(JTA) — Jared Kushner is facing more fire — from two cousins — for defending Donald Trump over an anti-Hillary Clinton tweet featuring a six-pointed star that was seen by some as anti-Semitic.
Marc Kushner and Jacob Schulder took to Facebook Wednesday to rap their cousin, a businessman married to Trump’s daughter Ivanka, for invoking their grandparents’ Holocaust experiences in an essay defending the Republican candidate, Politico first reported the following day.
Jared Kushner’s essay appeared Wednesday as a response to a letter by Dana Schwartz, a writer at the New York Observer — a paper Kushner owns — who demanded that he speak out against anti-Semitic messaging in his father-in-law’s presidential campaign.
In his response, Kushner said Trump is neither anti-Semitic nor a racist, and has “another side” the media never sees. He also invoked his family’s Holocaust history, arguing that the issue “is not idle philosophy to me.”
“I am the grandson of Holocaust survivors … My grandmother’s brother Chanon, for whom my father is named, was killed along with about 50 others. My grandmother made it to the woods, where she joined the Bielski Brigade of partisan resistance fighters,” Kushner wrote in the Observer piece. “I go into these details, which I have never discussed, because it’s important to me that people understand where I’m coming from when I report that I know the difference between actual, dangerous intolerance versus these labels that get tossed around in an effort to score political points.”
In response, Marc Kushner wrote on Facebook: “I have a different take-away from my Grandparents’ experience in the war. It is our responsibility as the next generation to speak up against hate. Anti-semitism[sic] or otherwise.”
Marc Kushner is the son of Murray Kushner, brother of Jared’s father, Charles.
It is the latest in a series of family spats in a decades-long family feud that predates Charles Kushner’s 2005 conviction for tax evasion and attempting to discredit his brother-in-law by setting him up with a prostitute and secretly videotaping the sexual encounter.
Schulder, whose father, William, was targeted in the incident, commented on Marc Kushner’s post, Politico reported.
“That my grandparents have been dragged into this is a shame,” Schulder wrote, according to Politico. “Thank you Jared for using something sacred and special to the descendants of Joe and Rae Kushner to validate the sloppy manner in which you’ve handled this campaign.”
