Howard Stern was born into a Jewish American family living in the Queens neighborhood of Jackson Heights, though the family soon moved to the Long Island town of Roosevelt. His father Ben Stern owned a Manhattan recording studio. Stern's father encouraged his son's interest in radio from an early age. His mother Rae was a homemaker for most of Howard's childhood. Stern has one sibling, a sister named Ellen, who is four years his senior. Stern describes his sister as being his "complete opposite".

Although both his parents are Jewish, Stern's on-air banter is that he is only half Jewish, with the other half being Italian, because "it's very hard to be Jewish in this country. My half Jewish side has been beaten with chains." Stern's Hebrew name is Tzvi (IPA: [ʦvi]); his paternal grandparents, Froim and Anna (Gallar) Stern and maternal grandparents, Sol and Esther (Reich) Schiffman, were Austro-Hungarian Jews who immigrated to America at about the same time.

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