Robin Washington is editorial page editor of the Duluth News Tribune and a commentator on public radio stations nationwide. This piece first appeared in Minnesota’s American Jewish World.

Would somebody please tell me how many degrees of separation from Louis Farrakhan you have to be in order to be considered a decent person on this planet – or better, a presidential candidate?

The somebody most fixated on the subject lately is Washington Post op-ed columnist Richard Cohen, who last month constructed a verbal Rube Goldberg machine to state:

“Barack Obama is a member of Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ. Its minister, and Obama’s spiritual adviser, is the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. In 1982, the church launched Trumpet Newsmagazine; Wright’s daughters serve as publisher and executive editor. Every year, the magazine makes awards in various categories. Last year, it gave the Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. Trumpeter Award to a man it said ‘truly epitomized greatness.’ That man is Louis Farrakhan.”

Yikes! Better take back all those primary and caucus votes cast by Jews: Obama’s an anti-Semite!

Except he isn’t, concedes Cohen, who went on to contradict his worries, writing: “nothing in Obama’s record suggests he harbors anti-Semitic views” and “I don’t for a moment think that Obama shares Wright’s views on Farrakhan” – statements that somehow got by the Post editors charged with fact-checking the column for logic.

Whether Cohen has withdrawn his motion or not, he’s succeeded in putting the dubious association out there, perpetuating the near-clinical preoccupation with Farrakhan that has wasted a generation of Jewish intellectual capital.

Before anyone accuses me of naivete in the face of the real danger that Farrakhan represents, let me point out that he doesn’t. Yes, he’s said and continues say obnoxious and inflammatory things about Jews. So did the late Bobby Fischer. If Farrakhan’s threat is greater because his Fruit of Islam army is ready to violently engage Jews to liberate Crown Heights, I’m sorry to report the dispatches from the front are nil. And if the fear is simply that Farrakhan has indoctrinated millions of minions with hate-the-Jews mind control, he hasn’t done that, either. Generous estimates put his Nation of Islam followers at about 20,000, or a tenth of the number of black Jews in this country and not even one percent of mainstream African American Muslims, who don’t consider Farrakhan quite up to the Islamic equivalent of halacha.

None of this has stopped any number of Jewish defenders of the faith from perpetuating a virtual cottage industry of Farrakhan obsession, complete with litmus tests for anyone remotely considered a public figure.

And with that, let me disclose my own degree of separation from the minister, who I’ve never met but who grew up with one of my former bosses, the publisher of Boston’s African American weekly newspaper who expresses unshakable admiration for Farrakhan. Should I, one of the only Jewish editors of a black newspaper, have quit my job in futile protest, or did my being there help bring some balance to the newspaper’s coverage of black and Jewish relations?

There’s another Farrakhan admirer I esteem, a late black clergyman who curiously shared the same surname as Obama’s pastor. The Rev. Nathan Wright, Jr., who I got to know when I produced a documentary recalling the first freedom ride through the South, in 1947, on which he participated, was a pioneer of civil rights before it became a movement. Wright was an early leader of the Congress of Racial Equality in Boston, whose activities inspired a young Rev. Martin Luther King. He was later chairman of the 1967 Black Power conference in Newark and, if anyone wondered about his penchant for violence, maintained a lifelong adherence to pacifism.

Wright also officiated the 1953 wedding of then-Episcopalian Louis Eugene Wolcott, and when the young man embraced Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam, helped the competing clergyman set up his first mosque in Boston.

“He still calls me ‘my minister,’” Wright told me once.

I don’t know what impressed the other Rev. Wright about Farrakhan, but I can hardly hold Obama responsible for his pastor’s predilections.

On the subject of degrees of separation, by the way, I’m directly connected to Obama, who I first met when he was a skinny law student at Harvard. Ditto for my ties to Ted Kennedy, who I also met in Massachusetts. I’m one degree of separation as well from Tony Ridder of the now-defunct Knight Ridder newspaper chain, my paper’s former owner. Kennedy’s dad infamously championed appeasement with Hitler and tried to get an audience with him. Ridder’s grandad did meet Hitler, and penned what must have been a fabulously informative 1933 article: “Hitler, ‘Man With a Holy Mission’ Explains Jewish Stand to Ridder.”

Guess I’d better start apologizing and disassociating myself.