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 “Finding Your Roots With Henry Louis Gates Jr.”
Gates said Tuesday at a TV critics meeting that he traced Ryan’s heritage back to his 10th great-grandfather born in 1531 in Germany. The research showed Ryan is 3 percent Ashkenazi Jewish.
“You could have knocked him over with a feather and then he was very proud of it,” Gates said of Ryan’s reaction. “We don’t know who that Jewish person was, but we know it was on his mother’s German line, which makes sense.”
Guess I need to start saying “L’Chaim” now, too! pic.twitter.com/JV8tVPeBto
— Paul Ryan (@SpeakerRyan) August 1, 2018
Also featured on the show’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.
“Her genome looks like the rainbow coalition because it’s Asian and European and African and it’s beautiful,” he said.
Rubio’s history was traced to his fifth great-grandparents born in Italy and on his father’s side his seventh great-grandparents born in the Canary Islands, off the northwest coast of Africa.
“There was a lot going on politically and in terms of immigration for him,” Gates said.
Gates’ wife, Marial Iglesias Utset, is a Cuban historian and she had her graduate students research Rubio’s history in addition to hiring people in Cuba to find his family tree in parish churches.
“It was like a challenge, an intellectual challenge for me,” 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.
(AP)
Join the official YWN WhatsApp status
7 Responses
He’s 0 part Jewish
I didn’t know Ywn was into clickbaiting
so what, Hitler wouldn’t kill him anyway
Not even according to the Nuremberg laws would he be considered Jewish.
Of course this does not give him part judaism. No one is part Jewish.
I don’t know about clickbait, but this is certainly Political Lobby bait. Imagine J Street having a grand time milking Ryan’s newfound Jewish pride! A single male ancestor from the 1500s…That does not stam happen. Seems to me, to be rather blunt, that were there Amudim and a certain crime division in those days, this probably pathetic Zaida would’ve been reported. Mr, Ryan, not top-of-the-line Jewish pride material. Neither are the Colbert jokes. Bad taste and should not have been posted on this forum.
There is no such thing as “part Jewish”. A person is either 100% Jewish or he is 0% Jewish/100% gentile.
Intermarriage was definitely a bigger problem in Germany than in most other places.
This news is so sad.
Take the test with a grain of salt. I heard of other cases of people from different groups also told they had 1 to 3 percent Yiddishe blood.