Alanis Morissette spoke about her Jewish background – which she didn’t know about for a long time.
Alanis Morissette has spoken about her family’s Holocaust past. In one episode of the PBS show “Finding Your Roots” she discussed her Jewish background. “I don’t think I found out I was Jewish until I was in my late 20s,” she said. Morissette grew up Catholic in Canada and Germany and is now a Buddhist. Her mother, Georgia May Ann Feuerstein, however, was born in Hungary to two Holocaust survivors.
Morissette explains the family secret with the traumatic experiences. “I think they have some kind of terror in their bones. They wanted to protect us from it and prevent anti-Semitism,” said the singer about herself and her brothers. “The fact that they left us in the dark about it was supposed to protect us.” While recording “Finding Your Roots,” the 49-year-old learned details about the life of her grandfather Imre Feuerstein. After the war, he was still looking for his brothers who had disappeared during the Holocaust. In 1956 the family left their homeland during the Hungarian Revolution. “I now understand their secrecy,” is Alanis Morissette’s assessment of her family’s reticence about her past.
The seven-time Grammy winner isn’t the first celebrity to explore her Jewish family history on the PBS show. In the tenth season currently being broadcast, the actress, author and director Lena Dunham, the actor Michael Douglas and the musical actor Anthony Ramos will also speak. History professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. from Harvard University will host the genealogy program.