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.