Monica Lewinsky - Early Life and Education

Early Life and Education

Monica Samille Lewinsky was born in San Francisco, California, and grew up in an affluent family in Southern California in the Westside Brentwood area of Los Angeles and in Beverly Hills. Her father is Bernard Lewinsky, an oncologist, who is the son of German Jews who escaped Nazi Germany and emigrated to El Salvador and later the United States. Her mother, born Marcia Kaye Vilensky, the daughter of a Lithuanian Jewish father and a Russian-Romanian Jewish mother; is an author who uses the name Marcia Lewis. Monica's parents' acrimonious separation and divorce during 1987 and 1988 had a significant effect on her. (Her father later married his wife, Barbara; her mother later married R. Peter Straus, a media executive.)

The family attended Sinai Temple in Los Angeles and Monica attended Sinai Akiba Academy, its religious school. For her primary education she attended the John Thomas Dye School in Bel-Air. She then attended Beverly Hills High School, but for her senior year transferred to, and graduated from, Bel Air Prep (later known as Pacific Hills School) in 1991.

Following high school graduation, she attended Santa Monica College, a two-year community college, and worked for the drama department at Beverly Hills High School and at a tie shop. In 1993, she enrolled at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon, graduating with a psychology degree in 1995.

With the assistance of a family connection, Lewinsky got a job at the White House as an unpaid summer intern in the office of White House Chief of Staff Leon Panetta. Lewinsky moved to Washington, D.C. and started the position in July 1995. She moved to a paid position in the White House Office of Legislative Affairs in December 1995.