"Mommy, Am I a Jew?"

In what is truly a bizarre story, Sen. George Allen's (R-VA) mother has finally revealed to him that she was raised Jewish.

This passage in the ariticle really raised some questions in my mind.

She said Allen asked her directly about his Jewish heritage when he was in Los Angeles for a fundraiser. "We sat across the table and he said, 'Mom, there's a rumor that Pop-pop and Mom-mom were Jewish and so were you,' " she recalled, a day after Allen issued a statement acknowledging and embracing his Jewish roots as he campaigns for a second term in the U.S. Senate.

At the table in Palos Verdes, Calif., 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. She said that she and the senator's father, famed former Redskins coach George Allen, had wanted to protect their children from living with the fear that she had experienced during World War II. Her father, Felix Lumbroso, was imprisoned by the Nazis during the German occupation of Tunis.

"What they put my father through. I always was fearful," Etty Allen said in a telephone interview. "I didn't want my children to have to go through that fear all the time. When I told Georgie, I said, 'Now you don't love me anymore.' He said, 'Mom, I respect you more than ever.' "

Why would she say that George wouldn't love her anymore if she was Jewish? Seems really strange. Does George have a history of hating Jews? He certainly does have some ugly things in his past that have been debated ad nausuem, but why would his mother be afraid to tell him that he has some Jewish blood? Seems awfully strange at best and pretty frightening at worst.

By the way, I love that the Senator calls his grandparents "Pop-pop" and "Mom-mom." I wonder if he calls a super-majority vote in the Senate "Majority Majority."