Which brings us to the other startling aspect of the interview between Samuels and Garrow, where we move from the abstract realm of character judgments to disturbing historical facts. In Obama’s ballyhooed first memoir, Dreams of My Father, Samuels summarizes his description of the breakup between Obama and Sheila Miyoshi Jager, one of his serious girlfriends before he married Michelle Obama: “In Dreams, Obama describes a passionate disagreement following a play by African American playwright August Wilson, in which the young protagonist defends his incipient embrace of Black racial consciousness against his girlfriend’s white-identified liberal universalism.”

But Garrow, who started writing his Obama biography well into Obama’s second term as president, tracked down Jager — now a professor at Oberlin with a formidable academic reputation — and asked her about her relationship with Obama. (That the credulous journalistic establishment was totally incurious about digging into Obama’s inconsistent and self-serving life story is a thread running throughout the interview.) According to her, what really happened was this:

In Jager’s telling, the quarrel that ended the couple’s relationship was not about Obama’s self-identification as a Black man. And the impetus was not a play about the American Black experience, but an exhibit at Chicago’s Spertus Institute about the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann.

At the time that Obama and Sheila visited the Spertus Institute, Chicago politics was being roiled by a Black mayoral aide named Steve Cokely who, in a series of lectures organized by Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam, accused Jewish doctors in Chicago of infecting Black babies with AIDS as part of a genocidal plot against African Americans. The episode highlighted a deep rift within the city’s power echelons, with some prominent Black officials supporting Cokely and others calling for his firing.

In Jager’s recollection, what set off the quarrel that precipitated the end of the couple’s relationship was Obama’s stubborn refusal, after seeing the exhibit, and in the swirl of this Cokely affair, to condemn Black racism. While acknowledging that Obama’s embrace of a Black identity had created some degree of distance between the couple, she insisted that what upset her that day was Obama’s inability to condemn Cokely’s comments. It was not Obama’s Blackness that bothered her, but that he would not condemn antisemitism.