Among his stage work, he is most known for Angels in America, which earned a Pulitzer Prize and a Tony Award, as well as its subsequent acclaimed HBO miniseries of the same name.

He then adapted the acclaimed 2003 miniseries directed by Mike Nichols for which Kushner received a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for a Limited Series or Movie.

[4][5][6][7][8] Shortly after his birth, Kushner's parents moved to Lake Charles, Louisiana, the seat of Calcasieu Parish where he spent his childhood.

He first developed an interest in the figure of Roy Cohn—who features as a major character in his play Angels in America—when he was ten years old, after asking his father about the meaning of McCarthyism, to which his father responded by giving his son a copy of Fred J. Cook’s The Nightmare Decade.Video on YouTube In 1974, Kushner moved back to New York to begin his undergraduate college education at Columbia University, where he received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Medieval studies in 1978.

His new translation of Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage and Her Children was performed at the Delacorte Theater in the summer of 2006, starring Meryl Streep and directed by George C. Wolfe.

In April 2011 it was announced that he was working with Spielberg again, writing the screenplay for an adaptation of historian Doris Kearns Goodwin's book Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln.

[16] In a 2015 interview actress/producer Viola Davis revealed she had hired Kushner to write an as yet untitled biopic about the life of Barbara Jordan that she planned to star in.

[18] His newest completed work, the play The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures, began as a novel more than a decade before it finally opened on May 15, 2009.

[19] West Side Story was released in December 2021 to positive reviews and received seven Academy Award nominations including Best Picture.

Kushner told the Jewish Advocate in an interview, "All that anybody seems to be reading is a couple of right-wing Web sites taking things deliberately out of context and excluding anything that would complicate the picture by making me seem like a reasonable person, which I basically think I am.

He later stated that he hopes that "there might be a merging of the two countries because [they're] geographically kind of ridiculous looking on a map", although he acknowledged that political realities make this unlikely in the near future.

[28] On May 2, 2011, the Board of Trustees of the City University of New York (CUNY),[29] at their monthly public meeting, voted to remove (by tabling to avoid debate) Kushner's name from the list of people invited to receive honorary degrees, based on a statement by trustee Jeffrey S. Wiesenfeld about Kushner's purported statements and beliefs about Zionism and Israel.

[30][31] In response, the CUNY Graduate Center Advocate began a live blog on the "Kushner Crisis" situation, including news coverage and statements of support from faculty and academics.