Bruce Springsteen says he's often mistaken as being Jewish and was called 'Springstein' just a month ago

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA: Bruce Springsteen, also known as The Boss, expressed his annoyance at individuals mistakenly connecting a Jewish twist to his last name—despite being raised Catholic.

The 75-year-old singer-songwriter performed a brief set at the USC Shoah Foundation's 30th Anniversary Ambassadors for Humanity gala on Sunday, October 13.

He openly expressed his disappointment during his performance that some organizers still occasionally misspell his last name as "Springstein," instead of "Springsteen," as "stein" is a frequent ending for many Jewish surnames, per People.

Bruce Springsteen responds to incorrect use of his last name 'Springstein'

During his recent performance at the USC Shoah Foundation's 30th Anniversary Ambassadors for Humanity gala, Bruce Springsteen expressed his displeasure at being misspelled as "Springstein" instead of "Springsteen."

He said, "I actually was Bruce Springstein for the first year or two of my career. Everywhere I went — I pull up to the club. ‘Welcome Bruce Springstein.’"

"This happened as late as a month ago. I’m not joking," he added.

Springsteen commended the Shoah Foundation, which Steven Spielberg created, before performing 'The Ghost of Tom Joad' and 'Dancing in the Dark,' pointing out that their goal of documenting, conserving, and disseminating Holocaust survivors' experiences is comparable to that of songwriting.

"The work of collecting the personal testimony and the voices of those who’ve witnessed history has just something in common with the work that songwriters, filmmakers, all artists do to understand and to create our real and imagined worlds," Bruce said.

He added: "We follow the ghosts of history. We listen for the voices of the past to take us into the future, and we lean into their stories and we listen to them."

In 1999, Adam Sandler made fun of Springsteen's ancestry in 'The Chanukah Song, Pt. 2,' singing, "Bruce Springsteen isn’t Jewish, but my mother thinks he is."

The gala dinner was held at the New York Hilton Midtown and drew over 60 Holocaust survivors. Stars including Drew Barrymore, Whoopi Goldberg, and Meryl Streep, who made the opening comments, were also present.

Bruce told the audience that his songs were dedicated to Spielberg and his wife, Kate Capshaw, and "everybody who have nourished the Shoah foundation over these past 30 years."

Bruce Springsteen's father's family reportedly have roots in Netherlands and Ireland

According to reports, Bruce Springsteen's father Douglas' family has roots in both the Netherlands and Ireland.

Despite being born in the United States, the Boss is a true Irishman. Although Bruce was born in New Jersey, the Garden State, his roots can be found in Westmeath and County Kildare.

The Boss' Co Kildare forefathers left the country for America in the 1850s during the Great Famine. In 1823, Bruce's great-great-great-grandfather from Rathangan, Christy Gerrity, was arrested and imprisoned under the Insurrection Act.

According to Irish Star, Bruce paid a visit to the hometown of his ancestors during his 2023 tour of Ireland. He explored his ancestry in the adjacent Newbridge Library while residing in Rathangan in west Kildare.

The Boss' predecessors were from Kildare and Mullingar, Co Westmeath. Authors Moira Sharkey and Greg Lewis' 2009 book 'Land of Hope and Dreams' followed Bruce's great-great-grandmother, Ann Garrity, back to the well-known town.

As previously reported by The Northern Times, Willem Meiner's book 'The Dutch Touch: A Small Nation’s Quiet Takeover of Main Street USA' claimed that the Springsteen family migrated from Kildare, Ireland in the middle of the 1800s, while their ancestors, including Joost Springsteen, were from the Dutch province of Groningen and settled in New Jersey in the seventeenth century.

Bruce accepted his 2010 Ellis Island medal with a nod to his Irish heritage. He expressed his gratitude to his wife, Patti, who is also Irish, and to the families of O'Farrell, Garrity, and McNicholas.

He made a joke about how they had continued the "mating tradition" of marrying Italians and Irish in Mid-New Jersey.