1/25/09

Is George Mitchell Jewish?

No, George Mitchell is not a Jew. He is Roman Catholic.

President Obama has appointed Mitchell as the special envoy to the Middle East charged with trying to resolve the conflict in the region. We wish him the best in his endeavors.

In an excellent Academy of Achievement interview George Mitchell says about his roots:
My mother was an immigrant from Lebanon to the United States. She came when she was 18 years old in 1920. My father was the orphaned son of immigrants to the United States from Ireland. My father never knew his parents. His mother died -- we're not sure -- either at or shortly after his birth, and he and all of his siblings were placed in orphanages in the Boston area. So my father grew up in an orphanage in Boston. He was then adopted by an elderly childless couple from Maine, who gave him the name of Mitchell. He moved to Maine, and there he met my mother and was married. My parents had no education. My mother couldn't read or write English. She worked nights in a textile mill. My father was a janitor at a local college in our hometown. But they were part of that generation of Americans who had a very deep commitment to the education of their children. They had, really, an exaggerated notion of the value of education. But their life's goal was to see to it that their children received the education that they never got, and in that, they were successful. They had five children, all of whom went on to graduate from college, and several of us have graduate degrees as well.

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