Eleanor Reissa is a Broadway/television actress, director, prize-winning playwright, author, and host of the Yale University/Fortunoff Video Archive podcast: Those Who Were There: Voices from the Holocaust.

A Brooklyn-born native and daughter of what she now calls Holocaust fighters, Eleanor embraced her Jewish identity and channeled that into her artistic expression. When her mother died at 64 in 1986, her father having died 10 years earlier, she discovered 56 letters written to her mother from her father in the years after the war and between his move to America.

Unable to read them, she kept them for many years until she decided to have them translated. What she discovered changed her whole perception of her family’s life and began a journey to uncover her parents' past, which she turned into her memoir, THE LETTERS PROJECT: A Daughter’s Journey. 

In conversation with Jay, she talks about her life growing up in Brooklyn, the many discoveries that she made while researching her family, and how studying the anti-semitism of the past can help counteract the growing antisemitism and identity-based intolerance that we're facing today.

Please find a transcription of this episode: https://allaboutchangepodcast.com/podcast-episode/eleanor-reissa/