I must have "Dreyfus Affair buff" written across my forehead

I just saw "The Power of Conversation: Jewish Women and Their Salons" at the Jewish Museum. It's a great exhibit, with visual elements used well, with more restraint than was the case in the Kafka exhibit there a few years back. Apparently salons switched over from emphasizing wittiness to being sites of political thought somewhere in the 1800s--not so different from the transition from mopey, gossipy livejournals to serious, influential political blogs, really... But the highlight of the show was a short documentary about Geneviève Straus, whose pro-Dreyfus salon was the basis for a salon described by Proust. There was a clip included from a 1907 movie about the Dreyfus Affair, which confusingly segued into a clip from a more-recent American movie about the Affair. After the documentary ended, the elderly woman seated next to me turned to me and asked, "Whatever happened to Dreyfus? Did he die?" And I was like, whoa. What were the chances that, a few days out of college, someone would be asking me what had come of Dreyfus? This woman did not know what she was getting herself into. So I gave her some of the post-Affair history while trying to figure out if for some reason I look like someone who'd know a lot about the Dreyfus Affair. She didn't seem to think it was at all odd that I did, it was as if she'd asked me for the time.