African-American novelist and Nobel prize winner Toni Morrison once famously asserted that former United States president Bill Clinton was America’s “first black president.” In a 1998 New Yorker article, Morrison said that Clinton was “blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children’s lifetime.”

History, of course, has proven Morrison wrong. A mere decade after her controversial statement, the recent U.S. election posed an interesting coda to her article.

And now U.S. Judge Abner Mikva has declared Barack Obama to be America’s “first Jewish president.” Riffing on Morrison’s turn of phrase, Mikva – a former congressman from Chicago’s Hyde Park, a former University of Chicago law professor and a retired federal judge – describes Obama as possessing a “yiddishe neshumah,” a “Jewish soul.”

What did Morrison mean, and what does Mikva mean, in so designating a U.S. president and president-elect?

Somewhat satirically, Morrison’s article suggested that Clinton be considered “black” not racially, but culturally, noting that he exemplified “almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald’s-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas.”

Written as Clinton was facing impeachment by the U.S. House of Representatives, the article compared what she saw as his unjustified persecution to the threat that hung over even successful black men in America. “No matter how smart you are, how hard you work, how much coin you earn for us, we will put you in your place or put you out of the place you have somehow… achieved. You will be fired from your job, sent away in disgrace.” She later explained that she was trying to convey that Clinton was “treated like a black on the street, already guilty, already a perp.”

The characterization took on a life of its own, and was used frequently to evoke Clinton’s many friendships with, and appointments of, African-Americans to federal offices and his sensitivity to the history and consequences of racism in America.

Mikva, the child of Jewish immigrant parents from a shtetl on the Russian-Polish border, sees in Obama, whom he mentored, quintessentially Jewish values – a “yiddishe neshumah,” a person with “a sensitive, sympathetic personality… who understands where you are coming from.”

Reading accounts of Mikva’s declaration about the president-elect reminded me of when I first learned about Mikva, this politician and statesman with the distinctively Jewish name. I was in graduate school, and friends from Chicago spoke of him as a source of personal inspiration.

Now in his early 80s, with a reputation for personal integrity, Mikva was raised with a strong, secular sense of Jewish identity by a father who was profoundly influenced by the atheism and anarchism of the Russian revolution. With no formal religious training, Mikva absorbed the Yiddish language of his household. His connection with Judaism was forged by his more religious grandfather, who would “sneak” young Abner into shul against his father’s wishes. In one of history’s ironies, Mikva’s daughter became a rabbi.

If we were to probe Mikva’s recent statement about Obama further, to develop it more substantially, as Morrison did with her remark about Clinton, we might see other reasons why he referred to Obama as “Jewish.”

It’s easy to imagine that the former judge would have been attracted to another child of a father from elsewhere, one who – as a member of a minority facing the obstacles of prejudice – had to figure out how he fit into America’s promise and reality. The tropes of Jewishness, to borrow Morrison’s locution, include much that Obama exemplifies: the value of education, close relations with grandparents, contending with suspicions of harbouring dual loyalties, being saddled with an odd name, negotiating a sense of identity that is at once particular and universal, being cosmopolitan, urban, and eloquent – the latter seen as both positive (a mark of intelligence) and negative (a tool of deceit). Moreover, in the culture wars of the recent election campaigns, Obama’s side did not sit comfortably with hunting and shooting. What could be more Jewish?

Most importantly perhaps, for a man who lived through the civil rights era and knew that the Jewish historical experience had motivated many American Jews to engage in a struggle on behalf of others, Mikva surely sees in Obama someone who similarly learns from and embraces, but also transcends, the historical struggle of the people with whom he most closely identifies.