Portal:California/Selected biography/4

Dianne Goldman Berman Feinstein (born June 22, 1933) is the senior U.S. Senator from California, having held office as a senator since 1992. She is a member of the Democratic Party. Senator Feinstein holds a number of "firsts"; she was the first female President of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, San Francisco's first and only female mayor, the first woman to serve in the Senate from California, one of two female Jewish senators, the first woman to serve on the Senate Judiciary Committee, and the first woman to chair the Rules and Administration committee of that body.

Feinstein was born Dianne Emiel Goldman in San Francisco to Betty Rosenburg, a former model, and Leon Goldman, a nationally renowned surgeon who was the first Jew made tenured physician at the UCSF Medical Center in San Francisco. Feinstein's paternal grandparents were Jewish immigrants from Poland, while her maternal grandparents, who were of the Russian Orthodox faith, left St. Petersburg, Russia after the 1917 Russian Revolution; Feinstein's maternal grandfather was an imperial army officer who was a convert from Judaism to Christianity. Feinstein attended the Convent of the Sacred Heart High School and was given a Catholic religious education, but also attended Hebrew school and was confirmed in the Jewish faith at the age of thirteen, having said that she has "always considered [herself] Jewish".