By Landon Jones
Even before Charlotte Clinton Mevzinsky headed home from the hospital on Monday, we had seen the first photos of her with her “over the moon” new grandparents, Bill and Hillary Clinton. But where were the machatonim?
In case you’re wondering,machatonim is a Yiddish word that describes a relationship for which there is no equivalent word in English: the parents of your child’s spouse. And in the case of the Clintons, themachatonim are two longtime friends and allies: Marjorie Margolies and Edward Mevzinsky.
“We are totally delighted,” Marjorie told TIME. What matters this week, anyway, is the relationship of the Clintons and the Margolies-Mevzinskys as machatonim — surely a more efficient way to put it than fumbling around awkwardly with phrases like “my daughter’s in-laws.” If Bill and Hillary are newcomers to their heightened status as grandparents, Marjorie and Ed are black-belt machatonim. Between their combined eleven children, they already have 18 grandchildren, thus presenting Charlotte with 18 cousins “who can’t wait to be part of Charlotte’s life,” Margolies says.
Chelsea Clinton’s mother-in-law, Marjorie Margolies has been earning a six-figure salary from her role heading a charity intended to help women in political campaigns abroad.
Marjorie Margolies, the mother of Chelsea’s husband Marc Mezvinsky, is a Democrat currently running for Congress in Pennsylvania and the financial statements for her charity, Women’s Campaign International (WCI), have come under scrutiny as such.
As the charity has grown over the past decade, so has her salary as The Huffington Post reports it has steadily increased from $54,962 in 2002 to the highest point in 2011 when she took home $164,159.
An ABC News investigation revealed that Mezvinsky, a former Democratic Congressman from Iowa, had been caught up in a series of Nigerian e-mail scams and began to steal from people to further his schemes.
“He was always looking for the home run. He was always trying to find the business deal that would make him as wealthy as all the people in his social circle,” said federal prosecutor Bob Zauzmer. According to Zauzmer, Mezvinsky, who is now 72, will be on supervised release, the federal version of probation, until 2011.
