In this Episode 7 of Finding Your Roots, three celebrated Americans share not only a Jewish heritage but discover tragedy and great hope in the the lost stories of their ancestors, who persevered in the face of prejudice, anti-Semitic persecution and the loneliness of exile - on both sides of the Atlantic. 

Tony Kushner delves into the history of the Holocaust to discover his ancestors’ fate; Carole King learns the origins of her family name and confronts the reality of the discrimination her ancestors faced in America; and Alan Dershowitz finds out that the first Hassidic synagogue in Brooklyn, started by his great-grandfather, played a secret role in WWII.  Episode 7 began airing Tuesday, November 4, 2014.

Through the first season of Finding Your Roots (2012), noted Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr. has been helping people discover long-lost relatives hidden for generations within the branches of their family trees, since the premiere of his groundbreaking series African American Lives (2006).  Professor Gates utilizes a team of genealogists to reconstruct the paper trail left behind by our ancestors and the world’s leading geneticists to decode our DNA and help us travel thousands of years into the past to discover the origins of our earliest forebears.

Filmed on location around the world, Finding Your Roots airs nationally on PBS.

Be sure to check your local listings for channel location and timeslot.  For more information, please visit www.pbs.org

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