Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
The Schmooze

Glee star Lea Michele is pregnant with her first child

Lea Michele, the “Glee” diva who taught a generation of girls to love their non-regulation schnozzes, is pregnant with her first child.

Michele’s Instagram announcement was short on words: the caption read simply “so grateful,” and concluded with a single, gender-ambiguous yellow heart. But who needs words when you have snapshots of celebs who haven’t wrecked their skin with a quarantine diet of Twinkies and Twitter news? In the photo, Michele is rocking a maxi dress I know for certain would also make me look pregnant, in a very bad way. The nose that a manager once instructed her to have surgically altered is displayed in full, glorious profile. And she’s also cradling a serious big baby bump that, before the era of coronavirus, might have been impossible to hide for so long.

View this post on Instagram

So grateful ?

A post shared by Lea Michele (@leamichele) on

But for celebs looking to skip the tabloids-scrutinizing-my-belly-fat phase of pregnancy, quarantine may be an unexpected boon. Michele has made it months without the slightest speculation as to whether she was creating a new life or committing the sin of eating carbs. Still, an experienced Instagram sleuth might have seen it coming: for weeks, Michele, who appears to be self-isolating with her mother and husband, has posted only snapshots of her radiant face and sweater-obscured upper body.

So what should we expect for this future human’s Jewish life? It’s hard to say. Michele, who is of Italian and Sephardic descent, has some serious Jewish credentials: her father literally owned a delicatessen. With baby daddy Sandy Reich, it’s harder to tell. A Wharton graduate and former lacrosse bro, Reich is intensely private and has never revealed his religion online. All we know for certain is that his teeth are very white and he looks elated whenever he’s in a picture with Lea Michele.

But as the best minds concluded at the time of the couple’s engagement, when Reich gave Michele a diamond ring that’s probably bigger than their offspring right now, “Zandy=Alexander. Jewdar rule #7 – play a goyishe sport. He’s a Jew with contacts in diamonds and head of a shmatte business.”

So we’re holding out for some aesthetic snapshots of a very tasteful baby-naming.

Irene Katz Connelly is an editorial fellow at the Forward. You can contact her at [email protected].

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.

Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.