Paul Wolfowitz - Personal History

Personal History

The second child of Jakub Wolfowitz (1910–1981) and Lillian Dundes, Paul Wolfowitz was born in Brooklyn, New York, into a Polish Jewish immigrant family, and grew up mainly in Ithaca, New York, where his father was a professor of statistical theory at Cornell University." Strongly influenced by his father, Paul Wolfowitz became "a soft-spoken former aspiring-mathematician-turned-policymaker ... world views ... were forged by family history and in the halls of academia rather than in the jungles of Vietnam or the corridors of Congress ... ... escaped Poland after World War I. The rest of his father's family perished in the Holocaust."

In the mid-1960s, while they were both undergraduate students at Cornell, he met Clare Selgin, who later became an anthropologist. They married in 1968, had three children, lived in Chevy Chase, Maryland. They separated in 1999, and, according to some sources, became legally separated in 2001 and divorced in 2002.

In late 1999, Wolfowitz began dating Shaha Ali Riza. Their relationship led to controversy later, during his presidency of the World Bank Group.

Wolfowitz speaks five languages in addition to English: Arabic, French, German, Hebrew, and Indonesian.