An Open Letter to Jared Kushner, From One of Your Jewish Employees
By Dana Schwartz, Observer.com
Dear Mr. Kushner,
My name is Dana Schwartz and I’m an entertainment writer at the Observer, the paper owned by your publishing company. On July 2, as I’m sure you’re aware (and have probably been wringing your hands about for the last three days), your father-in-law Donald Trump tweeted out an image of Hillary Clinton in front of raining money with a six-sided star declaring she’s the “Most Corrupt Candidate Ever!”
I responded to the meme, calling out its blatant anti-Semitic imagery because people can play ignorant, blame the corrupt liberal media for trying to “get” Trump, but it takes only a basic knowledge of world history or an understanding of how symbols work to see a wall of cash, a Star of David, and the accusation of corruption and not see the subtext.
But deny or play dumb as you might, when I tweeted out my response, my worst fears were realized: his message, whether purposeful or inadvertent, was met with cheers by those to whom that star’s message was certainly clear. Mr. Trump’s tweet was seen as a winking promise to this nation’s worst and most hateful individuals.
Here are just a tiny sample size of the responses I received:
A few hours later, Trump deleted the original image and re-tweeted it out, this time with the star crudely covered by a circle (the tips of the star still visible), and a new hashtag: #AmericaFirst. Forgive me if I condescend in any way or explain what you already know, but I’m sure you’ve been busy lately so just a quick refresher: America First was a movement led primarily by White supremacist Charles Lindbergh advocating against American intervention during World War II. The Anti-Defamation League has previously asked that Trump refrain from the slogan due to its overt anti-Semitic implications.
The corrected tweet, with new hashtags. Donald Trump
He and his campaign deny that the image—which had been found, previous to Trump’s tweet, on a white supremacist internet forum—has any Jewish implications at all. Instead of acknowledging the obvious, he and his campaign used it as an opportunity to undermine the free media in the style of the most dangerous regimes in history, and mock those like me, who had been getting strangers on the Internet telling her to put her head in the oven for the past day and a half.
Here are some of the excuses I’ve seen, both from Trump’s camp and Trump supporters:
- “It’s available on Microsoft shapes.” There are a lot of symbols you can make on Microsoft Word, and sometimes symbols SYMBOLIZE ideas, concepts, or groups. A cross for instance. I feel silly explaining this to you. This explanation is so inane that I feel so condescending refuting it to you, ostensibly my boss, that it feels insubordinate.
- “It’s a sheriff star.” Because users on the white supremacist forums where this image was found were no doubt implying Hillary is in the pocket of the sheriffs. You know, sheriffs. The group stereotypically associated with greed and money.
- “He didn’t make it; he’s too busy to pay attention to everything he tweets out.” This is not an excuse for racism. Trump’s twitter account is seen by millions of people, and he is responsible for the message he’s sending to his supporters. Besides, Trump is running for president. Making mistakes because he wasn’t “paying attention” isn’t an excuse that qualifies him for the highest office in the land in any way.
- “It was an accident.” Then where is the apology?
These explanations are so facile, infantile in their blatant disregard for context or logic that I can only imagine them being delivered by someone doing so while grinning and winking.
And then there’s the final explanation, the one most frequently cited by Trump’s most “reasonable” supporters on the Internet:
“Trump has a Jewish son-in-law, and granddaughter: he can’t be anti-Semitic.”
Mr. Kushner, I invite you to look through all of those images in the slideshow above, the vast majority sent in your father-in-law’s name. Right now, this hate is directed to one of your employees, but the message applies equally to your wife and daughter.
You went to Harvard, and hold two graduate degrees. Please do not condescend to me and pretend you don’t understand the imagery of a six-sided star when juxtaposed with money and accusations of financial dishonesty. I’m asking you, not as a “gotcha” journalist or as a liberal but as a human being: how do you allow this? Because, Mr. Kushner, you are allowing this. Your father-in-law’s repeated accidental winks to the white supremacist community is perhaps a savvy political strategy if the neo-Nazis are considered a sizable voting block—I confess, I haven’t done my research on that front. But when you stand silent and smiling in the background, his Jewish son-in-law, you’re giving his most hateful supporters tacit approval. Because maybe Donald Trump isn’t anti-Semitic. To be perfectly honest, I don’t think he is. But I know many of his supporters are, and they believe for whatever reason that Trump is the candidate for them.
I can’t abide another defensive blame-shift to the media or to “politically correct culture gone amok.” David Duke, outspoken and explicit white supremacist, anti-Semite, and former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, saw the image your father-in-law tweeted out, and to him the message was quite clear to him. Those aren’t stereotypical “sheriff” hands in the corner.
The worst people in this country saw your father-in-law’s message and took it as they saw fit. And yet Donald Trump in his response chose not to condemn them, the anti-Semites who, by his argument were obviously misinterpreting the image, but the media.
And now, Mr. Kushner, I ask you: What are you going to do about this? Look at those tweets I got again, the ones calling me out for my Jewish last name, insulting my nose, evoking the holocaust, and tell me I’m being too sensitive. Read about the origins of that image and see the type of people it attracted like a flies to human waste and tell me this whole story is just the work of the “dishonest media.” Look at that image and tell me, honestly, that you just saw a “Sheriff’s Star.” I didn’t see a sheriff star, Mr. Kushner, and I’m a smart person. After all, I work for your paper.
Edmund Burke once said, in times that are starting to seem more and more similar: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” Well, here I am, and here we are. Both Jewish, both members of the media. And you might choose silence, but I’ve said my piece.
Respectfully,
Dana Schwartz
Ryan on Star of David tweet: Trump should’ve known better
By Jacob Kornbluh, Jewish Insider.
House Speaker Paul Ryan on Tuesday joined public criticism of Donald Trump’s weekend tweet against Hillary Clinton, which included an image of Clinton and a Star of David created by a racist Twitter user and first posted on a white-supremacist website.
“Look, anti-Semitic images, they’ve got no place in a presidential campaign,” Ryan said in an interview with WTMJ’s Charlie Sykes. “Candidates should know that. The tweet’s been deleted. I don’t know what flunky put this up there. They’ve obviously got to fix that. We’ve got to get back to the issues that matter to the public.”
Saying he has no time commenting on every Trump tweet, Ryan advised his party’s presumptive presidential nominee to “clean up the way his new media works.”
“I think he’s got to clean this up,” Ryan repeated.
Trump’s social media director Dan Scavino took blame for the tweet on Monday, but claimed he thought it was a sheriff’s star not a Star of David. “For the MSM to suggest that I am anti-Semite is awful,” Sac vino tweeted Tuesday morning. “I proudly celebrate holidays with my wife’s amazing Jewish family for the past 16 years.”
Campaign surrogates on Tuesday pointed to Trump’s Jewish daughter and son-in-law and connection with the Jewish community to defuse growing angst of Trump’s candidacy. “I’m going to side with Dan Scavino, who’s married to a Jewish woman, and Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump on this,” Kellyanne Conway, a senior adviser and pollster for the Trump campaign, said on CNN’s “New Day” morning program. “They know the full measure of a man and we all know that Mr. Trump opened up his club in Florida to Jewish members for the first time. That’s much more important in my view in measuring the way someone looks at people.”
Former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, appearing on CNN earlier in the morning, cited Trump’s “long and storied history” of leading a “parade,” employing Jews as senior executives at his organization, and supporting Israel as evidence the tweet was not intended to be anti-Semitic. “He has a 30-year history of supporting the people of Israel,” said Lewandowsky.
But the Anti-Defamation League refused to let Trump’s ties to the Jewish community overshadow the incident. “Donald Trump should stop playing the blame game and accept that his campaign tweeted an image with obvious anti-Semitic overtones and that, reportedly, was lifted from a white supremacist website,” the ADL said in a statement Monday night. “It’s long past time for Trump to unequivocally reject the hate-filled extremists orbiting around his campaign and take a stand against anti-Semitism, bigotry, and hate.”
“Even if you don’t believe that Trump is a racist you get the feeling that he condones racists,” Michael Fragin, a New York-based GOP consultant, told Jewish Insider. “But the real problem politically is that Trump was given a campaign gift this weekend with Clinton being questioned by the FBI and he squandered the opportunity and lost the news cycle because he continues to be impulsive and undisciplined.”
Trump: Charges of anti-Semitism over tweet are ‘ridiculous’
By JILL COLVIN, The Big History
Donald Trump says Hillary Clinton’s campaign is “ridiculous” to portray an anti-Clinton tweet that appeared to depict the Star of David atop a pile of cash as anti-Semitic.
In a statement issued by his Republican presidential campaign Monday evening, Trump suggested Clinton and her allies were using the matter to distract from her own recent campaign troubles.
Trump said the tweet portrayed “a basic star, often used by sheriffs who deal with criminals and criminal behavior,” as part of an effort to convey that “Crooked Hillary is the most corrupt candidate ever.”
It was the presumptive GOP nominee’s most extensive comment since his official account tweeted— then deleted — the image Saturday, sparking uproar over its potentially anti-Semitic connotations. Trump’s account later posted a new version with a circle in place of the six-point star.
Addressing the origins of the tweet for the first time, Trump campaign social media director Dan Scavino said in a statement posted on Trump’s Facebook page Monday evening that he had lifted it from an anti-Clinton Twitter feed and had never intended to offend anyone.
“The social media graphic used this weekend was not created by the campaign nor was it sourced from an anti-Semitic site. It was lifted from an anti-Hillary Twitter user where countless images appear,” he wrote.
He said that the star, which he described as a sheriff’s badge “fit with the theme of corrupt Hillary and that is why I selected it.”
“As the social media director for the campaign, I would never offend anyone and therefore chose to remove the image,” he added.
The now-deleted @FishBoneHead1 account that appears to have first posted the image featured a series of anti-Clinton memes as well as other provocative and offensive images. The image had also appeared on a white supremacist message board filled with anti-Semitic messages.
Scavino did not respond to a follow-up question about whether @FishBoneHead1 was the “anti-Hillary” Twitter account he was referring to.
Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, said Trump’s attempt to dismiss the concerns of people who have taken issue with the post “falls somewhere between absurd and offensive.”
“It’s not a left-wing issue or a right-wing issue,” he said. “It’s not a Democratic issue or a Republican issue. It’s a matter of common sense.” Greenblatt said: “It would be appropriate and timely for the presumptive GOP nominee for the White House to say unequivocally, I want nothing to do with these ideas,” and to say “hate has no place in making America great again.”
Earlier Monday, Sarah Bard, director of Jewish outreach for Clinton’s Democratic presidential campaign, said in a statement that “Trump’s use of a blatantly anti-Semitic image from racist websites to promote his campaign” was part of a pattern by him. “Now, not only won’t he apologize for it, he’s peddling lies and blaming others,” she added. “Trump should be condemning hate, not offering more campaign behavior and rhetoric that engages extremists.”
In his statement, Trump accused Clinton’s campaign of using the tweet to try to “divert attention from the dishonest behavior of herself and her husband.” He cited her “missing emails” and Bill Clinton’s impromptu meeting with Attorney General Loretta Lynch as her agency oversees the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server as secretary of state.
Trump has long professed his support for Israel and his daughter converted to Judaism before her marriage. But he has come under scrutiny for repeatedly re-tweeting posts from white supremacists’ accounts and for not immediately renouncing the support of former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard David Duke.
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