“I do not think Mr. Trump can be responsible for people who are anti-Semitic who support him,” said Donald Trump adviser Jason Greenblatt (left), shown with Rabbi Shmuley Boteach in New York on May 5. | AP Photo Trump Jewish adviser: He can't be responsible for anti-Semitic supporters

Donald Trump cannot be held responsible for anti-Semitic comments lobbed by his supporters to journalists and political opponents online, one of the candidate’s longtime advisers and employees within the Trump Organization said Wednesday.

“I do not think Mr. Trump can be responsible for people who are anti-Semitic who support him,” Jason Greenblatt, who practices Orthodox Judaism, told Nachum Segal on his “JM in the AM” program. “He has come out clearly against anti-Semitism.”


Greenblatt said he was in Trump’s office when he called The New York Times to flatly denounce statements made by David Duke. “Anti-Semitism has no place our society, which needs to be united, not divided,” Trump said in the Times interview published May 5, after the former Ku Klux Klan leader denounced “Jewish extremists” opposing the Republican’s campaign.

Trump has said as much “countless times,” Greenblatt, adding that it “really bothers me that people think that he constantly has to repeat statements he has said before.”

A number of Jewish journalists, including POLITICO Magazine contributor Julia Ioffe and New York Times reporter Jonathan Weisman, have experienced waves of anti-Semitic abuse after publishing articles on Trump and his family.

“As we know, social media is such that people can simply say whatever they want constantly,” Greenblatt said, before alluding to the anti-Semitic vitriol he faces online himself. “Even on my own Twitter feed, I’ve tried not to look at the comments, but there are plenty of times that I simply cannot resist, and the same people keep coming up with the same anti-Semitic stance and statements. And I just think that they have to understand that he has a campaign to run, he has an election to win, and he can’t keep going around saying ‘I denounce anti-Semitism.’ He said it clearly and emphatically on multiple times.”