are you now or have you ever been a Jew?

Untroubled by the McCarthyite tone and line of questioning of George Allen by TV reporter Peggy Fox (which I wrote about here, in disgust), Arianna Huffington, interviewed today on Reliable Sources, asserted that asking about a candidate’s “heritage” and “origins” is no problem at all.

Here is what Fox asked Allen:

PEGGY FOX, REPORTER, WUSA: Could you please tell us whether your forbears include Jews, and if so at which point Jewish identity might have ended?

Here is the exchange between Kurtz and Huffington on Reliable Sources:

KURTZ: Arianna Huffington, I assume you’re 100 percent Greek. You ran for California three years ago. Would you have resented being asked in a debate about your grandfather’s or your mother’s ethnicity?

ARIANNA HUFFINGTON, HUFFINGTONPOST.COM: Absolutely not. I mean, it’s a straightforward question. And what made it a story is that George Allen could not give a straightforward answer and has not been able to do so ever since.

Let me suggest that a straightforward question to Allen, as Huffington refers to it, would have been: “It was recently reported that your mother was born Jewish, yet you are a Christian. Could you address this?”

Instead, the question was an elaborate trap that baited both Allen (its intended victim) and a lot of unhappy Jews, who were left wondering when they would be asked just how Jewish they are and how long Jewishness has been in their family and when it might be expected to be extinguished from their family.