Nina Totenberg

Place of Birth: Manhattan, New York City, New York, U.S.

Date of Birth: January 14, 1944

Ethnicity: Ashkenazi Jewish

Nina Totenberg is an American journalist. She is a legal affairs correspondent for National Public Radio (NPR). She specializes in politics and the Supreme Court.

Nina is the daughter of Melanie Francis (Eisenberg), a real estate broker, and Roman Totenberg, a prominent violinist and educator, who played all over the world. Her father was born in Łódź, Poland, then in the Russian Empire, was raised partly in Moscow, Russia, and lived in Berlin, Paris, and Poland, again, before moving to the U.S. in the late 1930s to escape the Nazis. He was a child prodigy. Her mother was an American Jewish woman, from an upper-class family.

Many of Nina’s father’s family members were killed in the Holocaust. He managed to secure his own mother’s safety. His sister Janina was in the Warsaw Ghetto along with her husband, Mieczysław “Mietek” Ferster; she survived, while her husband died.

Her sister, Amy Totenberg, has been a Judge of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia, since March 1, 2011.

Nina is married to trauma surgeon H. David Reines. She was previously married to Floyd Haskell, until his death; Floyd was a lawyer and politician, who was a Democratic U.S. Senator from Colorado, from January 3, 1973 to January 3, 1979.

A DNA test whose results were displayed on the show Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (2021) stated that Nina’s genetic ancestry is:

*100% Ashkenazi Jewish

Nina’s paternal grandfather was Abram “Adam” Totenberg (the son of Jacob Wolf Totenberg and Chaya Birenbaum). Jacob was the son of Mordechai Dov Totenberg and Ester Fajnmesser.

Nina’s paternal grandmother was Stanislawa Winawer (the daughter of Marcin Winawer and Cecelia Simon).

Nina’s maternal grandfather was named Alfred Eisenberg (the son of Adolph Eisenberg). Alfred was born in San Francisco, California, to a wealthy family. He died in the Influenza Pandemic of 1918. His family was from what is now Poland.

Nina’s maternal grandmother was Mildred Fanny Dryfoos (the daughter of Michael Dryfoos and Fanny Loewenstein). Mildred was born in New York, to a German Jewish family. She re-married to Millard Shroder, the son of Isaac William Shroder and Ernestine Heymann.

Sources: https://www.timesofisrael.com

Genealogy of Nina Totenberg – https://www.geni.com