Larry David discovered an uncomfortable truth about his ancestry:
In the Oct. 3 season premiere of PBS genealogy series Finding Your Roots (8 ET/PT, times may vary), David learns that they have common ancestry. And David also discovered his great-grandfather fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War and owned two children as slaves.
“I was shocked. I was completely blown away” by that revelation, he says. “Believe me, the last thing I wanted to do was to find all that out on television. It was very un-Larry like. But I’m glad I did it, because it was interesting personally to me to find out all that stuff.”
I haven’t watched the episode, nor do I intend to, but we can safely assume Larry’s ancestors in question were themselves Jewish.
From a Jewish Daily Forward article titled “Jews Mostly Supported Slavery — Or Kept Silent — During Civil War”:
Most southern Jews defended slavery, and some went further, advocating its expansion…
Although few Jews, like other Americans, opposed slavery at the war’s outset, many came to feel that the suffering of the war needed to be about something important: the end of slavery and the creation of a different America. The experience of Jews in New York City is indicative of this process in some ways. By far America’s largest Jewish community, New York’s Jews were overwhelmingly pro-southern, pro-slavery, and anti-Lincoln in the early years of the war.
But we aren’t supposed to know about this.
We must’ve deviate from Hollywood’s Antebellum Porn depictions of slave owners as dastardly gentile white men.