The number one business news anchorwoman in America, Liz Claman, also happens to be a Jew – and a proud one at that.
On her Fox Business show, “The Claman Countdown,” she covers the chaos of the last hour on Wall Street while wearing her Star of David necklace. The Los Angeles native, who went to Beverly Hills High School, is more dedicated than ever to standing up for her people. “I am a proud Jew, and I only became prouder after Oct. 7,” she said. “I am so fired up now. If you’re going to attack the Jews, you’ve got to go through me.”
Claman, an industry veteran who was recently inducted into the Syndeo Institute at The Cable Center’s Cable Hall of Fame, started her career in 1985 an intern at CBS in Los Angeles. “I picked reporters’ brains and asked to sit over their shoulder and see what they do in the newsroom,” she said. “That was my first introduction to broadcast TV.”
When she graduated from college, she snagged a job as an overnight production assistant at CBS. She’d come in at four in the morning, take a station car and drive around Hollywood and Vine – which was not a safe neighborhood back then – and pick up 500 newspapers. She’d then deliver them to all the reporters and executives in the CBS building. “I was in it to win it,” she said. “I was happy to do anything to get into the news industry.”
When Claman wanted to move up and become an anchor, she couldn’t find anything in L.A., and was told to go to the Midwest. She applied for jobs all over, but only received rejections. So, she tried a new tactic: She looked at the cities in the Midwest alphabetically and picked Columbus, Ohio. She learned everything she could about the city, such as why the mayor was fighting with the police chief and other local politics, bought a plane ticket with her savings, showed up to the station and said she needed an interview.
“They said, ‘Sure, we’ll speak to anyone for 10 minutes,” she said. “I stretched that to three years and seven months.”
From there, Claman made it to Cleveland, then Boston and eventually CNBC, where she hosted the show “Cover to Cover” and co-anchored “Market Watch.” CNBC had launched a search “to find people who were smart enough to pick up the stock market and also connected well with audiences,” she said. “I knew nothing about the market, but out of all the tapes, they picked mine.”
Following a nine-year run at CNBC, Claman went over to Fox Business, where she’s been at the anchor desk for 16 years and is the only Jewish anchor on the Fox Business channel.
“I have never felt so good working at a place as I do at Fox when it comes to being Jewish,” she said. “They understood the value of me and my voice, especially after Oct. 7. I feel like I’m living on another planet when I see how some networks cover what happened on Oct. 7 and after, and how Fox covers it. Our network has poured more resources into covering Israel than all the other networks combined, I could bet you money on that. In a time when the industry is cost-cutting, Fox realized how important this story is for democracy, the future of the Middle East, for Israel and for humanity.”
Claman grew up going to a Hebrew school where the teachers were Holocaust survivors with their numbers tattooed to their arms.
Claman grew up going to a Hebrew school where the teachers were Holocaust survivors with their numbers tattooed to their arms, and she heard about her family and the Jewish people’s history through her late father, Dr. Morris Claman, a world-renowned urologist at UCLA School of Medicine. “My father taught me so much about the Holocaust that I was hyper aware about the horror my teachers suffered,” she said. “He also raised us to understand we may be living in this golden town of Beverly Hills, but we had to remember all those who came before us and the sacrifices they made. It has really guided me.”
Claman attended Temple Beth Am and was bat mitzvahed when Rabbi Jacob Pressman was there. When Benjamin Netanyahu visited California and met with Governor Jerry Brown about water technology in 2014, the anchor asked Fox Business if she could go. They agreed, and she got to interview the Prime Minister.
“When I approached Bibi, I said, ‘Shalom,’ and he started speaking to me in Hebrew.’ I said, ‘I don’t speak Hebrew,’ and he said, ‘I know, all those years of Hebrew school and you don’t speak Hebrew,’” she said, laughing.
While the Jews have been through many struggles throughout their history, it gives Claman hope that the community will come out victorious now – as it always has. “Even after the Holocaust, we weren’t victims,” she said. “We stood tall, and we turned Israel into the miracle it is today.”
Along with continuing to speak the truth at work and beyond, Claman’s goal is to instill in her children the same sense of Jewish pride that she has. “I want to be a good mother and raise children who understand the importance of their heritage,” she said. “I tell them they are part of a chain that extends back thousands of years. Don’t break that link.”
