Allen Says He Embraces His Jewish Ancestry

Some Jewish leaders said that Allen's angry reaction to the question about his Jewish heritage bothered them.

"He was visibly uncomfortable and called it an 'aspersion,' " said J. J. Goldberg, editor in chief of the Forward. "What is it that makes him so uncomfortable with it? It raises more questions about who the guy is."

"How does one not know that his grandfather was a Jew?" asked Samuel Heilman, a professor of sociology at the City University of New York. Heilman called it a "tempest in a teapot" but said it would be a big story to American Jews.

"It is the case that for many people who are so much a part of blue-blood America, it's hard to imagine there is a Jew in their cupboard there," Heilman said.

But other Jewish leaders defended Allen's reaction, saying he was clearly upset not about being called a Jew but at what he considered to be the negative tone of the questioner.

"This was an 'I got you' question -- 'See, you really are a racist,' " said Rabbi Irwin Kula, author of "Yearnings: Embracing the Sacred Messiness of Life." Kula said there are many people who have been raised Christian and are not aware that they have any Jewish heritage. "I felt tremendous empathy for George Allen. It is 100 percent possible."

Allen has been asked before about his religious background. Bob Gibson, a reporter at the Charlottesville Daily Progress who has written about the senator for almost three decades, told the New Republic that Allen once wanted a correction "when I wrote about his mother's Jewish family origins. He insisted, through a press secretary, that his mother was raised a Christian."

Part of the interest in Allen's heritage comes from his speeches, in which he often includes references to his grandfather being incarcerated in a Nazi concentration camp. In 2000, he told the Richmond Times-Dispatch his grandfather was put in the camp because he was an Allied sympathizer.

He brought up his grandfather's incarceration at the Monday debate, just before Fox asked her question.

"If there's one lesson that I learned more than from anyone else, it was my mother, whose father was incarcerated by the Nazis in World War II," Allen said. "And of all people in my life who told me about tolerance and not judging people by their religious beliefs or their ethnicity or their race, it is my mother."

But people close to Allen have been reluctant to discuss his grandfather's religion in the past. Asked about it several weeks ago, campaign advisers either said they did not know or refused to comment. They also refused to ask Allen about it, saying at the time that it was not relevant to his job.

Yesterday, Wadhams accused Webb's campaign and liberal bloggers of anti-Semitism for raising the issue of the senator's religious background.