Route 17: Obama And Intermarriage

Barack Obama’s Jewish supporters are being somewhat unfair when they say it is a “smear” to even discuss the fact that Obama might be something of a Moslem because his father was. This wouldn’t be happening if Obama had been in the public eye for decades but he hasn’t. Most voters, even Obama voters, couldn’t write 250 words about his life. If a virtual unknown chooses to run, well, good people aren’t going to roll over and just take his official campaign biography as gospel. They’re not even going to take his Jewish supporters’ word for it, Jewish supporters who’ve been wrong about plenty.

In this decade of jihad there’s a reason – several thousand dead reasons -- why good folks sit up and pay attention when a child of Islam is running for president, even if Obama is the son of a secular Islamic father, a father assimilated enough to intermarry with a white Christian from Kansas. I’m not afraid of some Islamic guy who’d marry Auntie Em. I’m convinced that Obama is Christian, the religion of his mother that the young boy honestly came to as a man. But let’s look this from a liberal Jewish perspective:

Hundreds of Jewish leaders (yes, we have hundreds and hundreds of “leaders”) say that a Jewish baby born of intermarriage—Jewish father, Christian mother—ought to be counted as a Jew by demographers. Reform Judaism recognizes a child of a Jewish father and Christian mother to be Jewish. Tens of thousands of secular Russian Jews, religiously illiterate and Jewishly ignorant, born of Christian mothers and Jewish fathers, sometimes with only a Jewish grandfather, are Jewish enough for the Soviet Jewry movement to congratulate itself for bringing them to Israel, so these half-Jews – no, full Jews, say pluralists—can vote on matters vital to the future of the Jewish State.

There isn’t a newspaper in this country that doesn’t run articles every December insisting that a child of intermarriage can and should experience the religious heritage of both his parents -- Christian mom, Jewish dad -- no matter how dubiously Jewish that one parent may be. Jewish newspapers, including The Jewish Week, thrill to the existence of Jewish ballplayers and Hollywood entertainers, even if only their fathers were Jewish, their mothers not, and Christmas trees decorate their home.

Who, even in yeshiva, doesn’t understand and get a kick out of Adam Sandler’s Chanukah song: “Paul Newman’s half-Jewish, Goldie Hawn is too…” Last summer, Jewish newspapers proudly covered “Jewish” Ryan Braun of the Milwaukee Brewers being voted “Rookie of the Year,” even only his father is Jewish and Braun doesn’t care about Judaism. Newspapers, Jewish and non-Jewish, did articles on the Jewish roots of Madeline Albright, John Kerry, even Hillary Clinton, with far less reason to connect them to Judaism than to connect Obama to his father.

Millions of us insist that children born of only Jewish fathers be given bar mitzvahs, be given membership in synagogues, be brought to Israel for free with Birthright trips, and be allowed to attain leadership positions in Jewish organizations. To say out loud that these children of a Jewish father alone are about as halachically Jewish as Obama would evoke indignation from the Reform movement, and plenty of indignation in the Conservative movement, too.

But if some of these Jews then turn around and suggest in a casual e-mail that Obama is a Moslem because of his father – woe to the speaker for “smearing” Obama. If that is a smear, a foul to even suggest, than the last 500 articles on intermarriage in The Jewish Week were a fraud. It is all of one piece.

If a modern Jew wonders if Obama, even with a secular Moslem father, might be open someday to rediscover his Islamic roots, if not someday become an Islamic “baal teshuvah,” that is fully consistent with modern Jewish belief about the children of intermarriage and what we say is the power of one’s roots.

Look at it this way: If Obama’s father was a secular Jew, even if that father was out of his life, and Obama spent some brief childhood time in an Israeli yeshiva, even if he was now a practicing Christian, Jewish newspapers would be positively giddy about that Jewish father. We’d be filled with pride. He’d be someone to acknowledge and write stories about; we’d be laughing that, wouldn’t you know it, the first Jewish president will be black. He’d be the stuff of High Holiday sermons across the country; rabbis would try to “outreach him.” Would discussing Obama’s Jewishness under the same circumstances be a smear? Why, then, is it a smear when the candidate is Moslem?

Unless, of course, Democrats really believe that Islam is something that could give liberal Democratic voters pause. Democrats say that it the Republicans who play the fear card but this Islamic fear “smear” was thought to be useful in swaying Democrats in a Democratic primary, not a general election. Clearly, we live in times when Democrats are afraid, too, even if they’re afraid to admit it.

Perhaps this is all innocent, Jews just wondering about someone they know very little about.

If we are to be understanding and tolerant of other cultures, let’s be tolerant of modern Jews whose first instinct – and liberal instinct – is to believe that a father is enough to determine identity, even if the child never met the father.

That isn’t a “smear.” That’s the Jewish thing to do.

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