Facacta Macaca

After responding to a reporter’s question about his Jewish ancestry by accusing her of “making aspersions” (Really?—Since when is asking someone if they’re Jewish casting aspersions on them? Oh right, it isn’t…unless you don’t like Jews), now Senator George Allen is embracing his Jewish ancestry.

I’ve read the suggestion that Allen surely knew he had Jewish ancestry and has been hiding it, but I’m not so sure that’s true. I suspect if Allen knew about his family history, he probably would have been better prepared for the question. Plus, finding out late in life that one has Jewish roots is not actually all that uncommon, because Jews fleeing persecution elsewhere sometimes left their identities behind when arriving on American shores, since America isn’t exactly free of anti-Semitism, either. John Kerry and Wesley Clark both found out late in life that they had Jewish ancestors. I had a grandmother whose father was German and carried a surname that is generally Jewish, though he practiced Lutheranism. I suspect my own family history might have some hidden Jewish ancestry, but my mother doesn’t know, so I probably never will, either.

But here’s the thing—if someone came to me and said, “We have proof your great-grandfather was a Jew,” I imagine my response would be something like, “Bring on the kugel!” (Mmm…kugel.) Allen, on the other hand, flipped out. And now the explanation is that he was just irritated that the reporter “inappropriately introduced religion into the debate.” Does anyone buy that any more than his sorry assertion that he “made up” the word macaca? Anti-Semites don’t just dislike religious Jews; it’s also about ethnicity. When the Nazis were measuring the skulls of Jews, they weren’t interested in finding out how many verses of the Talmud were contained therein.

Allen’s clearly got an ethnic problem—and what he didn’t know is that his own ethnicity isn’t quite what he thought it was. Faced with the truth, it’s no wonder he reacted the way he did. He’s spent his life being an insensitive jackhole in the way only people convinced of their lily-white purity can. No one knows better than he does how men of privilege treat The Other, and suddenly finding his perfect pedigree in question must have rattled him to his racist bones.