Michael Douglas, Lena Dunham Make Shocking Discoveries About Their Jewish Ancestry

Actor Michael Douglas and writer-director Lena Dunham made shocking revelations about their Jewish ancestors and family roots stemming from Eastern Europe in Thursday’s episode of the PBS series Finding Your Roots.

In the latest episode of the popular series, in which celebrities learn more about their ancestral histories, host Henry Louis Gates Jr. presented Douglas with new information about his Jewish paternal side of the family. The Wall Street actor and his father, the late Kirk Douglas, are both household names in the Hollywood film industry, but Michael discovered on Finding Your Roots that his Jewish paternal grandfather who sold rags from a cart in America hailed from the town of Chausy, which was part of the Russian Empire but is now in eastern Belarus.

Back in Chausy, Douglas’ family lived in the town’s Jewish ghetto and faced discrimination for their Jewish heritage. The Oscar winner also learned that his grandfather was imprisoned and charged with robbery and his great-uncle, named Moshe, was a wanted man in Chausy accused of armed robbery in 1906.

Douglas made more revelations about his father’s Jewish family during the course of the episode and was even presented with a photo of a Jewish cemetery in Eastern Europe where some of his ancestors were buried. Upon learning more about his Jewish roots, the Fatal Attraction actor said, “I feel more of a spiritual religious connection to Judaism than I ever had before.”

During Thursday’s episode, meanwhile, Dunham for the first time ever learned that she had a family connection to the Holocaust. The creator of the HBO hit series Girls uncovered information about her Eastern European roots in Poland and Hungary. She learned of an ancestor, named Ilona, who was killed by Nazi SS police in Hungary in 1941 during World War II, along with thousands of Jews during a Nazi roundup.

“It’s an incredibly painful thing to think about people with whom I share probably not just a DNA but the features and emotional responses and an approach to life,” she said after learning about her genetic ties to the Holocaust. “Those people being placed in this situation and having their lives extinguished this way. There’s not a way to reckon with it. It’s too big … but to see a personal connection to it literalizes it in a way that is very, very powerful.”

The final bits of information presented to Douglas about his family revealed that his maternal fourth great-grandfather, named John Neilson, was a colonel of a battalion of a militia in colonial New Jersey during the American Revolution and an informant who provided military intelligence to George Washington. There is even a statue of Neilson in downtown New Brunswick, New Jersey. However, Neilson was also a slave owner. Reflecting on that unsavory part of his family history, Douglas said it made him think of the Hebrew expression tikkun olam, which means to repair a broken world and make it a better place.

“You feel the obligation [of tikkun olam] and that sense much more when you see something like that,” he said. “It makes you want to be a better person.”

Watch the full episode of Finding Your Roots featuring Douglas and Dunham in the video below.