By Jacob Gurvis
Seven-time Grammy Award winner Alanis Morissette explored her family’s Jewish past — something she said was kept hidden from her most of her life — on this week’s season premiere of the PBS celebrity genealogy series “Finding Your Roots.”
“I think I found out that I was Jewish in my late 20s. I didn’t know,” Morissette told host and Harvard University history professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. in the episode, which aired on Tuesday night, Jan. 2.
The 49-year-old Canadian-American “Ironic” singer was raised Catholic and is now a practicing Buddhist.
But her mother, Georgia Mary Ann Feuerstein, was born in Hungary to Holocaust survivor parents Imre Feuerstein and Nadinia Anna Lauscher/Gulyas. (Morissette’s father, Alan, is of French and Irish descent.) The Feuersteins moved to Canada after the Hungarian Revolution of 1956.
As Gates explained, the family’s experience during the Holocaust was so traumatic that they kept their Jewishness a secret for decades.
“I think there was a terror that is in their bones and they were being protective of us and just not wanting antisemitism,” Morissette said. “So they were doing it to protect us, sort of keeping us in the dark around it.”
After conducting research at Yad Vashem, Israel’s official memorial center to the Holocaust, “Finding Your Roots” discovered that Morissette’s great uncles, Gyorgy and Sandor Feuerstein, died in slave labor camps in the former Soviet Union. She also learned that her maternal grandfather tried to find his brothers after they went missing and were believed to have been sent to “work camps” to serve in the Russian military.
“In 1949, four years after World War II ended, your grandfather asked the Red Cross to look for his brother,” Gates told Morissette. “Can you imagine what that was like for your grandfather, carrying that burden?”
“Not knowing where your sibling is, if they’re alive or dead? … No, God,” she replied. “It’s unfathomable for me.”
On learning about her family’s past, Morissette, a mother of three, said, “You think about their resilience and their ability to keep going in the face of tragedy, it’s pretty poignant. … I had no idea how super-Jewish I am. I feel welcomed into a community that I always had a crush on. I’ve always had a crush on Judaism, and I would just show up at Passover and at seder. Now I know why. It was, like, come home.”
Morissette, who has sold more than 85 million albums worldwide and has performed in Israel multiple times, is the latest in a long list of celebrities to explore their Jewish ancestry on the show, which returned for its 10th season. Past guests have included Pamela Adlon, Dustin Hoffman, Scarlett Johansson and Paul Rudd.
Later this season, the show will spotlight Jewish comedians Lena Dunham and Iliza Shlesinger; Jewish actor Michael Douglas; and “Hamilton” star Anthony Ramos and “The View” co-host Sunny Hostin, both of whom have Jewish heritage.
“Finding Your Roots” airs on Tuesday nights at 8 on Maryland Public Television.
Jacob Gurvis writes for the JTA global Jewish news source.
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