Garrow's Rising Star is probably the first mainstream unflattering Obama biography. That explains the hostility to it. And as this Politico piece notes, it turns up unflattering truths about Obama.
A little background.
Obama dated Sheila Miyoshi-Jager before Michelle. Their relationship was somewhat tangled and they broke up. Obama fictionalized the whole thing in his autohagiography. The reality is more troubling.
Jager also told Garrow that the scene, in Dreams, that precipitated their breakup—a bitter row about race after they saw a play by an African-American playwright—misrepresented the issues that actually divided them. In Jager’s telling, the searing fight took place after they saw an exhibit at Chicago’s Spertus Institute about the 1961 Adolf Eichmann trial, a very different context. Where Dreams portrayed the lovers’ rift as at bottom a function of racial difference, Jager, while acknowledging the racial component of their strains, insisted she was mainly upset that day that Obama, in her recollection, was less than unequivocal in condemning “black racism”; it was at a moment when the overt anti-Semitism of Steve Cokely, a black mayoral aide in Chicago, had become a cause célèbre in local politics.
Cokely claimed that the Jews had invented AIDS and were using it to kill black people.
Mr. Cokely charged that Jews are involved in an international conspiracy to control the world and that ''the AIDS epidemic is a result of doctors, especially Jewish ones, who inject AIDS into blacks.''
The incident foreshadowed Obama's issues with Jeremiah Wright's racism and anti-Semitism. The media at the time condemned the black community's tolerance for racism and anti-Semitism. (A courageous act that is virtually unimaginable in today's intersectionalized left.)
Jager's father was Bernd Jager, a conservative Republican of Dutch origin who had real life experiences of anti-Semitism during WW2.
I walked downstairs through the hallway and found my father standing behind our front door, peering through the small window that looked out on the street. We stood there silently, afraid to make any noise that might attract the attention of the German soldiers who walked on the sidewalks, on both sides of the street. Between them, in the middle of the street, we saw hundreds of our Jewish neighbors being herded like cattle to the train station nearby.
Again we stood together in silence, able to share only our fear and our spiritual paralysis before a scene of unimaginable evil. There was for us no mystery about the fate that awaited these people. We all knew that they would be transported to slave and death camps, that they were all marked for death and that their only chance of survival would depend on a rapid advance of the Allied forces.
The next morning, I went with a few friends to the Jewish quarter of the village to find there all the windows broken, the doors left open, and family possessions looted or destroyed. I will never forget the infinitely sad spectacle of family portraits torn from the walls and smashed underfoot on the floor.
Brend Jager quickly rejected Barack Obama. Barry's arrogant posturing and condescension did not endear him.
And this was the background that equipped his daughter to eventually see through the glib exterior to Obama's complicity and moral cowardice.