A reporter said she penned an open letter to Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, in the hopes he would condemn a campaign tweet widely criticized as anti-Semitic.
The New York Observer’s Dana Schwartz sat down Wednesday with CNN’s Alisyn Camerota to explain why she addressed the issue to Kushner, whose publishing company owns the Observer. The letter was posted Tuesday on the Observer’s website.
The presumptive GOP presidential nominee set off a firestorm last weekend by tweeting a graphic of Hillary Clinton that featured a six-point star evoking the Star of David and a pile of cash with the words “most corrupt candidate ever.”
“It was a personal issue,” Schwartz, an entertainment writer, told CNN’s “New Day.” “I responded immediately because I saw it as an anti-Semitic issue.”
Schwartz has never met Kushner but said she hoped her letter would compel him as a Trump adviser to take action. Kushner is Jewish and is married to Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, who converted to Judaism.
“You went to Harvard, and hold two graduate degrees,” Schwartz wrote in her letter. “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.”
Responding to criticism, Kushner issued a statement calling his father-in-law “incredibly loving and a tolerant person,” adding that he has personally seen Trump embrace people of diverse backgrounds.
But Schwartz said Kushner’s response skirted the issue at hand.
“The issue isn’t whether Donald Trump as an individual is anti-Semitic,” Schwartz told Camerota. “The question is whether his supporters are and whether he’s encouraging that, and the answer is absolutely and unequivocally yes.”
After initially taking to Twitter to voice her concerns, Schwartz said she too faced a backlash, with many targeting her Judaism.
“I can’t imagine he could see the type of tweets I’m getting and think that’s the type of country we want to live in, and that’s what his father-in-law brings out in people.”
Neither Trump nor his campaign apologized for the tweet but deleted the original post and uploaded an edited graphic with a circle instead of the six-pointed star.
Commenting about the controversy on Twitter, Trump blamed what he called the “dishonest media” for misinterpreting the image.
“He’s blaming people like me for reading too much into it,” Schwartz said. “I feel so silly and really ashamed that we’re in an election where asking a candidate to disavow white supremacists is something we have to say.”