Andrew James Breitbart (; February 1, 1969 – March 1, 2012) was an American conservative journalist and political commentator who was the founder of Breitbart News and a co-founder of HuffPost. After helping in the early stages of HuffPost and the Drudge Report, Breitbart created Breitbart News, a far-right news and opinion website, which has been described as misogynistic, xenophobic, and racist by academics and journalists. He played central roles in the Anthony Weiner sexting scandal, the firing of Shirley Sherrod, and the ACORN 2009 undercover videos controversy. Commenters such as Nick Gillespie and Conor Friedersdorf have credited Breitbart with changing how people wrote about politics by "show[ing] how the Internet could be used to route around information bottlenecks imposed by official spokesmen and legacy news outlets". Early life Breitbart was born to Irish American parents in Los Angeles on February 1, 1969. According to his birth certificate, his biological father was a folk singer. When he was three weeks old, he was adopted by Gerald and Arlene Breitbart, a restaurant owner and banker respectively, and grew up in the affluent neighborhood of Brentwood. His adoptive family was Jewish; his mother had converted to Judaism when marrying his father. Breitbart studied at Hebrew school and had a Bar Mitzvah. Theologically he was an agnostic. Breitbart attended Brentwood School, one of the country's top private schools, but did not distinguish himself, saying: "My sense of humor saved me". However, he discovered that he loved writing, publishing his first comedic piece in the school newspaper, the Brentwood Eagle, analyzing the inequality in his high school's senior and junior parking lots: "One had Mercedes and BMWs, the other Sciroccos and GTIs."" Breitbart remembers his upbringing as apolitical, except in one instance: when the family's rabbi tried to defend Jesse Jackson against charges of antisemitism after his "Hymietown" comment, his parents left the synagogue in protest. Breitbart would remain "proudly and playfully Jewish" throughout his life, although not always religiously observant. He would sing Hebrew songs at work while also teasing his Orthodox Jewish colleagues for keeping to a kosher diet. Joel Pollak wrote: "He carried his faith as he carried all his convictions: with a lighthearted touch but a deep commitment." Breitbart later said of his profession: "I'm glad I've become a journalist because I'd like to fight on behalf of the Israeli people... And the Israeli people, I adore and I love."