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Chelsea Clinton And Marc Mezvinsky Expecting

The first Clinton grandchild is due later this year

by
Stephanie Butnick
April 18, 2014
Chelsea Clinton speaks at a Clinton Foundation event on April 17, 2014 in New York City, where she also announced her pregnancy. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
Chelsea Clinton speaks at a Clinton Foundation event on April 17, 2014 in New York City, where she also announced her pregnancy. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

Chelsea Clinton crashed a Clinton Foundation event yesterday to share the news that she and husband Marc Mezvinsky are expecting their first child later this year. The announcement brought cheers from the crowd and surprised even host America Ferrara, who recovered by asking Hillary Clinton, seated on stage next to her daughter, if she too was pregnant.

Clinton’s pregnancy marks the beginning of the next generation of the Clinton dynasty—or the beginning of the Clinton dynasty, or the continuation of it, I’m not sure how these things work. Both parents tweeted their excitement about the news, which mostly proves that if you say how badly you want to become a grandparent to enough news outlets and in enough interviews (or just out loud to enough people), it will eventually happen.

Clinton and Mezvinsky married in July 2012 in Rhinebeck, N.Y., in what the New York Times called “the most publicized interfaith wedding in recent American history.” (Rabbi James Ponet, who co-officiated the ceremony with a Methodist minister, discusses it here.) Naturally, their pregnancy, too, is of interest to the Jewish community—and its bloggers—who will likely dissect every detail about the couple’s child-rearing, down to their choice of mohel. Still, if their very Jewish interfaith wedding is any indication, there will very likely be a Clinton bar mitzvah in our future.

Mazel tov to Clinton and Mezvinsky. You can watch Clinton’s announcement here. If you want more Chelsea, here’s Etgar Keret writing about the time he hallucinated Chelsea Clinton leaping out of a donut. Topless. (In his defense, he was in donut withdrawal, having recently returned to Israel after three weeks in the United States.)

Stephanie Butnick is chief strategy officer of Tablet Magazine, co-founder of Tablet Studios, and a host of the Unorthodox podcast.