscope of contradictions: Was he mobbed up? A CIA asset? Merely a patriotic nightclub owner with an itchy trigger finger and a flair for drama? But among Jews — who are proficient at both fretting and investigating — there is a separate question: How Jewish was Jack Ruby? And did his Jewishness have anything to do with it?
First, let’s talk minyan attendance. Silverman, who led Congregation Shearith Israel from 1954 to 1964, remembered Ruby fondly, if bemusedly, when the Jewish Telegraphic Agency interviewed him in 2013. Ruby was not particularly devout, but he came to shul, Silverman said. In Judaism, sometimes that’s all you need to do: Show up. And he showed up — occasionally late, occasionally with tales of club drama, but present nonetheless.
Then there’s the puppies. One does not simply foist a puppy on their rabbi without a certain exuberant chutzpah.
Judaism was important to the Rubenstein family: They kept a kosher home, observed the holidays and sent their boys to Hebrew school. Ruby took his faith as a point of pride, and was known to have a quick temper, especially when it came to insults about his Jewish identity. During his service in the Army Air Corps in 1943, according to biographer Seth Kantor, he once physically attacked a sergeant who had called him a “Jew bastard.”
“The day of the assassination, we had our regular Friday night service, which became a memorial service for the president,” Silverman said. “Jack was there. People were either irate or in tears, and Jack was neither. He came over and said, ‘Good Shabbos, rabbi. Thank you for visiting my sister Eva in the hospital last week.’ I thought that was rather peculiar.”
Two days later, Silverman addressed his Sunday morning confirmation class, sharing his relief with the students that Oswald wasn’t Jewish — otherwise, he feared, there might have been a violent backlash or even a pogrom in Dallas. But then he turned on the radio and heard that a man named Jack Ruby had killed the assassin.
“I was shocked,” said Silverman. “I visited him the next day in jail, and I said, ‘Why, Jack, why?’ He said, ‘I did it for the American people.’”
According to contemporaneous reports, after shooting Oswald, Ruby allegedly said he did it “to show that Jews had guts.” Silverman, recalling that line, sighed. “I think he said, ‘I did it for the Jewish people.’ But I’ve tried to wipe that statement from my mind.”
Zapruder and conspiracy theories
Intertwined in this story is another Jewish figure: Abraham Zapruder, who famously captured the assassination on film. His granddaughter, Alexandra, is a Holocaust scholar and author. In her memoir about her family and that 26-second film, she reflects on the burden of history and the weight of accidental witness. In an uncanny way, both Ruby and Zapruder became part of the same surreal tableau — one an active participant, the other an accidental witness —pulled into the vortex of a great American tragedy.
Unfortunately, the internet never met a set of declassified documents it didn’t want to turn into a conspiracy. Some corners of the JFK-obsessed universe are now busy alleging that Jews or Israel were behind the assassination — because why settle for a lone gunman when you can blame an entire people? It’s a familiar antisemitic trope dressed in mid-century trench coats and fedora hats, finding new life in message boards and poorly Photoshopped charts. The recently released records, rather than silencing these whispers, have only added fuel to the fringe.
Ruby, who died from complications of cancer in prison in 1967, offered plenty of explanations for his actions — but still remains an enigma.
His Jewishness doesn’t explain why he shot Lee Harvey Oswald. But maybe it helps us understand why, in the aftermath, he felt compelled to justify it to everyone, including Silverman, his rabbi, a prolific author who officiated at High Holiday services well into his 90s and died in 2023. If nothing else, we are left with this image: A man who, when the moment came, did something rash, loud, and entirely unforgettable — and then tried, in perhaps the most Jewish way possible, to explain himself.
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