Donald Trump’s Star of David controversy has now come home to roost.
His Saturday tweet of an image of Hillary Clinton superimposed on a pile of $100 bills along with the words “Most Corrupt Candidate Ever!” emblazoned on a Star of David was quickly denounced by critics who called it anti-Semitic. Although the presumptive Republican presidential nominee quickly deleted the tweet and replaced it with one that used a circle in place of the star, the damage was done.
“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,” Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO and national director of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), said in a statement early Tuesday.
Classic @realDonaldTrump. First appease anti-Semitic white supremacists, then pretend it never happened #StarOfDavid pic.twitter.com/AHX2JDxu9J
— Michael Skolnik (@MichaelSkolnik) July 2, 2016
Now, however, the criticism is cutting closer. Donald Trump’s daughter Ivanka is married to New York Observer owner Jared Kushner, who is Jewish, and she has converted to Judaism.
Tuesday afternoon, an entertainment writer at the Observer named Dana Schwartz published an article on the publication’s site titled, “An Open Letter to Jared Kushner, From One of Your Jewish Employees,” in which she slams him for not standing up to his father-in-law.
After posting several violently anti-Semitic replies she received after tweeting her disgust at Trump’s Star of David image, and noting that the hashtag Trump used—#AmericaFirst—bears an eerie similarity to the America First Committee that pushed against against U.S. intervention during World War II, Schwartz lit into Kushner.
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.
Schwartz continued:
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.
Late Tuesday night, Jared Kushner replied. “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,” he said in a statement. “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.”
For their part, Donald Trump and his social media manager, Dan Scavino, have both denied that there was anything anti-Semitic about the original tweet—or that it was even a Star of David.
Dishonest media is trying their absolute best to depict a star in a tweet as the Star of David rather than a Sheriff's Star, or plain star!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 4, 2016
For the MSM to suggest that I am antisemite is AWFUL. I proudly celebrate holidays w/ my wife's amazing Jewish family for the past 16 years.
— Dan Scavino Jr.🇺🇸🦅 (@DanScavino) July 5, 2016
Fortune has reached out to Jared Kushner and the Donald Trump campaign and will update this story if they respond.
