Is Obama's mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, Jewish? What I discovered was more interesting than that.

Don't get me wrong.  I live in a red/blue state, and could care less about party politics.  My views on elections are at best, cynical.  In fact, if you want to see a close approximation of my own views, watch this George Carlin performance.  My interest in Obama's background is nothing more than sheer curiosity.

There have been rumors that President Obama's mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, was Jewish, though the proof of that rumor tends to be vague and fuzzy - she "acted" Jewish seems to be the gist of it.

Obama does havc some Jewish connections in his family.  Barack Obama Sr. married a Jewish woman named Ruth Nidesand and had two children by her.  One still living is Mark Okoth Obama Ndesandjo, an internet consultant who resides in China.

First Lady Michelle Robinson Obama has a cousin, Chicago resident Capers Funnye, the most prominent black Rabbi in the US. A Jewish convert, Funnye has been involved with another group of black converts in Uganda.  An organization supporting the 300 or so remaining Ugandan Jews operates from the University of Chicago.

Stanley Ann Dunham went to school in the Seattle area, first to Eckstein Junior High (aka Eckstein Middle School), then Mercer Island High School.  Because I'm in the area, I thought I might be able to track down clues to her alleged Jewishness.  To do that, I had to track down Jewish Seattle.

In the 1980's, there was a comedy competition in Seattle. One of the contestants, a Jewish woman from New York, told the following joke:

"Seattle is the only city in the US where you can order pastrami on white with mayo, and still maintain your ethnic identity."

In the packed theater where the competition was held, you could hear a pin drop.  None of the locals got it.

One writer laments:

"In Seattle, people tell me over and over that I'm the only Jew they know, which constantly amazes me. But, again, perhaps I shouldn't be surprised. The other night I was talking with a friend who said that before he temporarily left this city, at the age of 18, to attend college on the East Coast, he didn't know what a Jew was. Even more astounding: The number of Seattleites who know I'm Jewish and yet ask me, year after year, what I'm doing for Christmas...

There continues to be a basic and widespread ignorance in this city about some of the fundamental tenets of Judaism, an ignorance that is no doubt linked to the low number of Jews in this area, but one that continually leads to awkward encounters, annoying conversations, and embarrassingly ham-handed actions from public officials...

In Seattle, I haven't experienced anti-Semitism in the classic sense of being called a "kike" or checked for horns beneath my hair...But I do frequently find myself in social situations where people say amazingly stupid things about me, or Jews in general."

What a whiner.

My family arrived in Seattle in the 70's.  My father was deceased.  My mother was a blue-eyed WASP with British ancestry in the US dating back to the Revolution. Because of my father's Italian surname, we often got asked the following:

1)  What do you know about the Mafia?
2)  Why don't you live in "garlic gulch"?

Garlic gulch is the Rainier Valley area of Seattle, once populated by Italian market farmers until they got displaced by blacks, who were later displaced by Asians.  I know an old Italian-American from the garlic gulch days.  His surname ends in a y (it used to be an i).  When I asked him about it, he said when his family moved here, they were told to change their name, "or else there'd be trouble."

When I enrolled at a local university I got assigned to the Chicano floor of one of the dorms, replete with La Raza style murals.  My roomate, another resident with a vowel on the end of their name, was an Israeli-American. Armenians, Italians, Iranians, Albanians; Seattle lumps them all in one pile.  The clincher was when I got thoroughly searched at the airport because I fit a profile for a drug mule.  The profile turned out to be female + Hispanic + extensive travel record.

BTW, I look nothing like a Chicano.  When I'm overseas, Europeans think I'm French.  Turks think I'm Finnish.  Brits think I'm German.

But enough about me already.  Back to Jewish Seattle:

"From the beginning, Jews here were part of the business and political elite. One of the first territorial governors in Washington, Edward S. Salomon, was Jewish. Seattle's sixth mayor, Bailey Gatzert, was a Jew from Mississippi (by way of Germany) who'd first been drawn to California by the gold rush, and then up to Seattle by his marriage into a family of West Coast Jewish merchants. He spoke English with a southern drawl, served as a Seattle City Council member for several terms, and when he died, in 1893, received an obituary in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer that began: "The history of Seattle can never be told without telling much of the life of Bailey Gatzert." 

When, in 1897, the steamer Portland landed at the Seattle waterfront bearing more than a ton of gold from Alaska and setting off the Northwest gold rush that would put Seattle on the map, the ship docked at a place named Schwabacher Warf. 

And as Seattle subsequently boomed into a frontier town where eager prospectors bought equipment and passage to the Klondike gold fields, Jewish merchants often became richer than the prospectors themselves, selling pre-made packs of supplies and equipment designed to last a man a year in the Klondike. At Cooper & Levy Pioneer Outfitters, located at First Avenue and Yesler Way in what is now Pioneer Square (and what was then a neighborhood filled with actual pioneers), the packs of equipment were stacked along the sidewalk and sold, 24 hours a day, for $1,000 each...

Ferdinand Toklas, cofounder of Washington's first department store, was the father of Alice B. Toklas, the writer and partner of Gertrude Stein...To this day, though many prominent Seattle Jews are major benefactors to the arts (the Benaroyas, for example), this city's best-known Jews remain, as in the pioneer period, businessmen: Howard Schultz of Starbucks, Jeff Brotman of Costco, the downtown developer Martin Selig."

Hey, let's not forget Joe Diamond, the parking lot king.  Or Kenny G.  Or that Jimi Hendrix's first performance was in the basement of Seattle's Temple de Hirsch.  Or how about beloved 70's talk show fixture Rabbi Raphael Levine?

1956 - Dunhams in Seattle's Wedgwood neighborhood

1957 - Dunhams move to Mercer Island

According to one local Jewish organization, most of the Jewish population in Seattle lives east of I-5, the freeway that splits the city in two.

When the Dunhams first moved to Seattle in 1955, they rented an apartment in the Columbia City neighborhood.   There are no records of the address.  Columbia City is adjacent to the  Seward Park area, one of the largest Sephardic communities in the US, and at the time of the Dunhams residence, one of the more Jewish areas of the city.  However, this doesn't prove anything.  

By 1956 the Dunhams moved to the Wedgwood neighborhood, where Stanley Ann briefly attended Eckstein Junior High.  The directories from 1957 indicate they moved to Mercer Island, apparently so Stanley Ann could attend the local, newly built high school. 

Both Wedgwood and Mercer Island became heavily Jewish, but only long after the Dunhams had left.  Wedgwood now boasts of at least three synagogues and a Chabad Lubavitch shul, and Mercer Island, home to conservative radio talk show host Rabbi Daniel Lapin, has been known as a heavily Jewish area at least since the 1970's.  As for proof of Stanley Ann's heritage, this amounts to clutching at straws. 

Seattle Polk's Directory:  Dunham

Seattle Daily Times 1959-06-14 - Stanley Sr. gets his salesman's license

Stanley Dunham Sr. worked as a salesman for Standard Grunbaum furniture, located at 2nd and Pine in Seattle.  "Standard" in Standard Grunbaum refers to the Louis Schoenfeld owned Standard furniture empire, which was sold to Grunbaum in 1958.  Still, working for a Jewish owned furniture store doesn't prove much. 

The Dunhams went to a local Unitarian church, even though Madelyn Payne Dunham was raised Methodist.  The Unitarians don't require a belief in God, and the denomination is often cited as a haven for crypto-Jews ("Jewnitarians").  Still, not solid evidence.

Madelyn and Stanley shed their Methodist and Baptist upbringing and began attending Sunday services at the East Shore Unitarian Church in nearby Bellevue.  "In the 1950s, this was sometimes known as 'the little Red church on the hill,' " said Peter Luton, the church's senior minister, referring to the effects of McCarthyism.  -  Chicago Tribune, March 27, 2007

When Scotland Was Jewish - page 242

Madelyn's maiden name Payne has some Jewish connections. And didn't Stanley Ann once say she had Cherokee ancestry? We're getting a little warmer. But is everyone named Payne ethnically Jewish?

Faculty, 1950's, Mercer Island High School

Stanley Ann, from a Mercer Island High yearbook

Finally, the school yearbooks.  I searched local libraries, the Seattle School Archives, online sales of yearbooks, but no luck.  I called Eckstein, they had nothing.  Surely, the Mercer Island High School yearbooks had to be somewhere.  Otherwise, how would high school yearbook pictures of Stanley Ann be showing up in the media?  I hoped to find something incriminatingly Jewish regarding Stanley's "Anarchy Alley" days. So I made a call to Mercer Island High School:

"Hello?

Hi, I was wondering if I could come over and look at some of your yearbooks.  Do you have any from the 1950's?

Are you looking for something on President Obama's mother?

Yes.

Well, don't bother coming over, because you're not going to find anything.

Why is that?

A few years ago, just before the Obama campaign got started, before most people knew who he was, someone came here and asked to look at those yearbooks.  Unfortunately, we let them.  And they took off with them and never brought the books back...and we think we know who she is, and that's all we're going to say about it." 

Wow.  I admit, I was momentarily speechless.  What had I stumbled across?  An organized conspiracy?

There are a lot of records surrounding Barack Obama that have either dissapeared or remain unreleased.  They include:

Passport records, Obama kindergarten records, Punahou School records, Occidental College records, Columbia University records, Columbia thesis, Harvard Law School records, Harvard Law Review articles, University of Chicago scholarly articles, Illinois State Bar Association records, Illinois State Senate records/schedules (said to be lost), Medical records, Obama/Dunham marriage license, Obama/Dunham divorce documents, Soetoro/Dunham marriage license, Adoption records and of course the long-form Certificate of Live Birth. 

Is there really something to hide?  Or has there been  an organized scheme designed to divert peoples' attention from more important issues by having them chase red herrings? And if so, why? Why would anyone take the time to make off with a bunch of Obama family high school yearbooks? (As an update, I've found some pages of these yearbooks at a former faculty member's memorial website.)

In 2010 Obama visited Seattle, stopping in the Wedgwood area at the home of Erik and Cynnie Foss, where a "backyard chat" was held.  To add insult to injury to the memory of Stanley Ann, on the way to the Foss home his entourage and limo quickly passed Eckstein Junior High with nary an acknowledgement of the hundreds of students who had waited on the front lawn, waving and holding up signs.

In May of 2012, Obama did a fundraiser in the Madrona neighborhood, which in addition to modest homes, boasts multi million dollar estates on its Lake Washington side. Madrona is bordered on one side by Martin Luther King Way, and was until recent times considered a black neighborhood.  Keeping with the black and Jewish theme, a brunch was held at the Madrona estate of Ann and Bruce Blume.

Questions remain:  Will the mystery of Barack Obama's heritage ever be solved?  Will Barack's missing records magically reappear in a hidden vault somewhere?  Will Stanley Ann's yearbooks show up under a pile of encyclopedias at Goodwill?

Will Barry ever star in a video like this one?

Related:

Why Obama's mother was named Stanley (according to the NY Times):

Obama’s mother was named Stanley Ann Dunham not at the perverse insistence of her father, Stanley, but because her mother was taken by the sophistication of a Bette Davis character, a woman named Stanley, in the movie “In This Our Life,” which she saw while ­pregnant.  

According to the Chicago Tribune:

"I know, it's a boy's name . and no, I don't like it. I mean, would you like to be called Stanley?" Johnson recalled her saying. "But my dad wanted a boy and he got me. And the name 'Stanley' made him feel better, I guess."
 
  
The Mossad, Charlotte, NC and the Democratic National Convention - upcoming false flag?