The Washington Post has a front-page story this morning in which Henriette (Etty) Lumbroso Allen, George Allen's mother, takes responsibility for having hidden her Jewish identity from her son until he asked her about it point-blank last month:
Allen's mother, who is 83, said she told her son the truth: That she had been raised as a Jew in Tunisia before moving to the United States.
"He didn't want me to tell his mother," she said of the elder George Allen. "At that time, that was a no-no, to marry outside the church."
And even a few weeks ago, she implored her son, "'Please don't tell your brothers and sister and your wife.'"
It seems clear, then, that Allen dissembled when he said in Monday's debate that his mother was brought up Christian, "as far as I know": she wasn't, and he knew it then.
Yet I'm surely not alone in feeling that this story has just become a lot more pathetic, and personal, than we could have anticipated.
George Allen is not the man he has claimed to be-- but being an Allen who hides one's identity and one's past did not begin with him. Instead, we now know, it's a deep-rooted family practice. Surely the people of Virginia have learned more than enough to know him better than he wanted us to, while granting him the pity and privacy he now clearly deserves on this matter.
It is only appropriate, now, that the campaign focus on other things, as Jim Webb himself has advocated. George Allen needs to come to terms with his real heritage, but that is no longer the business of politics. I wish him well in that endeavor, truly--in his forthcoming senatorial retirement.