Tonight on Finding Your Roots: explore the shared Irish ancestry of three powerful social commentators of our times. Watch The Irish Factor at 8/7 on PBSExplore the shared Irish ancestry of Soledad O’Brien, Bill O’Reilly and Bill Maher and how they have been deeply influenced by their Irish roots.
3 comments:
I got your blog post 11:01 PM (10 hours ago)on Tuesday. No doubt you intended it to go out earlier. The program would have been over long before 11:00 anyway.
I don't know where you live but you can see from the timestamp on my blog post that it was published just before 11 A.M. (not pm) on Tuesday. Check the bottom of the post and you will see this:
"Posted by Lorine McGinnis Schulze at 10:53 AM"
I am on Eastern Time. There was plenty of time for everyone to view the program after reading my post. Since I don't know WHERE you got the post (via what medium) I can't offer you any help figuring it out
Why does this show often whitewash people's Jewish backgrounds?
Harry Connick, Jr., Bill Maher, and Patricia Arquette were all born to Jewish mothers, who were fully Jewish.
Yet this was not even hinted at in their episodes, not in the slightest.
You had to squint your eyes real hard to see that Arquette's DNA result said 48.5% (or was it 48.9%) Ashkenazi Jewish. This certainly was never commented upon anywhere in the episode.
This is even more absurd because Gates mentioned BOTH sides of the OTHER guests who were on.
With Maher's episode, Gates went over Bill O'Reilly's father's side the most, but he also discussed a bit of O'Reilly's mother. He talked mostly about Soledad O'Brien's father, but they also spent a few minutes about the fact that O'Brien's mother was a black Cuban woman.
But apparently Bill Maher was conceived immaculately by his father. Did he even have a mother?
For Arquette's episode, Gates covered John McCain's father a lot, but he also disclosed a bit of genealogical information about McCain's mother (the George Washington relation). He fully discussed both sides of Julianne Moore's family.
But for Patricia Arquette's mother? Name, profession, and picture. That's it.
It would be like having an episode about a person of half Jewish background that never mentions the existence of their non-Jewish parent or ancestry (there have been no such episodes, only the vice versa).
What's going on here? It's ridiculous that an ethnic group that makes up 50% of a person's ancestry is never mentioned on their shows. Can you name any other group where this has happened, much less happened ''three'' times? (and where it's half of their ancestry).
You can't. I've checked. It's never happened on this show.
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