PRESIDENT KOHN?: U.S. Senator and presidential candidate John Kerry may look and talk like a patrician WASP and practice Catholicism, but according to an investigative piece published in the Boston Globe yesterday, he's at least half-Jewish.
Kerry recently discovered that his paternal grandfather, Frederick Kerry, was born Fritz Kohn in a village in the Czech Republic; he had already been aware that his grandmother was a Jew. Kerry/Kohn, a prominent businessman, had committed suicide in the bathroom of the Copley Plaza Hotel in 1921. It's Kerry's mother's side that is related to many of Massachusetts' more prominent families, and he is married to ketchup heiress Teresa Heinz.
A focus of the story appears to be that Kerry has a "David E. Kelley problem," in that news organizations have been reporting (falsely) for years that he is Irish, while he has made little effort to discredit the stories (while not overtly lying about them). However, Kerry claims that he has corrected the mistakes when they have been made, and this doesn't appear to be an attempt to pander to the Jewish vote, along the lines of Hillary Clinton's Jewish step-grandfather, introduced during her 2000 Senate run. And besides, if you believe in the whole matrilineal thing, it's irrelevant to his actual Judaism as long as the Jewish roots are all on Kerry's father's side.
But even if Kerry isn't actually a Jew, he's nevertheless got a shot at becoming the first Kohan to be president of the United States.