Freedom from Blog

Don't call it a comeback . . . .

Wednesday, September 20, 2006

Ich Bin Ein Juden

Time to come clean. Open that family closet. George Felix Allen has inspired me. Or maybe it was Cartman. And we can't exactly have a series of blog entries mocking the distinguished junior senator from the great state of Virginia without full disclosure, so here goes.

As it turns out, my Virginia Scots-Irish roots are, shall we say. . . "complex." They're actually Scots-Irish and German. And the German, well, it's partly assimilated German Jew. One of my ancestors, "Benedict Stern" (1800-1886), aka "Benjamin Plaut," was a Jew who was imprisoned in Germany during the revolutionary wave of 1847-8 for his radical political sympathies. He got smuggled out of the country and ended up in New York as a bookseller. He eventually dropped his Judaism and took a Christian-sounding name, although we're a bit fuzzy on that part of the story.

I've only known this family history for a few years, so any anti-semitic sentiments I may or may not have expressed during my youth were purely the product of dumbass southern Christian tribalism, and not the result of a deeply perverse, self-loathing, SoCal preppy confederate wannabe psychosis. All Clear? OK. Go about your business.

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