Clareified

Surprising Turn of Events

Evidently John Kerry’s Jewish and his wife is African-American.

Kerry: “The roots are surprising for a Massachusetts politician with an Irish name and Catholic upbringing. Kerry did not know the extent of his Jewish roots until a year ago when a genealogist in Vienna, hired by The Boston Globe, discovered that Kerry’s paternal grandfather, Frederick Kerry, a converted Catholic, was actually born Fritz Kohn to Jewish parents in what was Austria-Hungary, now part of the Czech Republic. Kerry, 60, has known for about 16 years that his paternal grandmother was born Jewish as Ida Lowe and converted to Catholicism.

Sunday, the Vienna genealogist, Felix Gundacker, posted new findings on his Web site that the Nazis killed two of Ida Lowe’s siblings — a sister in the Treblinka concentration camp, and a brother in Theresienstadt, a Czechoslovakian ghetto that held Jews before they were taken to camps.

“I’m very touched by the knowledge that one of my relatives was in the Holocaust,” Kerry said in an interview last night. “It gives an even greater personal sense of connection [to the Holocaust] that is very real and very touching. It makes you wonder how horrible their lives must have been.”

Heinz:

“The Baltimore Sun reports:

Officially, she is an American citizen. “But my roots are African,” she told a reporter in 1995. “The birds I remember, the fruits I ate, the trees I climbed, they’re African.”

Other times, she straddles the divide, calling herself “African American,” as she did in 1993, touching off a storm of criticism. Her spokesman defended the reference, saying she used the term without a hyphen. “African-hyphen-American belongs to blacks,” the spokesman said.”

How’s that going to play in Ohio?

This entry was posted by Dawn Summers on Monday, March 1st, 2004 at 11:58 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.