Barry Goldwater

Origins and early life

Barry Goldwater was born on 2 January 1909 in Phoenix, in what was then the Arizona Territory.

Work and career

His paternal grandfather, Michel Goldwasser, was a Polish Jew from Konin who anglicized his name to Goldwater and whose family built the Goldwater's department stores of Arizona — the Southwest Jewish Archives of the University of Arizona document the line. His father Baron, raised Jewish, married Josephine Williams, an Episcopalian, and Barry was raised in his mother's church — this fiche says so plainly; he is in this directory by his documented grandparent, and he never hid the heritage, famously answering a country club that excluded Jews that, being only half Jewish, he supposed he could play nine holes.

Elected to the Senate from Arizona in 1952, he served five terms across three decades and won the Republican presidential nomination in 1964. His defeat that year seeded a movement: he is regarded as the founding father of modern American conservatism, the man who opened the road Ronald Reagan later traveled. He died in Paradise Valley on 29 May 1998.