Jake Tapper
Jake Tapper · Arts & Literature
CNN's lead Washington anchor (The Lead, State of the Union), three-time Merriman Smith award winner and author of The Outpost (2012), the account of American soldiers in Afghanistan
12 March 1969, New York City, United States
Philadelphia · Washington
Jake Tapper is recognized among Jewish contributors to Arts & Literature — CNN's lead Washington anchor (The Lead, State of the Union), three-time Merriman Smith award winner and author of The Outpost (2012), the account of American soldiers in Afghanistan
Origins and early life
Jacob Paul Tapper was born in New York City on 12 March 1969 and grew up in the Queen Village neighbourhood of Philadelphia, the son of Theodore Tapper, a paediatrician from Chicago, and of Helen Tapper, a psychiatric nurse at the city's veterans' hospital.
Work and career
In an essay for Salon in August 2000 he wrote of himself “as a Jew”: his mother, raised a Presbyterian in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, converted to Judaism to marry his father, a Chicago Jew, and he went to Jewish schools and camps. He studied at Akiba Hebrew Academy, a Jewish day school in Merion, Pennsylvania, spent his summers at Camp Ramah in the Poconos, and graduated in history from Dartmouth College in 1991 with Phi Beta Kappa honours.
After working as a congressional press secretary and as a reporter for the Washington City Paper, he joined ABC News in 2003, reported from Baghdad, New Orleans and Afghanistan, and was named senior White House correspondent on 5 November 2008. The White House Correspondents' Association gave him its Merriman Smith Memorial Award for presidential coverage under deadline pressure in 2010, in 2011 and again in 2012. He moved to CNN in January 2013 to anchor The Lead with Jake Tapper, took over the Sunday programme State of the Union in June 2015, and in January 2021 became the network's lead anchor for all major Washington events.
His book The Outpost, the story of American soldiers at a remote base in Afghanistan, entered the New York Times best-seller list in November 2012 and became a film in 2020, and since 2018 he has also published political thrillers, beginning with The Hellfire Club.
Recognition
He shared Emmy Awards with CNN teams in 2023 and 2024, and that first year the Jerusalem Post, which also noted his thriller All the Demons Are Here, named him among its fifty most influential Jews.
Verify and go deeper with these external references.
Source: Wikipedia — Jake Tapper; Salon, « Too Jewish? », 2000; Jerusalem Post 50 Most Influential Jews 2023
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CNN's lead Washington anchor (The Lead, State of the Union), three-time Merriman Smith award winner and author of The Outpost (2012), the account of American soldiers in Afghanistan
Source: Wikipedia — Jake Tapper; Salon, « Too Jewish? », 2000; Jerusalem Post 50 Most Influential Jews 2023
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