Not having it. Members of Jared Kushner’s extended family aren’t too thrilled that the businessman invoked their shared past as a way to defend his father-in-law, Donald Trump, in an op-ed printed in the New York Observer (owned by the Kushner family) on Wednesday, July 6.
In the piece, Kushner, 35, insists that Trump, 70, is “not an anti-Semite,” an accusation that was made about the Republican presidential hopeful after he tweeted — and deleted — an offensive meme of political opponent Hillary Clinton in front of a pile of money with a six-point star (believed to be the Jewish Star of David) calling her the “most corrupt candidate ever!”
“Donald Trump is not anti-Semitic and he’s not racist,” Kushner, husband of Ivanka Trump, wrote in response to entertainment journalist Dana Schwartz’s open letter regarding the questionable Twitter incident. “Despite the best efforts of his political opponents and a large swath of the media to hold Donald Trump accountable for the utterances of even the most fringe of his supporters — a standard to which no other candidate is ever held — the worst that his detractors can fairly say about him is that he has been careless in retweeting imagery that can be interpreted as offensive.”
Kushner then went on to detail his own grandparents’ struggles as Holocaust survivors as a way to show that he has the credentials to determine that Trump is not against Jews.
In a series of posts to Facebook on Thursday, July 7, however, Kushner’s relatives called Kushner everything from “out of touch” to “self-serving.”
“I have a different takeaway from my grandparents’ experience in the war,” Kushner’s cousin Marc Kushner posted to Facebook, along with a link to the original op-ed. “It is our responsibility as the next generation to speak up against hate. Anti-Semitism or otherwise.”
Another cousin, Jacob Schulder, commented on Marc’s post with a few choice words of his own.
“When an out of touch with reality nominee hires an out of touch with reality campaign manager, who is also a son-in-law, you get the BS Jared wrote,” Schulder wrote. “I don’t think Trump is an antiSemite; I think he’s a lying idiot (among other things) with little to no experience outside his teetering fiefdom of failed development projects, divorces, bankrupted sports leagues, fraudulent ‘universities’ and golf courses (and the list keeps going). The very first thing a responsible campaign manager should do, I’d think, and I mean the very first thing, would be to take away his father-in-law’s Twitter account. Even Joseph Kushner [the grandfather Jared referenced] would’ve had the street smarts to figure that one out while living on boiled potatoes in the forest.”
Schulder added that Kushner had changed significantly since joining Trump’s family when he wed Ivanka in 2009, but that not even his relatives, who have watched “the sloppy manner in which you’ve handled this campaign,” thought he would write the piece that he did in response to an Observer employee asking him to speak out against Trump supporters’ hatred.
“Kudos to you for having gone this far; no one expected this,” Schulder continued. “But for the sake of the family name, which may have no meaning to you but still has meaning to others, please don’t invoke our grandparents in vain just so you can sleep better at night. It is self-serving and disgusting.”
Kushner and the Trump campaign have thus far not publicly responded to his relatives’ outraged responses to his piece.
