Is Ric Flair Jewish?

A correspondent asked me to give my take on whether the wrestling great Ric Flair - aka Richard Morgan Fliehr but born Fred Phillips/Demaree/Stewart - was jewish and despite not knowing anything much about wrestling I thought I'd give it a go.

Flair was born on the 25th February 1949 to Luther Phillips and Olive Phillips/Demaree/Stewart (different documents says differing things according to Flair) being given into the care of the Tennessee Children's Home Society to be put up for adoption. (1) He was then adopted by a German-American couple named Richard Reid Fliehr and Kathleen Virginia Kinsmiller. (2) Clearly none of these individuals are likely to have been of jewish origin as nothing suggests they were.

Indeed Flair addresses this question directly in his autobiography when referring to his first wife Leslie Goodman who was in fact jewish. To wit:

'Leslie and I had gotten married in 1971. She had wanted me to convert to Judaism, for the sake of her grandparents more than anything else.

I'd always had Jewish friends and didn't have a problem with it, but when I went to one of those religion classes and they started speaking Hebrew, I balked. I wasn't going to sit through that stuff week after week. We ended up getting married at Plymouth Congregational Church in Minneapolis, where my dad was a deacon.' (3)

In other words Flair is telling us here that he isn't jewish (a fact which is also supported by an Israeli wrestling fan page), (4) is a Protestant Christian and has (or at least had) a deep feeling of revulsion towards Hebrew and Judaism when he actually encountered it for real as opposed to by proxy via his jewish friends.

So no Ric Flair isn't jewish.

References

(1) Ric Flair, Keith Elliot Greenberg, Mark Madden, 2004, 'To Be A Man', 1st Edition, Pocket: New York, p. 7

(2) Ibid., p. 5

(3) Ibid., pp. 31-32

(4) http://www.ipwa.co.il/jewishwrestlers.html