— Section i —The boy from Forest Hill
Aubrey Drake Graham was born in Toronto in October 1986 to a Jewish Canadian mother, Sandi, and an African American father, Dennis, a drummer from Memphis. When his parents divorced, Drake was five. He stayed with his mother in Toronto, and from that point on, his Jewish identity was never something abstract. It was the home he came back to after school, the table he ate dinner at, the community that surrounded his upbringing in Forest Hill — the same neighbourhood that produced a long line of prominent Jewish Canadian families. The synagogue, the Hebrew lessons, the holidays: he didn’t grow up around the idea of Judaism, he grew up inside it.
In 2000, when he turned thirteen, his mother threw him a Bar Mitzvah at a Toronto reception hall. By every account, including his own retellings in interviews and music videos, it was a real Reform Jewish ceremony — Torah portion, prayers, a tallit, the works. He has spoken about it often, and in 2012 he restaged it on camera in the music video for the song “HYFR” from his album Take Care, complete with a real rabbi, his real family and the actual Hebrew liturgy. It was both a joke and not a joke. He was 25, the most famous rapper in the world, and he wanted his community to see him recommit to the religion he had grown up in.
— Section ii —How faith shows up in the work
You can hear his Jewish identity threaded through Drake’s catalogue without trying very hard. He name-checks Hebrew greetings on songs, references the Sabbath and Yom Kippur, jokes about being a “light-skin Jewish boy” from Toronto. On 2017’s More Life, he dropped Yiddish slang into his bars; on Scorpion he spoke openly about identity and self-doubt in language any Jewish kid raised between cultures would recognise. He also openly observes Jewish holidays: he has been photographed wearing a kippah at family events, posted Rosh Hashanah and Passover messages to his hundred-million-plus followers, and named his son Adonis — a Greek-rooted choice, but one that places him in a long Jewish tradition of giving sons a name that points to the divine.
None of this is performance for credibility. Drake doesn’t need to advertise being Jewish; if anything, it complicates his marketability. He does it because, by his own description, his mother’s side of the family is the side that raised him, and that side is Jewish. In a music genre where artists are often pressured to flatten their identity into one neat brand, Drake’s public Jewishness is an act of refusal — an insistence that he is a Black man and a Jewish man, and that neither half cancels the other.
“He is a public reminder that Jewish identity in 2026 doesn’t look one specific way. It looks like Toronto. It looks like him.”
— Section iii —Why he was chosen, and what he teaches
I picked Drake for this profile because he is, for my generation, the most visible example of a Jewish person we already know. Most of my classmates couldn’t name a famous rabbi or scholar, but everyone knows Drake. That matters. The Reform tradition he was raised in is, by design, the most flexible branch of modern Judaism — it tries to keep the ethical core of the religion alive while letting individual Jews engage with ritual on their own terms. Drake lives that out exactly. He doesn’t pretend to keep kosher. He doesn’t claim to be observant. But he has never denied who he is, never tried to soften it for an audience, and he repeatedly returns to his faith in public moments — weddings, holidays, family events, his son’s milestones.
The qualities worth learning from him are not flashy ones. They are loyalty (to his mother, who raised him alone, and to whom he has dedicated multiple songs), resilience (a teenage actor on Degrassi who became one of the most successful musicians in history without abandoning Toronto), and a certain refusal to be embarrassed about where he came from. In a course about religion, that last one is the most important. Drake’s Judaism is not the Judaism of the textbook; it is Judaism as it actually lives in twenty-first century North America — partial, public, proud, threaded through ordinary life. That, more than any sermon, is what most of us will encounter when we encounter Jewish identity in the world. Studying him is studying the religion as it really is, not as it appears in a museum.