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House Speaker Ryan Uncovers Jewish Roots on PBS Show
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By Associated Press
Published 7 years ago on
August 1, 2018

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BEVERLY HILLS โ€” House Speaker Paul Ryan was surprised and proud to find out he has Jewish roots.
The Wisconsin Republican discovered his family history while filming a segment for the upcoming season of the PBS series โ€œFinding Your Roots With Henry Louis Gates Jr.โ€

โ€œYou could have knocked him over with a feather and then he was very proud of it. We donโ€™t know who that Jewish person was, but we know it was on his motherโ€™s German line, which makes sense. So somebody who was a Christian German slept with a Jewish German person and thatโ€™s where that came from.โ€ โ€” Henry Louis Gates Jr., host of โ€œFinding Your Rootsโ€
Gates said Tuesday at a TV critics meeting that he traced Ryanโ€™s heritage back to his 10th great-grandfather born in 1531 in Germany. The research showed Ryan is 3 percent Ashkenazi Jewish.

Show Explores Roots of Marco Rubio, Tulsi Gabbard, Too

Also featured on the showโ€™s fifth season debuting in January is Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Florida, and Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, D-Hawaii.
Gates said he chose Ryan because he was fascinated by him and not his politics. He picked Rubio because he wanted to include a Cuban and Gabbard because of her Pacific ancestry.
โ€œHer genome looks like the rainbow coalition because itโ€™s Asian and European and African and itโ€™s beautiful,โ€ he said.
Rubioโ€™s history was traced to his fifth great-grandparents born in Italy and on his fatherโ€™s side his seventh great-grandparents born in the Canary Islands, off the northwest coast of Africa.

โ€œWeโ€™re all immigrants. Weโ€™re all mixed up. When the lights came down, everybody was sleeping with everyone else.โ€ โ€” Henry Louis Gates Jr.
โ€œThere was a lot going on politically and in terms of immigration for him,โ€ Gates said.
Gatesโ€™ wife, Marial Iglesias Utset, is a Cuban historian and she had her graduate students research Rubioโ€™s history in addition to hiring people in Cuba to find his family tree in parish churches.
โ€œIt was like a challenge, an intellectual challenge for me,โ€ Gates said.
Gates said his purpose in doing the show is to deconstruct race and show how racism manifests itself in the current anti-immigrant feeling in the United States.
โ€œWeโ€™re all immigrants. Weโ€™re all mixed up,โ€ he said. โ€œWhen the lights came down, everybody was sleeping with everyone else.โ€

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