Bruce Springsteen’s name is known the world over.
However, that doesn’t stop some people from getting it wrong.
One of the most common mispronunciations of Springsteen’s name is “Springstein.”
The mistake popped up a long time ago and still routinely happens, he told the audience Sunday at the USC Shoah Foundation’s 30th anniversary Ambassadors for Humanity gala in New York.
“I actually was Bruce Springstein for the first year or two of my career,” he said at the Oct. 13 event, per a People report. “Everywhere I went — I pull up to the club. ‘Welcome Bruce Springstein.’ This happened as late as a month ago. I’m not joking.”
Springsteen, 75, performed at the gala hosted by the USC Shoah Foundation — The Institute for Visual History and Education, a nonprofit founded by Steven Spielberg in 1994. He dedicated his performance to Spielberg and his wife, Kate Capshaw.
The Shoah Foundation records and collects video interviews with survivors of the Holocaust. Its archive includes testimonies from Holocaust survivors as well as survivors of and people connected to the Armenian genocide and other atrocities.
“The work of collecting the personal testimony and the voices of those who’ve witnessed history has just something in common with the work that songwriters, filmmakers, all artists do to understand and to create our real and imagined worlds,” Springsteen said at the event, which was also attended by Jersey celebrities like Whoopi Goldberg and Meryl Streep. “We follow the ghosts of history. We listen for the voices of the past to take us into the future, and we lean into their stories and we listen to them.”
Springsteen grew up Catholic in Freehold. His family is of Irish, Dutch and Italian ancestry.
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Amy Kuperinsky may be reached at [email protected] and followed at @AmyKup.
