The intellectual incoherence of Jared Kushner, and what it teaches us about Jewish Trump supporters

On July 6, 2016 Jared Kushner took to the pages of his New York Observer, determined to prove once and for all that his father-in-law was neither an anti-Semite nor a racist. It had been one day since Donald Trump had sought to demonstrate that his opponent was “corrupt” by tweeting an image of her face beside a Star of David and wads of American currency. A month earlier, he had said that Mexican parentage made a judge unfit to rule on a Trump-related lawsuit.

Facing an uphill battle, Kushner did what any Trump acolyte would do with no evidence to support a claim: talked about something else. In the op-ed, Kushner told the harrowing story of his grandmother’s escape from Poland, where her brother and sister had been murdered by the Third Reich. Kushner chose to publish this narrative during the fervor of the campaign, he wrote, to verify his credentials for distinguishing “between actual, dangerous intolerance versus these labels that get tossed around in an effort to score political points.”

Donald Trump could not conceivably be anti-Semitic, Kushner was suggesting, because his son-in-law’s grandparents had survived the Holocaust.

Of course, it’s a false dichotomy. Kushner was implying that Trump could not at once be an anti-Semite and the father-in-law of someone descended from Holocaust survivors. But the two are not intrinsically connected.

Kushner’s second fallacy is his claim of unqualified authority. Just as my grandfather’s experience as a uniform salesman does not give me the expertise to advise a potential uniform-buyer, Jared Kushner’s family history—painful, true, and affecting as it is—does not end the debate on Donald Trump’s history of racism.

Misleading information from the Trump inner circle isn’t remarkable. An army of logicians working overtime and weekends would miss half the fallacies peddled by Trump and his surrogates. But Kushner’s complicity in the rise of Trumpism is significant because it is one instance in broader phenomenon: the willful cognitive dissonance happening in right-wing American Jewish circles.

While over 70 percent of Jews voted against Trump in November, more than a small handful of major Jewish institutions and leaders have backed his policy agenda. On the morning of November 9, 2016, the Republican Jewish Coalition released a rhapsody to Trump, saying in a press release that the group “could not be happier” with the election results. Within the month, the Zionist Organization of America had invited Steve Bannon—Trump’s white nationalist senior advisor—to receive an honor at its annual gala.

December marked the Hanukkah party of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, held at the newly minted Trump Hotel in Washington. In the new year, Rabbi Marvin Hier, who leads the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the Museum of Tolerance, offered a prayer at the inauguration. And last week, World Jewish Congress president Ron Lauder said the White House statement on International Holocaust Remembrance Day “appropriately commemorates” the genocide, in spite of the administration’s deliberate decision to make no mention of Jews.

On a pragmatic level, these choices are self-defeating. For instance, the decision of a Jewish group to honor an influential anti-Semitic propagandist for his “pro-Israel” stance is like lighting a stick of dynamite in your home in the hope that it will keep you warm.

On an intellectual level, these choices are incoherent. Jewish support for Trump is the result of a one-dimensional reading of Jewish history and its contemporary implications.

The reading sounds like this: Jews, as an ethnic group, can only be kept safe from mass brutality if there is a strong Jewish state. A strong Jewish state is sturdiest when it is employing conservative policies and maintaining an occupation. Likud and the Israeli right are championed by Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu had a tenuous relationship with Barack Obama and has been propped up, almost unconditionally, by Republicans. The Republican standard bearer is now Trump.

This syllogism—the premises of which are rooted in unresolved trauma—holds that Donald Trump is our best bet at ethnic endurance.

There is morbid hypocrisy in using the survival of a long-persecuted group as the pretext for backing this president; Trump’s first week in office heralds the erosion of that very ethic.

In his eagerness to exploit his family’s oppression narrative to exonerate his father-in-law, Jared Kushner has both permitted and embraced Trump’s warped version of tokenism, in which the President’s proximity to a person who holds a marginalized identity serves as a panacea to any suspicions of ill will toward other people who carry that same identity. If Kushner continues to suggest that this, in itself, isn’t “actual, dangerous intolerance,” he is either severely misguided, or he is lying.

Kushner isn’t a flawless case study for understanding the motivations of Jewish support for Trump. It’s clear that he has other potent forces acting on him, like a familial relationship with the president, the proximity to power, and a desire to consolidate more of it. But the defense he has mounted highlights the lapses in reason that have led some American Jews to stand with the paranoid and vengeful agenda of this White House.

Jewish support for Trump isn’t just immoral—it is nonsensical. One must wonder whether Kushner and the heads of these other groups have the rational capacity to extrapolate and use the lessons of our past as warnings for someone else’s future, or our own.

Ami Fields-Meyer is a 2016-2017 Fellow in Public Affairs at the Coro New York Leadership Center.