Jewish actress, musician, writer and entrepreneur Kat Graham just shared that she’s having a baby, her first child, with husband Bryant Wood this week!
The actress shared a carousel of pictures of her and Wood with the baby bump, smiling. “We’re having a baby,” the caption reads. Wood also shared a video of the two of them dancing while Graham cooks Thanksgiving dinner, her baby bump showing.
Graham is known to many as Bonnie Bennett from “The Vampire Diaries,” but to me, her biggest hit is this Funny or Die parody of Wiz Khalifa’s “Black and Yellow” called “Black and Jewish” with Kali Hawk from “Bridesmaids,” in which she reads the Torah with her real life half brother Yaakov and raps about blowing the shofar and stabbing her enemies with menorahs. It’s very silly, but very full of Jewish pride, too.
Graham, 36, is the daughter of Americo-Liberian music producer-turned-journalist Joseph Graham and Natasha Graham, the daughter of Eastern European Jewish refugees who came to America to escape the Holocaust. Her parents divorced when she was young and she was raised by her mother, who raised her Jewish, going to Hebrew school and speaking the Jewish tongue, and visiting family in Israel.
Graham has talked about how being the granddaughter of refugees from both sides of her family informs her philanthropic work. Back in 2024, she was named a TIME100 Next Generation Leader for her work as a UNHCR Goodwill ambassador, for bringing “empathy this year to refugee crises in Africa the world seems to forget: Sudan, South Sudan, and Ethiopia, where refugees are on the front lines of climate change.”
Earlier this year, she participated in “Borrowed Spotlight,” getting her photograph taken with Holocaust survivor Yetta Kane to encourage people to remember the Holocaust.
Graham was very close to her mother, who unfortunately passed away in 2023 from an illness; she shared on The Kelly Clarkson Show that Natasha was supposed to write the closing to her 2023 self help book, “Seasons of You.” Graham’s brother was killed in a tragic shooting in 2021.
Wood and Graham first got married in a small ceremony in 2023, but when it came to having their official wedding party, Graham was walked down the aisle by her godmother, Hollywood golden-era actor Valerie von Sobel, a Hungarian Jewish refugee herself.
The wedding ceremony was performed by Bryant’s friend, Rabbi Iggy, and according to The Knot, the couple “passed their rings around and put a modern spin on the traditional Jewish ritual of the seven blessings, asking friends to share personal blessings.”
We’re so excited for the couple to welcome their first child into their interfaith family, and excited for Graham to be able to share her Jewish pride with her future child.
