The New York Jewish Week checks in on U.S. Rep. Anthony Weiner’s love life and wonders whether his engagement to a Muslim woman will hurt him politically:
In the course of his long political career, Anthony Weiner became accustomed to eager inquiries when he walked into a Jewish senior center without a wedding ring.
“They all want me to meet their granddaughters,” the rail-thin, youthful politician told me as we walked into one such senior center on Brooklyn’s Ocean Avenue years ago. “And, they want to know what I’ve eaten today.”
At the time, Weiner was running for Congress with posters that read Anthony David Weiner, lest the man with the Italian given name be perceived as a non-Jew and lose advantage to any of his three rivals, Noach Dear, Melinda Katz and Daniel Feldman.
The unusual moniker and his reluctance to meet those granddaughters or to put on a few pounds have never stood in the way of Anthony Weiner becoming a darling in his own religious community, mustering both political support and serious financial backing in a district that includes some of the most heavily Jewish neighborhoods in the country. They include Forest Hills in Queens and Flatbush in Brooklyn.
But now Weiner, 44, a six-term Democrat with staunch pro-Israel leanings, is entering uncharted waters with his announcement that he’ll soon be married. To a Muslim.
“OY,” commented one reader on the blog Yeshiva World News in reaction to the news….
Read the full story.
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