Some of our conservative friends had conniptions earlier this month when President Obama quipped that he was "in many ways the most Jewish president we've ever had."

From Limbaugh, to the National Review, from Fox to the even farther right, the universal response was . . . no he isn't.

Marx was a Jew.
Netanyahu is a Jew.
But the President most certainly doesn't even come close.

Their arguments were often mystifying, which begs the question: Why such high dudgeon over such a simple and obvious remark?

Despite the stories of Jesus' repeated use of parables, some of our friends on the Christian right appear to have serious problems with statements that aren't literally true.

Analogy, simile, and abstractions in general are all too often attacked as if they were heresies worthy of the stake. "Life" they argue, is definitely not ANYTHING like a "box of chocolates" . . . and here's why.

For our truly fearful friends, who honestly believe we godless progressives are trying to confuse them at best, and lie to them at worst, here's what I think was meant by what the President said about "being the most Jewish President we've ever had."

Was the President claiming to be Jewish?
Of course not.

He was simply pointing out that he (and his extended family for countless generations) had closer, longstanding, personal, cultural and emotional ties to the experiences of the Jewish people than any other American President who springs to mind.

That seems a fair enough statement on at least two levels.

Jeffrey Goldberg in June's Foreign Policy, put it this way: ". . . in essence, no president has been shaped to the degree that Obama has been shaped by exposure to Jewish mentors, Jewish teachers, Jewish fellow community-organizers, Jewish advisers, Jewish political supporters, Jewish writers, and Jewish thought. On the Jewish right, of course, Obama is thought of as something approaching an anti-Semite. He's not, of course. What he is, is a philo-Semite. And this comes with its own set of problems and challenges."

As a 70-year old white male, born and raised in the segregated south, and a student of the history of the Holocaust, I'd put it another way.

The President and his extended family are inextricably part of an ancient and long-memorialized tradition shared with Jews worldwide.

Like most, if not all Jews, the President and his family, would be inclined to see slavery and liberation as a central and defining part of their personal, cultural and national histories.

Those defining themes are often imbedded and for all practical purposes culturally unavoidable, both in the abstract and in day-to-day life.

They live not only in oft-told tales, but in literature, music, religion, film, ceremony and sorrow.

They share a long and tragic cultural history of displacement, exile and murder, all too often on a mass scale.

They share stories of masters, cruel and kind; and liberators martyred. They know first hand, or have heard the tales of what it means for members of their families to be excluded from schools and professions, both by law and "cultural heritage."

They know what it means to have been denied the vote, denied office, prohibited from owning real estate, or denied full acceptance, even in national institutions like the military. (Medal of Honors were awarded posthumously this past month to two World War One veterans who had been all too long denied them . . . he was black, one Jewish).

Both share a tradition in which justifications of ill treatment have been all too often based on religion.

Perhaps our friends on the right can think of a President with closer personal, or family, or cultural ties to history of the people of Abraham than Barack Obama.

At seventy, the great grandson of slaveholders, the dubious "beneficiary" of apartheid, and a lifelong student of the Holocaust and anti-black racism here and abroad . . . I can't.

Barack Obama is, indeed, the "closest thing to a Jewish President" we have ever had.