A Syrian refugee brought us Steve Jobs

USA Today - Steve Jobs biological father was from Syria,,,

Steve Jobs’ biological father, Abdulfattah “John” Jandali, was born in 1931 to a prominent Syrian family, the youngest of nine children. He grew up in Homs, Syria, a city since ravaged by the nation’s civil war.

According to the authorized Steve Jobs biography written by Walter Isaacson, in the early 1950s, Jandali went to study at the American University in Beirut, and eventually on to the University of Wisconsin.

While serving in Wisconsin as a teaching assistant, he met the woman who would become Steve Jobs’ biological mother, Joanne Schieble.

Jandali and Schieble would eventually marry, but not until they put the future co-founder of Apple up for adoption, the year he was born, in 1955. The couple later had a daughter as well, the writer Mona Simpson.

In the Jobs biography, Isaacson writes that they initially decided not to get married because Schieble’s father, who was dying at the time, “threatened to disown her if she wed Abdulfattah.”

Years later, Jobs would “bristle whenever anyone referred to Paul and Clara Jobs as his `adoptive’ parents or implied that they were not his `real’ parents,” Isaacson wrote. Jobs, who died in 2011, instead referred to his biological parents as “my sperm and egg bank.”