Polimom Says

Senator George Allen is on the hotseat again:

Virginia Sen. George Allen (R) said for the first time publicly yesterday that he has Jewish ancestry, a day after responding angrily to an exchange that included questions about his mother’s racial sensitivity and whether his family has Jewish roots.
At a campaign debate with Democratic challenger James Webb on Monday, a reporter asked Allen whether his mother’s father, Felix Lumbroso, was Jewish. He became visibly upset, saying his mother’s religion was not relevant to the campaign and chiding the reporter for “making aspersions about people because of their religious beliefs.”
Allen’s campaign manager said the senator believed the question was hostile because it followed another one about whether Allen had learned the word “macaca” from his mother. The word, which Allen used last month to describe a Webb volunteer, is a French slur for a dark-skinned person. Allen’s mother, Henrietta “Etty” Allen, is a native of Tunisia and speaks French.

I’m just gonna step right around the macaca controversy and go right to what’s bothering me: why do people care, one way or another, about Jewish ancestry? How can that possibly indicate anything of value, to voters generally, or to George Allen personally? If Allen does have a problem with his grandparents’ religion (and I don’t know that he does, frankly), why would that be? Why would anybody have a problem with that?
I have never, ever, understood this.
Then there’s this WaPo article, which says:

Yes, let’s [move on] — but not before we figure out what that was all about. Turns out the Forward, a Jewish newspaper, reported that the senator’s mother, Etty, “comes from the august Sephardic Jewish Lumbroso family” and continued: “If both of Etty’s parents were born Jewish — which, given her age and background, is likely — Senator Allen would be considered Jewish in the eyes of traditional rabbinic law, which traces Judaism through the mother.”
If that’s true, the Presbyterian Allen joins public figures Madeleine Albright and John Kerry in discovering his Jewish roots. Of the three, the 6-foot-4-inch Allen, a down-home former college quarterback known for opposing laws to keep children out of the back of pickups, seems the least likely candidate for inclusion among the Chosen People. It would be no more surprising to learn that Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) has Southern Baptist ancestry.

This article also leaves me scratching my head. Who would then be the most likely candidate for “inclusion among the Chosen People”? And on what basis?
What is it about Judaism that provokes people so?
The whole thing, from both sides of this latest kerfluffle, looks exceedingly strange to me.