DOV TALES
by Dov Burt Levy

Senator George Allen (R-VA) has not just his foot, but also a large silver menorah stuck in his throat. The senator is finding it very hard, maybe impossible, to pull it out.

Allen, a former Virginia governor now running for reelection to the Senate, has been a front-runner among Republican conservatives for the 2008 presidential nomination.

Here's the story:

Last month at a campaign rally, Allen was caught on camera calling a young Indian man, working for Allen's opponent, "macaca." That's derogatory slang used by French speakers in North Africa — where his mother lived — for dark-skinned people. Its root is macaque, a kind of monkey. Allen claimed he just made the word up on the spot. (Wow, that's easy to believe.)

Three days of macaca apologies followed, then a brief calm before Allen confronted his "Jewish problem."

Questioned at a television debate about his Jewish heritage, Allen turned visibly angry, replying with pointed finger and quavering voice that his mother's background is "French-Italian with a little Spanish blood."

Besides the lie (he later confessed to knowing a month earlier), what offended Jews was Allen's scolding the questioner for "casting aspersions" by raising the Jewish issue.

Aspersion means "a false or misleading charge meant to harm someone's reputation." So Allen was asserting that calling him Jewish was despicable and damaging. (He doesn't need help undercutting his own reputation.)

The next day, Allen took a 180-degree turn when CNN's Wolf Blitzer outlined Allen's mother's famous Lumbroso family tree of Sephardi historians, doctors and rabbis. Allen emotionally replied that his 83-year-old mother had sworn him to secrecy and had now released him. She was Jewish, but had become a Christian out of fear stemming from her father's arrest by the Germans. The senator avowed that his future public service would be devoted to fighting for religious freedom and justice.

Then, rather than allowing the tasteless mess to fade, the tin-eared Allen stated in a newspaper interview "I still had a ham sandwich for lunch. And my mother made great pork chops."

To which, one Internet blogger-wit replied, "Don't worry [Jewish readers], she had separate plates for the chops and the cheese."

All of which illustrates columnist Art Buchwald's assertion many years ago, "You can't make up anything anymore. The world is a satire. All you're doing is recording it."

With Allen leading the cast, we can only wonder what foolishness will follow. [Since this column was written, an "N-word" (anti African-American) chapter lasting four days followed. Finally, a stroke of luck for Allen when Congressman Foley's email trysts with teen-age congressional pages took other Washington sleaze off the front pages.]

The larger issue (and sadness) is how so many Jews since WWII decided to pass as Christians, not wanting to face or stand up to anti-Semitism.

And don't think that Senator John Kerry or Secretary of State Madeleine Albright or Washington Post publisher Katherine Graham were only the high profile few whose Jewish ancestry had been hidden. My guess is that countless thousands of similar stories exist, some uncovered in later years by children, others not.

My first such experience occurred in Washington, DC, 30 years ago, with a woman and her daughter, coffee and cake friends, who lived nearby. The whole family seemed to be non-practicing Christians.

I commented several times to my wife that the mother seemed "pretty Jewish." This I based on her New York-tinged speech twang, her ironic and sarcastic sense of humor and perhaps my mystical ethnic antenna that allows Jews to divine other Jews.

Ten years later, just before the mother's funeral, her sister announced to the children: "Enough of this cover-up. Your mother and father were Jewish. After the war, when your father sought a job in Washington, they thought life would be easier for them — and for you — if you were not Jewish."
None of the children had engaged in even the vague kind of speculation I had. Years later, one son changed his name to his mother's Jewish-sounding maiden name. The others carried on, their Jewishness as just an interesting artifact.

I call it a great sadness. To change religion because of spiritual conviction is one thing; changing out of fear or shame is quite another.

When Madeleine Albright's Jewish roots were revealed in 1997, I wrote an op-ed in the Jerusalem Post ending with, "I am looking forward, 15 years from now, to welcoming [Albright] on Israeli soil as a fellow citizen, and maybe riding an Egged bus with her on a senior citizens' outing from Tel Aviv to Metulla."

However, for George Allen, whose political history and fondness for nooses and Confederate regalia repels me, somebody else, maybe the Los Angeles rabbi who offered Mel Gibson the pulpit for Rosh Hashanah, might issue a similar invitation. I can't.