Episode 19: Transcript

"When it all comes together, it is beyond exhilarating." - with Jennifer Mendelsohn

Doug French: Well, here we are. The first podcast since you got married. What's it like to be married?

Magda Pecsenye Zarin: That would be a better question if we had recorded this after I was married instead of the week before.

Doug: Yes, it's still a great mystery.

Magda: Yeah, we're still recording this. It's still a great mystery. I don't know, I just want to... 

Doug: Wasn't that a fantastic day? It went perfect. Nobody fought. The weather was ideal. Canapés were on point.

Magda: The cake was delightful. I mean, I do know the cake was delightful. I can tell you in advance.

Doug: And I was a perfect DJ.

Magda: You were a perfect DJ.

Doug: We're basically manifesting a perfect wedding day.

Magda: Yes.

Doug: And we're here to talk about Jennifer Mendelsohn, who is, she's always been really smart and started her life as a journalist and then just fell into this passion.

Magda: I was so intrigued by her story. And you'll hear in the rest of the episode, I had nothing to say. I thought we were going to come into this story and we would ask her “And then what happened?” right? And, you know, pepper her with questions. But instead, because she's a journalist, she tells her own story so well and paces it so well that I had nothing to say except, “Wow!” the whole time, so for most of this episode, I sound stupid because literally all I'm saying is, “Wow!” to everything she said.

Doug: Hopefully we'll get the same reaction from listeners because now that she's using DNA to reconnect Holocaust survivors and bringing about these amazing reunions, it's something that everybody should know is happening and recognize that it's a story that we don't see enough of, but it's out there.

Magda: And sometimes people sort of struggle with this idea of “I'm not doing anything important,” you know, if you're just doing your regular job. But she was somebody who just had a regular job, who, because of her regular job had these other skills to do this genealogy work, and then

got hooked up with the DNA tracking end of it. And now she's doing this amazing, miraculous thing that's so good for humanity and for specific people. And she didn't have to decide only to do public service. She's just doing the best she can with what she has, and is serving as she is. And I think that's really inspirational to the rest of us.

Doug: Especially since you never know who's going to catch your attention.

Magda: Right.

Doug: To both good and ill because she became very Twitter famous. And then Twitter infamous, just because people saw what she was doing and she was picking fights with powerful people with facts, which is what journalists do. And, you know, the creeps didn't like it so they started targeting her and doxing her and she withstood it and that's the best part, because if you meet her you know she's not a contentious person. She's just out there trying to tell a story and tell it well, and when people don't like what you're saying they're going to come after you. And I'm really impressed by how she withstood that and has left that, because it's one thing to be Twitter famous, and another thing to be X-infamous. And so she's now just doing the work and she's dodged the fame.

Magda: Right.

Doug: That's all you got?

Magda: Yeah, that's all I got. I mean, her story tells itself. We don't need to give her a long introduction.

Doug: All right. Fair enough. Yes, this is Jennifer Mendelsohn, Episode 19. And I had a ball with her. And I had a ball at your wedding. I love dancing with your mom. See you Friday!

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Doug: That is Jennifer's video and she debunks the idea that people's names were changed in Ellis Island.

Jennifer Mendelsohn: Oh God, you found that?

Doug: Yeah. I do a lot of research, and I just love the idea that you've grown into this person whose purpose is to debunk a lot of nonsense.

Jennifer:  It's fun.

Doug: How do you feel, as someone in your position who's trying to combat misinformation and disinformation, how much of a cross current do you think you're fighting as you're trying to get the word out?

It's like pissing in the ocean.

Jennifer: I mean, it's like pissing in the wind? A hopeless, like, it's like being buried under an avalanche and it is so distressing. And I was just thinking the other day, I was going through my Facebook feed and I just, I find it so disheartening how many people I know who just continue to repost obvious nonsense and that no one has become more savvy over the last few years when we have seen the horrible, horrible consequence of disinformation in culture, in politics, in health, in everything. And people still are posting that they don't give Facebook permission to charge them $7.99 or like the most basic

that had saved over 900 people from the World Trade Center.

And all of these people, a dog, and all of these people, all of these people were commenting, “this is so beautiful. This is a hero.” And it said the dog had been honored by New York City. And out of curiosity, you know, I looked it up and there is a Snope story from November, 2001, debunking this story that was just reposted on Facebook in September, 2023. And I just thought, you know, we're never going to learn.

Magda: How would a dog have been at the World Trade Center or gone well to the Trade Center? It might as well have been about a hippopotamus!

Jennifer: Like most good urban legends, there is a fascinating kernel of truth to the story. And I actually learned something amazing in the process, which is that there was a blind man on one of the upper floors of the World Trade Center who had a guide dog who safely got him down, I think it was like 80 something floors. And he then went on the speaking circuit. And I think the sort of kernel of truth that a seeing eye dog saved somebody snowballed into the idea that a dog saved 900 people and was honored by New York City with a special citation.

Doug: Does that tell you how parched we are for good news? You know, how assiduously we'll gravitate towards something that gives us a dopamine hit, you know, makes us think that there's still hope for humanity?

Magda: Well, but the other thing that makes that story clearly not true is that Rudy Giuliani would never have allowed himself to be upstaged by a dog.

Jennifer: That's true. Or Donald Trump, who somehow would have stepped in and said, you know, my dog rescued 1500 people from the World Trade Center. 

Magda: He was the hugest dog.

Doug: Well, the crux of our conversation here is about how it's very telling that you lead off with how helpless it feels a lot of the time, but you still do it. You're fighting the good fight and unearthing amazing and vital facts about people's families. So given that, let's, why don't we start off with your current project and how you came to be a part of it?

Jennifer: Sure. Well, it's a little bit of a long story, so settle in.

Doug: Oh, I got some time.

Jennifer: There's a talk that I now give and I typically start by saying, you know how there's always one person in every family who is the person who sidles up to all the old people at every family gathering and wants to know the names of every aunt and uncle and hear stories about the old country and the one who asked to see the old photo albums? Yeah, well, that wasn't me. I mean, most genealogists start as that person and just because that person gets older.

Doug: Even the journalists didn't want that to happen? I mean, there's still the search for the facts that must permeate somewhere.

Jennifer: That will come in a later chapter of the story. But the truth is, you know, I was not a born genealogist. My brother Daniel, who some of your listeners may know, is quite an accomplished writer and critic. He was that kid. And he was the one my grandfather with questions and charting out the family tree. I had no interest. I mean, a vague passing interest. Sure, it's cool. “Oh, look at this picture of Grandpa when, you know, he was 18 years old and emigrating to America.” But the burning questions were not ones that interested me. I was a journalist. 

I spent many years in my journalism career, and I did always have sort of a fascination with debunking. I worked on many stories in my career, sort of getting to the bottom of commonly accepted stories, myths, people that turned out to be not what they seemed. And I always found that incredibly satisfying and fun. The genealogy thing, as many, I suppose, life changes do, came about almost entirely by accident. 

Actually, this is so funny, Doug, I didn't even realize it goes back to our common friends at UVA because what happened was in the spring of 2013, I noticed that several people I knew from college had posted a Kickstarter campaign for a documentary that was being produced by someone we had gone to college with, who I did not know, but with whom I had many mutual friends, who was making a documentary about the Streitz-Mazza factory on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. And I sort of clicked on it and I thought, oh, that's so charming. You know, again, I had no specific interest in genealogy, but, you know, I sort of like stories about old New York City. And three of my four grandparents were like Eastern European Jewish immigrants who lived on the Lower East Side, right in that neighborhood. And I just thought, oh, this is interesting. And I noticed that the matzo factory was on a street on the Lower East Side called Rivington Street. Everybody from the Lower East Side knows Rivington Street. It's a pretty mean thoroughfare. But what sort of popped into my head was, I always remember growing up, my mother used to talk about cousins that she had who lived on Rivington Street. I remember her talking about them, that her cousin Max sold bagels on Rivington Street. And it just sort of formulated a question, which is, oh my God, whatever happened to cousins Max and Miriam? I remember them clearly from my childhood and they lived in Key Biscayne off Miami Beach, and I remember meeting their granddaughter who was my age and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. 

So I did perhaps the stupidest thing ever. I still have no idea why this yielded fruit, but I put in their names and Rivington Street to Google. I have no idea what I thought I was going to find, but I was just sort of curious. And what came up was the 1940 census on ancestry. And I had never seen the census before. I had no idea you could even look at the census. And I just started looking at it and had all this cool demographic information about them. And it mentioned where they had been living in 1935. And in 1935, they had been living in Woodbine, New Jersey. And that sparked another memory because I knew from my childhood that my mother's cousin, Miriam, who was married to Max, who sold bagels on Rivington Street, Miriam's father was the mayor of Woodvine, New Jersey, which that's a whole other story. It was an agricultural colony in South Jersey, specifically designed to attract immigrant European Jews to work farmland in South Jersey. And I just thought, oh, this is so interesting. Let me look for my grandparents in the census and let me look for my great grandparents in the census and let me look for my cousins. And I always say, you know, the next thing I knew I was looking for, you know, my hairdresser's nephew's sister-in-law's cleaning woman's grandfather. Like I just, and it did dovetailed perfectly with, you know, my reporting background, my storytelling background, my getting to the bottom of things background, because the first thing you learn in genealogy is that much of what you're told by your family is wrong. And when you actually start following the paper trail and what the documents and the evidence tell you, the story that emerges can be completely different. And that's how it started. And I would not be sitting here today on this podcast with you if not for the fact of a second very lucky accident, which happened two weeks after that first Google search. 

So I did that Google search. I found the census. I fell down the rabbit hole. I started building my tree on ancestry and finding all these cool documents and things about my family. And two weeks later, sort of flush with all of these thoughts, specifically about immigration, because as I said, three of my four grandparents were immigrants. So when I tell my family story, it's a story of great exodus of all of these people leaving Eastern Europe and coming in this great wave of immigrants, mostly to New York City. Two weeks later, I was in the car with my husband's then 95 year old grandmother, who was a Holocaust survivor from Poland, born in 1917.

Magda: Oh, wow.

Jennifer: And because I was recently thinking about all these questions of immigration, I asked her what I thought was a very innocuous question. I was not trying to change anyone's life. I was not trying to change the course of my career. I was honestly just trying to make conversation in the car on the way to a family party with a 95 year old woman. I knew that her family was sadly the reverse of my family. In her family, there were no immigrants except for her because she was the only one to survive, meaning no one had gotten out of Eastern Europe and they were all murdered. She had managed to flee and that's why she was here to tell the story.

Doug: And how old was she when she made her way out? I guess, 1917, so she was in her mid-20s?

Jennifer: They literally fled Poland to go east in November of 1939, two months after Germany invaded. And in, you know, something out of a classic World War II movie, she asked her mother to let her take one of her younger sisters with her. And her mother said, you know, “Tsk-tsk, Frida, we've seen war before. This will be no different. You go.” And not one of them survived. Anyway, so what I asked her was, Mumma, I said, when you were growing up, was there a lot of buzz about going to America? Because I thought how interesting, you know, my family, there's all these ships manifest and naturalization papers and everyone was getting out, you know, what was the thought about getting out in her neck of the woods? And I should mention, by way of context, that, you know, she lost both of her parents, all six of her siblings, her only living grandparent and quite literally 99.5% of every cousin, aunt, uncle, you know, everybody. I knew she had a first cousin because that family had gone to Cuba before the war. And I vaguely knew she had like a second cousin somewhere in Canada, but this was a woman with no family.

So I said, what did you know about America growing up? And she said,

“We didn't really talk about it much,” you know, and I thought, okay, case closed.

And then she said, sort of as an afterthought, well, you know, of course, that my mother had two older sisters who went to Chicago before World War I. And I was like, oh, and I, I always say that in the cartoon retelling of this story, this is the point at which my eyes like bug horizontally out of my head. Because I was just like, wait a second, if your mother had sisters in Chicago, that means that you have family. And I remember sort of doing that like mental Rolodex, like, wait, no, her mother, that's not the cousin who went to Cuba. And that's not the people in Canada. Who is that? And I said, “Mumma, what are you talking about? Who are your mother's sisters who went to Chicago? What happened to them? Like, where are their kids?” And she got very quiet. And she said, “I don't know.” Her mother was supposed to join those sisters, but World War I broke out. She was never able to join them. And she said she lost touch with them and she had no idea what had become of them.

And she said, “I remember my mother crying over a photograph she had of the two of them and they were wearing long black skirts. And that's the end of the story.” And I just was like, incredulous. I said, “Mumma, you have to tell me everything you know about them. Like, you have family here somewhere, like those women, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.”

Well, we could spend the whole next half hour talking about what happened, but I will tell you the short version, which is that two weeks later, I went back to her assisted living community and I said, “Mumma, you need to sit down,” because I was able to figure out in two weeks, in my very first genealogical expedition ever, that this woman, whose family had been wiped off the face of the planet, had three living first cousins.

Magda: Whoa.

Jennifer: And we reunited them. And she later said to me, “Now I know why I live so long. I live so long so I could see this day.” And I thought, this is what I want to do with my life. So that's... 

Doug: You talk about throwing gasoline on an ember, my gosh.

Jennifer: So that's how it all started. And then like the ball kept rolling because I wrote an article about that experience of tracking down her family and reuniting them. And then a family friend reached out to me because they read the article and they said, “My father was adopted. Can you find his birth mother?” And, you know, I always joke like, you know, flush with exactly one genealogical success under my belt, I was like, “Sure, I'll find your birth family.” But I did it. And they told me, this has completely changed our lives. I reunited him with his half-sister and I was just completely sold. 

And that's the whole story. And it really is no different than reporting. It just requires the ability to carefully follow an information trail and not get sucked in by bad information and not get sucked in by confirmation bias.

And so that's how it started. And I became hopelessly devoted to genealogy.

Doug: So your training as a journalist was a big part of how you grew to become a professional genealogist.

Jennifer: Right. It just, it came very, very naturally to me. And I realized that's like a huge leg up. And sometimes people want to learn how to do that. And I find those skills very difficult to teach because they're just so sort of innate to me after having been a reporter for so many years. But I feel very lucky that my journalism career sort of equipped me for the second phase of my career.

Doug: So let's use the flashback approach in terms of this screenplay, because cut to, now this current project, this DNA project that you're a part of, let's talk about that and then retrace your steps, how that amazing fortnight in your life led to where you are now.

Jennifer: Obviously, just because of my personal bias and my own family tree, the vast majority of work that I do is on Jewish family trees, and I do

a lot of work involving the Holocaust. Unfortunately, you know, my own family was gravely impacted by the Holocaust. My husband's family, as I said, you know, my mother-in-law was actually born during the war when they were doing forced labor in a camp in the Ural Mountains. And she came here at 15, not speaking English. That was sort of my genealogical frame of reference. And Jewish genealogy is sort of a world unto itself.

For a lot of people, a lot of the challenges that Jewish genealogists face are quite different from the challenges that non-Jewish genealogists face. I have many times joked that we do everything they do, but in high heels and backwards because, you know, records are just a lot more difficult and working with DNA, which was sort of the next thing that I became involved in, is also much more difficult because of the nature of Jewish history.

And we are what is called an endogamous population, which makes it a lot more difficult to sort of decipher your DNA match list. But those things ultimately sort of coalesced. I got deeper and deeper involved in genealogy, Jewish genealogy. Then, you know, DNA was sort of exploding. This was around like 2015, 2016, and I started to become interested in learning about DNA and working with DNA. And that just sort of ultimately kind of morphed into the idea that DNA can be incredibly valuable for the Holocaust survivor community because the Holocaust created many, many situations where the paper trail goes cold.

There's a lot of situations of unknown parent cases, meaning children were hidden and only discovered through DNA, that they are either not who they thought they were, or they just don't know who they are and DNA is the only way to help them. And in order to solve those cases, you need a very deep understanding of working with Jewish DNA and you need a very solid grounding in Jewish paper genealogy. And over the years, I had developed both of those things and I started working on a lot of these cases. And that ultimately all came together in late November of 2022.

My partner, Dr. Adina Newman, who's a Jewish genealogist based in Boston, and I teamed up with the Center for Jewish History in New York City, and we launched a project called the DNA Reunion Project. And after we had been running the program for like six weeks, we were given an unbelievably generous donation from Ancestry.com. They gave us 2,500 free DNA kits to test survivors with. So we have been chugging along for the past almost year, giving out those kits to survivors and working on cases of unknown identity and helping survivors use DNA to reconstruct their family trees, connect with relatives, etc, etc.

Doug: That's what I've been thinking throughout this, just how much DNA do you have to work with? Because for every person whose DNA is even on the grid, there must be so many more who aren't.

Jennifer: It's funny, I feel like that's the question I get most from people who aren't familiar with how this works.

Doug: Well, there you go. I'm very happy to fulfill the norm.

Jennifer: Well, and I'm happy to explain. The way I can best explain it is that when somebody like me, whose family tree is known, takes a DNA test, you get sort of a random assortment of people on your match list who match you. Cousins related to you through, you know, both of your parents and all four of your grandparents and all eight of your great grandparents, etc. And because I know my tree, I can fit, usually, all of those matches into my tree. Random person A, they're related to my maternal grandfather. You know, it's like putting pieces into a pegboard.

Boom, boom, boom, boom. I can do that because I have the existing tree.

When you have a person with unknown parentage, you do the exact reverse. And you reverse engineer the family tree off of the trees of those matches. So it's a completely happenstance process depending on who has tested. And the closer the match, the easier it is to do that reverse engineering process because you have left fewer generations to go through.

But what we often find with these Jewish cases and these Holocaust cases is these people have nothing closer than like third cousins who share great great grandparents with you. So you have to do a lot of paper genealogy and a lot of decoding to be able to get down to who the parents are. It's that reverse engineering process. So we don't need these people's parents to have tested to match them. The best would be like a half-sibling test. And that's like, okay, well, I'm your half-sibling. We share one parent. Which one is it? That should be pretty able to figure out. Let's say you get a first cousin match. Okay, we share a set of grandparents.

Which set of grandparents is it? Third cousins, you know, it's a lot harder and you have to slog through, but it can be done. 

We don't need the parent. We just need a close enough match with a tree that we can, you know, or a tree that we can build. Very often the tree doesn't exist, but we can build it. You know, it's like the results tell you this is the family tree of someone. Who is that person? And you do that reverse engineering process to figure out who they are and ultimately the trail will identify two parents. 

Doug: And that's what I was thinking about because many people our age are suddenly very interested in genealogy and have many tools to pursue however much information they want to find, but the particular challenge that you have is there was this effort of comprehensive erasure 70, 80 years ago and so you have that as well to kind of pieced together in the detective work must be that much more complicated and instinctual.

Jennifer: It is, but I want to be really clear about one thing, because this is a very pernicious myth that we bump up against in our community. There was a comprehensive erasure. It was a comprehensive erasure of people. It was a genocide. There is a widespread myth that there was a comprehensive erasure of records, which is completely false. The Germans left meticulous records, sadly, and quite morbidly, of many of the people that they killed in this genocide, and many of the people that they imprisoned in this genocide. But there is a widespread myth that if you are an Eastern European Jewish person living today, you know that there's no way to find your grandparents' birth records or your great grandparents' marriage records from countries in Eastern Europe, but nothing could be further from the truth. There are absolutely places where records were destroyed. For instance, you know, there are huge holes in the records for Warsaw, Poland because buildings were demolished. So there are many records that did not survive, but it was not the Nazis on a comprehensive mission to destroy Jewish records.

That simply did not happen.

Doug: Yeah, those are the visuals that we remember and the idea that these records exist is just fascinatingly awful.

Jennifer: There's both the records from the Holocaust, meaning records of, you know, detainment, deportation, imprisonment, and murder sometimes. You can sometimes find the exact date that someone perished in a camp, not always. But I just want to make clear that like vital records from before the Holocaust absolutely exists and are searchable and findable and very often like ridiculously easily online.

I can pull up my great great grandmother's death certificate from Latvia from the 1890s right now in a second on a free website. 

Doug: So you're finding a lot of records have been digitized and are that much more searchable and connectable and in some ways your job is getting a little easier just because those records exist and are much more easily accessed?

Jennifer: I mean, not everything. There's still stuff we have to get in analog form, but it's night and day from when my brother Daniel was interested in 1973 in building his family tree, you know, when he was writing letters to the health department in New York City to try to find my grandmother's birth certificate, you know, which I also could just pull up right now in two seconds on a website that New York City set up last year.

Doug: Should we ascribe some significance to the thought that that was almost exactly 50 years ago?

Jennifer: I don't know, maybe. It's yeah, crazy.

Magda: Okay, so I guess I'm just along for the ride on this podcast today, right? Because I knew what you were doing, but I didn't really, I didn't really know what it was. I didn't know what the entire process was. It's like double ledger work you're doing between the DNA part and the paper genealogy. And that part is super fascinating.

Jennifer: When it all comes together, though, it is beyond exhilarating in a way that I can't even describe. I mean, I have cried many times, like when it all comes together and you, you know, figure out the answer, and you can... 

Doug: Magda cried a couple of times while you were talking earlier in the podcast.

Magda: I did!

Jennifer: Yeah, I mean, it's very, very heavy stuff. But, you know, when we wrote the prospectus for the DNA Reunion Project, I pointed out, and I believe this, that I find it somewhat ironic that, you know, there are so many social service agencies and projects and resources devoted to helping Holocaust survivors. Of course, everybody cares about Holocaust survivors and wants to help them, but there are virtually none until our project that are specifically devoted to giving Holocaust survivors back the very reason we care about them, which is because they lost their families. And I just thought it just seems so obvious that somebody should be doing this.

The other piece that may be interesting about how this evolved was I was doing this work pro bono for a while. I was just taking on these cases as a volunteer and helping people, which I was perfectly happy to do. But at a certain point, I realized I was quite literally paying to do this because I was buying the DNA kits and I was buying the documents. And I thought, this is sort of ridiculous. Like somebody can help me do this. Like there needs to be some resources to make this happen. And that's why we were, you know, fortunate to connect with the Center for Jewish History. And everybody that we told the idea to was like, duh, like, this is a no brainer. Like, of course, and this is great. And it needs to happen immediately because these survivors are dying off and we need to test them while we can. And so, so it's been incredibly gratifying.

Magda: I think I thought I knew a little bit about genealogy. I mean, my own background on the Norwegian side, we have it back a gazillion years because the Norwegians, in as much as the churches were allowed to, the churches kept all the records. And then I took a class on Hungarian genealogy, in which they said, “Hey, hey, hey, good luck, because the parts of Hungary that have been Hungary have changed hands so many times, there were so many different empires, every time a new empire would come in, they would do some sort of reorganization. And sometimes that meant destroying records. And sometimes

records were held at the churches, and sometimes they were held someplace else.” And all the lies that people did to immigrate to the US, because at one point, Hungary had a bigger allotment for immigration, because they had a larger number of people who were claiming to be Protestant instead of Catholic. And so people were coming from all these other countries, would stay in Hungary for a year, and then go to the US. So I guess just everything's mixed up in Hungarian genealogy.

And so I sort of was like, “Yeah, I don't have it in me to take on this project.” 

Jennifer: But yeah, it's, my grandfather used to joke, they would wake up in the morning and ask what country they lived in.

Magda: Yeah, and then the lies! Like this guy in the Hungarian genealogy class was showing us a ship manifest, and it would be the father and the mother and then they would have three or four kids that were all 12 years old. And then they would show the census record of these people, like five years later, and the kids were, you know, like 21, 20, 19, and 18. None of them had been 12. So why would they have done that? Well, because the price break was when a kid turned 13. So they were just lying about the ages of all of these people and their relationships to each other and all that. I thought, wow, you really have to dig into that. And I would imagine if you're looking for people who were not just all from one country, that's the kind of thing you have to be keeping in mind all of the time. Like, which records am I looking at if they came over in one year or the other? What rules had changed? What policies had changed? All of that kind of stuff.

Jennifer: It can be complicated, but I think genealogy must like satisfy some weird OCD element in me because there's nothing I love better than sort of a complicated, thorny, messed up tree to then go in and sort of figure it all out and make it all line up neatly and, you know, oh, yes, this is the same kid who said he was 12, but now he's 18. And this must be this person. And I find it incredibly satisfying when it all kind of clicks into place. I realized somewhere along the line, I had one of those like sweet, funny memories of childhood that when I was a kid, I used to love

what are called logic grid puzzles. I don't know if you guys know what they are. That was like my favorite thing to do, where, you know, Mr. Brown is not the one who lives next to Mr. Green, you know, Mr. Smith does not have the blue house, and you'd have to like sort it all out and make it fit. And that's exactly what genealogy is. And I still love it. It's like playing Clue, essentially, right?

Magda: 100%. I love playing Clue.

Doug: Also, there you go. My whole childhood just flashed before my eyes. And Magda and I met teaching LSAT games, which there's a whole deductive reasoning section, which is just like that. You know, there are six people at a birthday party and A must sit next to B, but D won't sit next to F. And if E is in seat three, then where is G?

Jennifer: Right. And it's really interesting because one of the things that, I don't know if it makes genealogy different, but maybe slightly unusual is that we live in a world where there are so many public trees, meaning you can like look at other people's family trees on Ancestry and MyHeritage and Genie and a million different sites. And sometimes it's so easy to see where other people have gone wrong, you know, seating the people at the wrong table. You know, they sort of don't know how to distinguish between two people who have the same name. It's not uncommon to find two people with the same name who have a wife with the same name and a child with the same name who were born in the same year and you have to be really rigorous and I every single day come across other people and I can sort of see where they failed. By no means am I perfect. I make my share of mistakes. But I think my reporting training gives me, you know, as we said earlier, a leg up in sort of how not to fall into those easy traps.

Doug: Do you feel like you're getting better at it?

Jennifer: I mean, I think as much as we want to rely on meticulous records, we want to look at, pursue the truth and recognize that this is written down. But throughout all of this is the frailty and the flaws of humanity in terms of how much money changed hands, how forgetful somebody may have been. I mean, there's the possibilities are endless.

Doug: And so as you develop a nose for that, do you think you've gotten better at discerning the wheat from the chaff?

Jennifer: 100%, 1000%. I was just saying to my partner Adina this morning, I was working on something yesterday. And I feel like one of the things on my to do list for this afternoon is to sit down and reconstruct the steps I took to figure out this very thorny research question, because it was like, a masterclass in how if you pay attention to small details, it can all come together. And it was also like a great lesson in how this is not a Holocaust case, but in how DNA matches can work together with paper records to build a robust tree and find all sorts of interesting details and flesh out your tree and learn the names of people. You know, I saw one piece of information that led me to order a death certificate from New Jersey for the woman that I thought was mentioned. And I got the death certificate and it was a dead end because I didn't recognize any of the names on the death certificate. And then I picked it up again yesterday and started looking at the person's DNA matches. And one thing led to another thing led to another thing. And all of a sudden I was like, aha! The person that signed that death certificate is her son-in-law.

It all fits together, you know, and then they all like, and now I know the names of like four of this woman's great-grandmother's siblings that she had no idea she had. I know that her great-grandmother had a half-sister because the great-great-grandmother was remarried and blah, blah, blah, you know, and that all was like, I like to say it's also, it's like playing Concentration. You have to pay attention to the cards that you've seen and turn over because the death certificate was signed by a Harry Rabinowitz in Elizabeth, New Jersey. And that name meant absolutely nothing to me when I got that death certificate three weeks ago. But immediately when I started putting two and two together, I thought, aha, I followed the lead in a DNA match. And that person's great grandfather was living in the census with somebody else. And I followed the trail of that somebody else. And that led back to the death certificate.

You sort of have to have a million little pieces planted. And then you have to remember all the little pieces and sew it up in a nice, neat bundle. And it's fun, you know, it's like when it all comes together. 

I should also mention, in that woman's case, this is a woman I did her tree for. I donate some research to my synagogue silent auction every year. And following the trail of her maternal grandfather, I uncovered one of the greatest stories I think I've ever found. Her great-great-grandmother, a Russian immigrant woman living in Chicago in the 1880s. The great-great-grandfather died young, leaving her with a young son. And there were a million stories in the newspaper that the great-great-grandmother had been accused of burning down the great-great-grandfather's tavern for insurance money. You know, you sort of picture a widowed woman trying to raise a child. However, there was an old woman who lived in the rooms above the tavern, a disabled woman, who died in the fire. So she was being accused of arson and murder in 1888 Chicago. And I was like, I couldn't get enough. I was like, tell me more. You know, it's like, it just goes to show, I always tell everybody, once you start digging, there is always a story in everybody's family tree, usually one that no one has ever heard of. I don't yet know exactly what happened, except I sort of know what happened because I was able to follow that woman's trail and she ended up getting remarried in New York City in 1891, and dying in New York City in the flu epidemic in 1919. So I'm assuming that she was acquitted. But I like desperately want to order all the court records from Chicago because oh my god. Anyway, so that was a fun little diversion.

Doug: How has this work fed your appreciation for the human condition?

To the point where you could visualize writing fiction about it? Because of the climax and the payoff at the end, like you were saying, when you have a great novel, all you can do is you can't wait until you can get to the end and find out who did it. You've got so many different ways in which humans interact. Is there a book in there somewhere? Is there fiction in there or no?

Jennifer: I have never had the jones to write fiction ever. I can't make it up. I think it's like my, I don't know how, it's not part of me. I know how to tell stories. And, you know, a lot of people have approached me about a possible book about all these stories. And I've had a few false starts. I love telling these stories. Maybe the answer is maybe, but definitely not a novel. I, to me, the idea of writing a novel is like, you know, it's like saying, Okay, Jennifer, you're gonna, you know, swim to the moon, like, go ahead.

Doug: Well, it's redundant, right? The stories themselves are that much more compelling. Why make one up?

Jennifer: I have no idea how to tell a fictional story. It just is not my thing.

Doug: Well, I really want to talk to you about this particular era in your life, which we now can look at in the past tense. I mean, it started and it stopped, and it's the time when the journalist became the story. And that's your phase with Resistance Genealogy. I'd love to know as much as you're willing to talk about in terms of how it came to be, what it was like to become the story, to build a following on that platform that that guy bought and is slowly killing. And what that experience was like, because you were doing great work and doing a good job at it, it was inevitable that someone would find you and that interest in your work would snowball. So when resistance genealogy became a trending hashtag, what was that experience like as it built to a crescendo and now has since faded into recent memory?

Jennifer: It's funny, I think back to my days as a journalist, part of which was spent writing a lot of celebrity profiles. And I remember in the late 90s, I did a cover story for a magazine about Trisha Yearwood, the country singer. And Trisha Yearwood talked about the early days of fame feeling like holding on to a runaway train. And though I would never in a million years liken having, you know, 15 minutes of internet celebrity to, you know, becoming a Grammy winning country singer, I can relate to that comment, because that's exactly what it felt like. I just was like, assaulted, not necessarily in a bad way. But it was like, every time I sat down, there was another email, phone call or text from somebody wanting to talk about this silly little thing I had done on Twitter that had, you know, completely blown up. And it was like, you know, would I like to host a television show? You know, could I blah, blah, blah, it was like, this, this, like, that literally happened. And I did like a video interview to host a TV show about genealogy. Like, I just was like, I think I said on Facebook at the time, and everyone kept asking me, you know, what I was going to do with this. And I had decided what I was going to do was write a diet book, because I had had no time to eat, you know, for like weeks and I suddenly like lost all this weight, you know, and it was like the, “when your hashtag goes viral” diet book, you know, this is what you do because you don't have time to eat. But, you know, that was like... 

Doug: Two crackers over the sink.

Jennifer: Exactly. That was a small moment that sort of white hot interest didn't sustain. I mean, maybe we should explain what resistance genealogy was. What I, I basically on Twitter just started responding to

politicians and pundits who were complaining about immigrants by sharing bits from their own family trees, which I was very easily able to build because I had been doing all this genealogy. And there was sort of an initial

January of 2018, I had a tweet about Dan Scavino, who was the White House social media director, that went crazy viral. And I got, you know, a whole lot of attention from that. And I have to say in a personal moment of pride, they did a talk of the town piece in the New Yorker about me, which was like, I still cannot believe that happened. And it's framed in my kitchen because holy shit, like never in a million years. And then there was sort of a second wave in May of that year, where another tweet about Tommy Lauren from Fox News went quite viral. And she ended up talking about me on Fox News. And there was a whole lot of buzz then. And then it, you know, after that, it sort of died down. But I did amass a nice Twitter following, which was satisfying. It's satisfying because as I have to say, somebody once called Resistance Genealogy, “one woman's bookish way of fighting back.” And I sort of loved that because that's exactly what I felt like it was. And I feel like it was a double edged sword.

I always say, The fact that every single one of these stories ends the exact same way is either a reason to stop doing this or a reason to keep going. Like, how many times can you say the same thing? Unless you are Native American or you descend from enslaved people who were brought here against their will, every single American descends from immigrants. Every story goes back to a boat. It's just a question of how recent or how distant in time. It eventually sort of ran its course, but I think it was satisfying for a lot of people to sort of see the documents and the primary evidence.

You can be up there, you know, spouting nonsense about how immigrants need to speak English. But here, here's the 1910 census showing that your great grandmother had been here for 40 years and didn't speak English. And I think people found that satisfying and a sort of way to hedge against, you know, all of the nonsense that was being thrown at us in 2018 by the Trump administration. You know, so much gaslighting, so much lying, so much just bullshit slinging. And here were the facts. In Tomi Lahren's case, it was like the best one ever, which is, you know, she was out there talking constantly about, “if you're here illegally, buh-bye.” And I literally found that her great, great grandfather had been indicted by a federal grand jury for immigration fraud. And it just was amazing. Like, I always make very clear, he was acquitted at trial, but there was substantial evidence against him. And those sorts of prosecutions, I don't have it at the at my fingertips anymore. But I looked up, you know, they were exceedingly rare for a case to proceed at a federal grand jury in, it was like 1916. I can't remember exactly now. There were like very, very few of those cases a year. 

And what he had done was so stupid, too. He had basically tried to alter his paperwork because the immigration process has always had two parts. The first step is called a declaration of intention, where you sort of state in a court that you are going to become a citizen. And then you have a set time frame in which to take the second step, which is a petition for naturalization to finalize the process. And he had let the window elapse, but he didn't want to have to go back to zero. So he was accused of erasing the date on his paperwork to change it. And there we go. And she lied about that, which was even more frustrating. She said on TV that he had just I forget she she totally lied about what what he was even accused of doing to make it sound less serious.

Magda: Well, that's par for the course.

Doug: That's what's got to be eventually what drains the air out of the balloon. It's just, as you say, you're just saying it over and over again, and it just becomes, regardless of how much fact you have behind you, it's just, she said, she said. And the polarized nature of confirmation bias, there are people who just will look at facts and just ignore them because they run in contrast to the narrative they need to believe.

Jennifer: I had a hilarious, perfect example of that, sort of parallel to the resistance genealogy project. I had become interested in a meme that was circulating right around the same time in early 2018, and it was being used by the right to suggest that the Democratic Party had been founded or was deeply, deeply entrenched with the Ku Klux Klan. And there's a picture of a Klan march through city streets, and the meme says that this is a picture of the 1924 Democratic National Convention, which was nicknamed, the meme says, The Klan Bake. And it says, you can Google it if you want. And at the time, I remember looking at the picture and thinking, this doesn't look like New York City in 1924. And I did a reverse image search. And in three seconds, it showed me that that picture was taken in Madison, Wisconsin and was Klan members marching to protest the death of a policeman at the hands of  immigrants. So I ended up writing a story. My co-author was Professor Peter Schulman, who's a history professor at Case Western. And we wrote this whole piece debunking how this meme was based on complete lies. 

And in another great and really satisfying find, it turned out that the convention had never been nicknamed The Klan Bake. That was sort of a case of Telephone. And I found actually that the 1924 Republican convention had been called the Kleveland (with a K) Konvention (with a K) because the Klan was so active at the Republican convention that year. But where I'm going with this is that I stupidly at the time was constantly engaging with people on Twitter who were, you know, trying to maintain that this was true despite all this primary evidence I found that it was not true. And one of the things I pointed out to this guy was I showed him a search on the New York State newspaper website that if you search for the term Klan Bake with a K, you get zero hits and you would think that a national political convention held in 1924 in New York, if it was known as the Klan Bake, that word should by all rights appear in a newspaper search, right? And what he said to me is, “Well, it's not showing up because those are liberal catalogs that you're searching.” And I thought, you know, when you are pushing back against that level, like, what am I going to say to that?

Doug: Right. For every theory, there's a conspiracy theory that says, well, those records were quashed.

Jennifer: Exactly. We got into it with a guy who was arguing about, you know, the convention was held at Madison Square Garden, and he was literally trying to argue with us about the location of Madison Square Garden in 1924. And I'm like, this is not subject to debate. Like, here is a map. Here is where Madison Square Garden was. Like, no, just no. You can find a map from 1924, which will show you the location of Madison Square Garden in New York City. 

Doug: As long as you don't use liberal maps, yes.

Jennifer: You have to avoid those liberal maps. But it was, you know, as I feel like where we started, it was disconcerting to learn that what I thought were sort of givens about established knowledge are not givens to everybody. And I was trained early in my career, quite literally as a fact checker. And we were told that there was such a thing as red check sources. And you know, if you could check something in a red check source, you were done. And now everything is subject to debate and interpretation and, well, those are your facts and alternative facts and it's like the Wild West.

Doug: All I'm picturing is just the joy you have reuniting families versus the Sisyphean dread that must embody everything you do, just the whole idea of why Resistance Genealogy, the costs soon outweigh the benefit.

I mean, the reward of this work must just

fallen down this genealogy hole, and I was doing all this genealogy, and I was up late one night, it was a Friday night, you know, my kids were little, I think they had gone to bed, my husband was like watching a movie in the living room, and I was here hunched over my computer, working, working, working, you know, and this was long before Resistance Genealogy, I was just, you know, working on genealogy. And I remember my husband saying to me, almost with a hint of annoyance, like, “What is all this for? Where is all this going?” Wow, I just remember saying, like, “I can't explain it.” I said, “I just feel like it's what I'm supposed to do, and I feel like it's all going to make sense eventually. I don't know what it's for, but I feel like I'm supposed to use this for something.” And then when resistance genealogy happened, I was like, aha. And I had this really cool opportunity the year that I turned 50 to sort of use all my bookish skills to speak truth to power. And I was deposed in a case by the ACLU where they needed me to look up some census information on an immigrant.

And it was so cool. And I just thought, “This is amazing.” But I also learned that, you know, speaking truth to power and being in The New Yorker and on CNN can also be really scary. And I learned that there are some very ugly undersides to being a liberal Jewish woman in the public eye. And I was like, this is great, but I am not Malala. And I don't want to, you know, I dealt with like death threats and crazy shit like that. And it was not really for me. I just didn't feel like... 

Doug: All right, I'm making a note: Death threats, that's a no.

Jennifer: That's a no. That's a definite no. So I sort of backed away from, you know, I was naive. Like, I didn't realize that, like, tangling with someone like Tomi Lahren, even however indirectly via internet tweet, could be so dangerous. I just had no idea that people would be that crazy, but then I'm like, well, somebody showed up with a gun at a pizza place in Washington because they thought Hillary Clinton was enslaving children in the basement. Like nothing in today's world should surprise me.

So I sort of backed off like the red hot political stuff, but to answer your question and bring it full circle, yes, what I am doing now could not be more satisfying, rewarding, and a beautiful use for whatever skills I have cultivated over the last 20 or 30 years of my career. So very happy to be where I am.

Doug: I'm thinking about you and your husband because I just finished reading Fleishman Is In Trouble. And so I'm in the whole mind about that.

Jennifer: I love that book. I know Taffy.

Doug: You do?

Jennifer: Yeah. Yeah.

Doug: When you read it, were you thinking, Oh, this is so Libby?

Jennifer: I definitely related to Libby. I know that world. I know the people in that book. Yeah, it definitely resonated.

Doug: As we conclude here, I wanted to talk a bit about journalism,  because that is who you are at your core. And you may not think of yourself as one anymore because you've really morphed into this whole new wonderful thing. Even now, as we're preparing for ‘24, and you're looking at the two frontrunners, and it's like, okay, well, one guy has 91 felonies, and the other guy is a little older. And there's just this, you know, it's becoming once again, are we falling into the same both sides-ism trap. Can the media help itself to figure out how to present this in a light that reflects lessons learned or should we just learn to view what they give us more critically and recognize what the motivations are behind it?

Jennifer: I don't know, and I don't even know if I'm equipped to answer that question. I mean, I'm not a media critic. I don't have the answers to the woes that have befallen our media climate, our media literacy. I guess I just feel like I continue to do my small part, whatever that may be, to sort of show people how you know what's true and what's not true, and how you use primary evidence to sort through and distinguish facts from lies. But I mean, I'm terrified, frankly, that we're no smarter. And I mean, the fact that he's running again, and the front runner is just inconceivable to me.

Magda: I'm stunned that he's still alive. That part really surprises me. Like, he's kind of stuck together with like balsa wood and like duct tape, like... 

Doug: Well, I think in many ways, your arc right now is a microcosm of what all of us feel. The idea of working at a macro level doesn't work because you just hit that same 50-50 wall. And I think what we're doing now is turning our efforts inward to work on a smaller scale and yet

Jennifer: Well, I think the nugget in there that resonates with me in that I began to do in 2018 with Resistance Genealogy is a little more specific, meaning I feel like my personal experience and my professional experience constantly every single day being confronted with the aftermath of fascism, genocide, information wars, propaganda. I see that and I continue to use whatever social media I've left, if I have left Twitter, but to share stories that humanize that experience and personalize it for people to really understand where that path can lead. I feel very much a responsibility to continue to do that, because this is not just abstract for me. You know, when people talk about keeping out refugees, I think immediately, you know, my family has the cache of desperate letters that my grandfather's brother sent from, you know, what was then Poland and is now Ukraine, begging the family in New York to find $5,000 to get him the paperwork to get him out. And of course, they were unsuccessful. He and my aunt and their four daughters were all murdered. And that is very real.

And I have quite literally shared those letters on Twitter to show people, you know, I think about George Santos, when George Santos was out there, I sort of was called back into action on Resistance Genealogy.

And I immediately showed that he is absolutely not descended from Holocaust survivors. And I shared stories of actual Holocaust survivors, and how completely disgusting it is to masquerade as a child of Holocaust survivors when you are not. So that's the windmill I tilt at over and over and over again.

Doug: That's just the perfect way to end this. That's the metaphor for an age.

Jennifer: The Covenant Gettya is a insane case where these two Polish women in their 80s who were Catholic and adopted took DNA tests because their granddaughters thought it would be cool to find out who their families of origin were.

Magda: Oh, wow. And they weren't really Catholic.

Jennifer: They were sisters. Total strangers to one another. Find out that they are full sisters at 80 and they are 100% Jewish. One of them was abandoned on the side of the road in the summer of 1942. And when you think you were abandoned on the side of the road in Poland in the summer of 1942 and you think you're Catholic, it means one thing. If you were abandoned on the side of the road in the summer of 1942 and you were Jewish, it means different. So we have identified their parents and we are meeting with the granddaughters to go over some stuff. So that's my life these days.

Doug: So anybody who wants to hear more about this current project you're on, the DNA Project, where can we find you online? Where can we find your writing, your efforts, and anybody who wants to learn more about what you're doing?

Jennifer: It's very easy. Our website is dna.cjh, for Center for Jewish History, dot org. (http://dna.cjh.org) And there's information on the project there. If you are a Holocaust survivor or the child of survivors, or you know a Holocaust survivor or the child of survivors, they can apply and get a free ancestry kit just by filling out a form on our website.

The best way to find me is probably my public Facebook public page you can follow. I try to keep people updated of where I'm speaking, writing, doing whatever. I'm in all the places, you know, I'm trying out all the new places. None of them is really sticking. I am on Instagram as @ClevertitleTK. I have a Substack that I rarely write in, etc, etc.

Doug: When's that title coming? When are we going to get that clever title?

Jennifer: The clever title still eludes me.

Doug: Well, I'm so grateful you came on here. I've been wanting to talk to you about this for a long time. I've admired what you do. And thank you for discussing what you're doing and what your mindset is. And I'm really glad you found this place that accidentally fulfills you in ways you probably couldn't have predicted 30 years ago.

Jennifer: Thank you so much for having me. This was awesome.

Doug: Thank you listeners for listening to Episode 19 of the When the Flames Go Up podcast with Magda Zarin and me, Doug French. Our guest has been genealogical expert Jennifer Mendelsohn. We'll link to everything she mentioned in the show notes. We'll be back next week. Until then, thanks for listening. Bye-bye.