Finding Your Roots is a PBS program that tracks and reflects on different artists about their Jewish heritage. The program, hosted by Henry Louis Gates Jr, a historian at Harvard University, is in its tenth season, and has in the past featured the participation of great actors and artists, such as Dustin Hoffman, Paul Rudd and Scarlet Johansson.
This time it was Alanis Morissette's turn. The singer, a seven-time Grammy winner, recounted her experience and her strange connection to her family's Jewish past. According to Morissette herself in the program, her mother's Jewish origin was hidden from her during her childhood and adolescence.
The singer admitted that she discovered “that I was Jewish in my late twenties. She didn't know.” It was at that moment that she learned that the parents of her mother, Georgia Mary Ann Feuerstein, who was born in Hungary, were two Holocaust survivors. Their names were Imre Feuerstein and Nadinia Anna Lauscher/Gulyas.
However, the singer believes that her parents hid that information from her to protect her: "I think there was a terror, in their bones, and they were protecting us, they just didn't want anti-Semitism." Raised Catholic, Morissette now practices Buddhism.
OY VEY!