Michael Wolff Family History

Michael Wolff was born on August 27th, 1953 to Lew and Van Wolff in Paterson, New Jersey.  He grew up in New Jersey and attended Montclair Academy, a privately run school in Essex county.

New York Journalism.  Michael and his New Jersey accent arrived in New York in the early 1970’s, to attend Columbia University and to find work as a copy boy for the New York Times.

He published his first magazine article in the New York Times Magazine in 1974.  Shortly afterwards, he left the Times and became a contributing writer to the New Times, a bi-weekly news magazine.

During the 1980’s his work would appear in publications as he was developing his writing craft.  The 1990’s saw him expand into book publishing and write his first best-selling book, Burn Rate, about his misadventures with a startup internet company.  As one reviewer described it:

“The narrative follows a series of meetings, with the occasional business-class flight thrown in.  In less capable hands such a book would hold little appeal for the average reader.  But Wolff, a nimble writer with a knack for spotting colorful details, moves the story along at movie-of-the-week pace.”

He was now becoming better known and getting work as a columnist or critic for publications such as The Hollywood Reporter, USA Today, New York Magazine and Vanity Fair.   His style was always to provide readers with a behind-the-scenes account of whatever he was covering.  He offered them a mixture of acerbic truth-telling with calculated artifice.  This intrigued many.  But he also had his critics.

Publishing Paydirt.  Michael hit paydirt in his sixties with his five-book exposures of Donald Trump – starting with Fire and Fury in 2018 – during Trump’s first and second Presidencies.

In New York’s media landscape he apparently knew everyone.  He had surprising access into the worlds of both Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump.  His sources would release, perhaps unwittingly, confidential information that would go straight into his books.  In 2025 Michael expanded into podcasts with his regular briefings of Inside Trump’s Head in The Daily Beast.

Publishing success enabled Michael and his second wife Victoria in 2021 to buy their 1829 Amagansett farmhouse in New York’s fabled Hamptons.  Michael, formerly a die-hard New Yorker, walks everywhere in the village and has said that it was like still being in the city.

Michael on the Lower East Side

By 2009, working then for the magazine Vanity Fair, Michael had become a successful New York journalist and writer, having recently had a tell-all biography of the media mogul Rupert Murdoch published.  He was married, comfortably settled in an Upper East Side doorman building, and knew the best restaurants.

But all of this was to change when he began an affair with Victoria Floethe. a Vanity Fair intern roughly half his age.  Victoria lived on New York’s Lower East side and Michael moved there too.

For the first time in thirty years he did not have a doorman.  This msde newspaper delivery difficult (he thought the homeless people on the Lower East Side would steal his papers).  So most mornings he would throw his overcoat over his pajamas and trudge down to the gas station to pick up his daily reading of the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Daily News and New York Post.

And of course the Lower East Side restaurants were not up to what he had known.  Some would not even accept him as a customer.

Jewish Wolffs and Wolff’s Kasha

Michael’s great grandparents William and Fannie Wolff had married in Poland in 1864 and soon decided that they wanted to take their leave of the Russian Empire.

William was the founder of Wolff’s Kasha, a traditional Jewish food made from roasted buckwheat kernels, which he brought with him to America.  Wolff’s Kasha would find its way onto the menus of New York Jewish restaurants such as Ratner’s.

Emigration.  The Wolffs came in stages to America, initially stopping off in London for a few years.  It seems that William arrived in New York in 1870, followed by Fannie and their three children some three years later.  William must have worked and saved in New York so that he could pay the passage for his wife and family.

The Wolffs were to be in New York’s Lower East Side for nigh on twenty years.  In the 1890’s they crossed the Hudson to Hunterdon county in New Jersey.  The family had risen to six children by then, four boys and two girls, of which the baby in the family was Morris, Michael’s grandfather.

New Jersey.  The Wolffs moved to New Jersey, but they did not settle for a while:

• in 1900 they were to be found in the small town of Readington in Hunterdon county on the western side of New Jersey
• then in 1905 they were further north in Warren county, New Jersey
• and in 1910 they were further north again in Lafayette, Sussex county (it was around this time that William, the patriarch of the family, passed away)..

By 1916 these meanderings seem to have stopped for his sons, including Morris.  They made their home in Paterson in Passaic county, New Jersey.  Paterson – with its silk, iron and cotton factories – had been a thriving industrial town in the early 1900’s, attracting much immigrant labor.

The Wolff brothers – sons of William – continued making Wolff’s Kasha in Paterson, putting out in 1925 a buckwheat cookbook in Yiddish and English to publicize its use.  The book included such recipes as the kasha varnishkes shown below.  However, their kasha mill in Paterson burned down in the 1930’s and Wolff’s Kasha was taken over by Birkett Mills in 1948.

Morris and his wife Rose raised three sons in Paterson.  Their eldest son Ralph fought in World War Two and returned to start an office printing company in Fair Lawn, Bergen county.  He was a prominent member of the Jewish community there.  Their second son Lewis (Lew), born in 1920, was Michael’s father.

Lew and Van Wolff

Michael’s parents Lew and Van Wolff had married in Paterson, New Jersey in 1953.  Lew was thirty-three years old at the time and his wife Marguerite Vanderwerf, or Van as she was known, twenty-eight.

Lew.  Lew like his brother Ralph had enlisted with the US Army in 1942.  He served as a sergeant in the Pacific and Mediterranean sectors during World War Two.  After the war he returned to Paterson and started up an advertising and public relations firm called Force Inc.

He and Ven moved around a lot in New Jersey while he was running his business.  His work had its ups and downs over the years, which must have been a source of stress.  In 1984 Lew died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of sixty-three.

Van.  Marguerite had Dutch origins from her father Albert Van der Werf who had been born in Friesland, the Netherlands in 1901.  He arrived in America in 1920 and married and settled down in Paterson, New Jersey.  His daughter Marguerite was born there in 1925.  .

As Michael told it:

“Marguerite had graduated from high school in 1942 and went to work for the Paterson Evening News, a daily newspaper in New Jersey.  In a newsroom with many of its men off to war, Marguerite VanderWerf, nicknamed Van in the newsroom, became the paper’s military reporter.  Her job was to keep track of the local casualties.

She married my father Lew Wolff an adman and left the paper after eleven years to have me.”

When Lew died in 1984 Van was fifty-eight and left with limited resources.  She moved to Ridgewood in Bergen county, New Jersey and embarked with brio on a second career – as a marketing executive for two pharmaceutical companies.

She retired in 2004 and moved to an assisted-living apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.  She died at the age of eighty-seven in 2012.

Lew and Van had three children – Michael, Nancy and David.  Michael and Nancy moved to Manhattan and fretted over their mother’s dementia in her later years.  David, on the other hand, had departed far away to Hawaii.

Michael Wolff’s Family Tree

• New Jersey

• Lewis William Wolff from Russia (1845-1910) m. Fannie Lewis from Poland (1845-1922) in Poland in 1864 and came to America via England in 1870, later settling with his family in New Jersey
• – Samuel Wolff (1865-1952) m. Leah Jacobs, born in Poland
• – Julia Wolff (1869-1937) m. Morris Rosenblum, born in England
• – George Wolff (1873-1951) m. Martha Hoffman, born in England
• – Rebecca Wolff (1875-1967) m. Michael Peters, born in New York
• – Abraham Wolff (1879-1947) m. Elizabeth Zayulove, born in New York
• – Morris Wolff (1887-1972), born in New York

• Morris Wolff from New Jersey m. Rose Messing from an Austrian immigrant family (1892-1959) in New York in 1917 and moved to Paterson, New Jersey
• – Ralph Wolff (1918-2008) m. Paulette Schotz
• – Lewis (Lew) Allen Wolff (1920-1984)
• – Samuel Wolff (b. 1924)

• Michael Wolff from Paterson, New Jersey m. Alison Anthoine, lawyer (b. 1952) in New York in 1981, separated in 2009 and divorced in 2016; rem. Victoria Floethe (b. 1981), a Vanity Fair intern
• – Susanna Wolff, college editor
• – plus two other children (Elizabeth and Steven) with Alison
• – plus two children with Victoria