A Jewish employee of a newspaper owned by Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law, has written an open letter to Kushner accusing him of “tacit approval” for a culture of antisemitic hatred surrounding Trump, and challenging Kushner to do something to break it up.

Dana Schwartz, an entertainment writer at the Observer, wrote “An Open Letter to Jared Kushner, From One of Your Jewish Employees” on Tuesday. The Observer is a New York City-based paper that Kushner, the billionaire scion of a real estate family, bought in 2006.

Schwartz writes that she became a target of antisemitic hate speech after she took issue with a Trump tweet posted Saturday that included an image that Paul Ryan, the House speaker, on Tuesday called “antisemitic”. Schwartz challenges Kushner as a fellow Jewish member of the media to face what is happening in the barely concealed underbelly of his father-in-law’s campaign.

“I’m asking you, not as a ‘gotcha’ journalist or as a liberal but as a human being: how do you allow this?” writes Schwartz:

Because, Mr Kushner, you are allowing this ... 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.

Trump’s eldest daughter, Ivanka Trump, converted to Judaism to marry Kushner in 2009. Kushner has played an increasingly high-profile role in Trump’s campaign, participating at a high level in the decision last month to fire the former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, among other decisions.



Kushner responded to the letter in a statement late Tuesday. “My father-in-law is an incredibly loving and tolerant person who has embraced my family and our Judaism since I began dating my wife,” the statement said. “I know that Donald does not at all subscribe to any racist or anti-semitic thinking. I have personally seen him embrace people of all racial and religious backgrounds. The suggestion that he may be intolerant is not reflective of the Donald Trump I know.”

The controversy began when Trump tweeted an image of Clinton with a rain of cash behind her and the words “most corrupt candidate ever” inside a six-pointed star. A short time later, the tweet was deleted and reposted with a circle replacing the star.

Trump changed his Star of David to a circle. I took a screenshot of the original. pic.twitter.com/TkBxTaAORc — Sarah Kendzior (@sarahkendzior) July 2, 2016

Though the original image was deleted, Trump did not apologize for it, or admit that it was derogatory, instead claiming that the star was a “sheriff’s star, or plain star”.

The Trump campaign’s social media director, Dan Scavino, also tried his hand at cleaning up the mess, saying that he had lifted the image from an online source but it wasn’t hate speech and he would never offend anyone. (The image in Trump’s original tweet was traced by Mic to a white supremacist message board.)

The explanations, wrote Schwartz in her public letter, were “inane” and “condescending”.

“Look at that image and tell me, honestly, that you just saw a ‘Sheriff’s star,’” writes Schwartz. “I didn’t see a sheriff star, Mr. Kushner, and I’m a smart person. After all, I work for your paper.”



She continued:

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.

In the letter, Schwartz shares screen grabs of antisemitic hate speech that confronted her after she objected to the image online. They referred to ovens, invited Schwartz to kill herself, and used images of Anne Frank and other Jewish caricatures.

Schwartz notes that Trump’s campaign has a way of attracting “hateful individuals”, and challenges Kushner to imagine his own family as the target: