‘Jews are the best tenants’
Trump Village on Coney Island was still an empty plot of sand when Sharon Glaser’s family signed up for an apartment on Fred Trump’s waiting list.The Glasers were shown a model of what their unit would look like, and offered a list of planned amenities. “We had to put money down,” said Glaser, who moved into the property in 1964 and still lives there to this day. “It was mainly Jewish when we first moved in, but now it’s very mixed.”The process for securing an apartment wasn’t hard for her Jewish family. “We met the requirements,” she said.Fred Trump, founder of Trump Management and father and mentor to Donald, was personally involved at this stage of development. In interviews, residents said they would see him around often and that he maintained a good reputation in the community.But at this point in his life, Fred, born of German immigrants, was publicly peddling a fabricated Swedish past. As has now been acknowledged by the Trump family, he was hiding his German heritage out of fear that it would deter critical Jewish contacts in the New York real estate world, as well as potential Jewish tenants interested in his properties.And Jewish tenants were his preference.‘I figured out how to use Jews to my advantage’
The Jerusalem Post first reported on Donald Trump’s presidential ambitions in 1999, when he floated himself as a potential candidate for the Reform Party of Ross Perot, Pat Buchanan and Ralph Nader.By that time he was publicly known as a brash New York builder, a casino mogul and a twice-divorced tabloid magnet.Trump kept loyalists around him throughout this period, when he carefully reconstructed the image of his father’s company based on his own personal brand as a shrewd deal maker.“He surrounds himself oddly enough with Jewish personnel, both then and now: his real estate lawyer is Jewish, his house counsel is Jewish, his controller is Jewish, his chief of staff, chief financial officer, executive vice president, his first executive vice president – I was his litigator for 15 years,” Jay Goldberg, who worked for Trump from 1990 to 2005, said in an interview.Goldberg navigated Trump through both of his divorces in the 1990s with Ivana Zelníková and Marla Maples. Aware of Fred’s past, Goldberg warned against holding deeds of the father against the son: “No attainder of treason shall work corruption of blood,” he said, quoting the Constitution.“When we talk about the Jewish community and I really think about it, I can’t think of one Christian person on his senior staff,” said Goldberg, who will vote for Trump in November. “It’s amazing to me. It’s almost prejudice in favor of Jewish people.”During their divorce proceedings, Ivana reportedly told her friend that Trump would jokingly “Heil Hitler” with his cousin – an allusion to their hushed German heritage – and that he kept a book of Adolf Hitler’s most successful propaganda speeches, titled My New Order, on his bedside. When a Vanity Fair reporter asked Trump to explain this in 1990, he referenced the wrong book. “It was my friend Marty Davis from Paramount who gave me a copy of Mein Kampf, and he’s a Jew,” Trump asserted. The late Hollywood executive was not Jewish.Several authors made hay of Trump’s star appeal, including John O’Donnell, who wrote a book titled Trumped! that Donald said was generally accurate. One section of the book depicts him openly discriminating against people on the basis of their race, ethnicity and religion.“I’ve got black accountants at Trump Castle and at Trump Plaza. Black guys counting my money,” Trump said, according to the 1991 biography. “I hate it. The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day.” Trump later denied making that comment.Only one author spent extensive time with Trump, however, and that was Tony Schwartz, who embedded himself in Trump’s life for 18 months as ghostwriter of The Art of the Deal.Schwartz would often hear Trump talk about Jews – a group that he quintessentially characterized as shrewd accountants and lawyers, the writer said.“The way I would describe his perception of Jews is that he thinks of them in very simple and very stereotypical terms,” Schwartz said in an interview. “My feeling was, ‘I figured out how to use Jews to my advantage.’”Asked whether he ever thought Trump defined him by his affiliation with a group, Schwartz said he felt at the time that Trump thought of him as a “smart hustler Jew” who would probably write a solid book.“It’s preposterous to think that Donald Trump has a deep personal understanding of or affinity with the Jewish community in the fullest sense of what that means,” Schwartz said. “And the reason I say that is that ‘affinity’ or ‘connection’ or ‘empathy’ or ‘deep understanding’ are not part of his vocabulary.”Trump raised eyebrows with a Twitter message posted in April of 2013 which suggested that “outing” Daily Show host Jon Stewart as Jewish would indicate his level of intelligence.“I promise you that I’m much smarter than Jonathan Leibowitz – I mean Jon Stewart, who, by the way, is totally overrated,” Trump tweeted at the time.‘Trump knows where his roots are’
The closest link Donald has to the Jewish community is not his staff, his business partners or his tenants, but his daughter, Ivanka, who converted to Judaism after three years of study in 2009.Shortly after her engagement to Jared Kushner was announced that year, a friend of the family for over 20 years caught both Donald and Ivanka for a private moment on the sidelines of an important business meeting in Chicago.Congratulations were offered; and knowing the Kushner family as Modern Orthodox, he asked her: Are you going to convert?“He didn’t make a grimace in his face or raise his eyebrows or anything,” said Herb Kolben, who later attended their wedding with a “million-dollar” huppa. “Donald told me he was entirely supportive.”Jared and Ivanka declined requests to be interviewed for this article, as did her conversion rabbi, Haskel Lookstein, who said the Trump experience with Judaism was “a private matter for the family.” But the candidate’s top two advisers on Israel and the Jewish world, David Friedman and Jason Greenblatt, both sat down with The Post to discuss what they described as Trump’s heartfelt, consistent and demonstrable commitment to the community.“I don’t know where Jewish culture and New York culture begin and end,” said Friedman, who described a candidate with deep New York values. “There’s a lot of overlap there. And there’s a lot of that going on at the Trump Organization – fast talkers, quick thinkers, self-starters, motivated people.”Friedman’s support for Trump is personal. Donald’s friend and lawyer for fifteen years, he took a genuine liking to his client roughly two years into their relationship, when Friedman’s father died.In the middle of a blizzard, a ways outside the city, Friedman was sitting shiva when Trump suddenly showed up. Friedman was stunned. Trump was famous, and busy, and didn’t owe him anything.“He came by, spent about an hour with me,” Friedman said. “We talked about my father and talked about his father – about how much of an influence his father had over him. And you know, there was nobody around. He wasn’t trying to prove anything to anybody.”‘Affirmative prejudice’
Trump has made a handful of appeals to the Jewish community since announcing his presidential run, but most of them have resulted in one controversy or another.“I’m a negotiator like you folks,” Trump said in a speech to the Republican Jewish Coalition in December. Campaign aides said the speech was geared toward business executives (it was not). “Is there anybody that doesn’t renegotiate deals in this room? This room negotiates them – perhaps more than any other room I’ve ever spoken in.”At a group interview with Jewish reporters four months later, Trump looked around his conference table, saw several “Orthodox faces,” and “summoned some Orthodox Jews of his own to the room,” JTA reported at the time. “I’ve had many, many friends over the years Orthodox, in fact people that work for me,” Trump said. Jared and Ivanka sent their regards.Friedman doesn’t see anything wrong here.“If he’s guilty of anything, it’s of observing that Jews have been successful and they’re smart, and they’re engaging – you know?” Friedman said. “Okay, guilty.”But to cast Jews in positive Trumpian terms – smart, shrewd, deal maker – still amounts to degradation equivalent to the sexist act of calling a woman a 10, said Maurice Samuels, director of Yale University’s Program for the Study of Antisemitism.“Affirmative prejudice is a good term, and I prefer it to philosemitism,” said Samuels in an interview. “As soon as you begin viewing Jews as a group, either positively or negatively, you’re veering into very problematic territory. It’s a process of ‘othering’ and separating that usually doesn’t end well for Jews.”The impression that Trump is peddling bigotry vexes his most loyal Jewish friends, many of whom go back with him several decades. Those deeply appreciative of his tolerance for their religious practices in the workplace see him either taking a low road to score votes, or simply not caring enough to take a stand– choosing instead a path that serves his own interests, like an old political hand.“I think it’s really sad, and disturbing, that he has so many Jews around him,” Schwartz said. “I don’t think it’s good for Jews, because I believe the people he has around him are probably quite smart, and they know who Trump is. Every one of them knows who Trump is. They’ve made some kind of pact with the devil – and I should know because I did this myself – that now threatens the future of civilization.”Several current and former Trump employees described a man more respectful and understanding of their religiosity than their own families – “pray for me,” Trump would say, entering important negotiations late on Friday nights without critical members of his senior staff. Others portrayed a New Yorker at heart who understands that even Jewish humor includes some off-color, ‘All in the Family’-style jokes from time to time.Many expressed admiration, and some will vote for him in November. But virtually everyone identified a pattern that strikes at the core of his sensational campaign for president.In subtle stereotypes of Jews that have long rallied their most impassioned enemies, Trump may see winning virtues: A special group worthy of his praise that has acquired whatever it is he defines as success, paying him forward and the rent on time.And what greater compliment can Mr. Trump give to a minority than that?“Part of the problem with Donald Trump is that he seems to stereotype different groups – Muslims, Hispanics, blacks and Jews,” Sarna concluded. “He seems not even to understand that in the era in which we live, that’s precisely what we’re trying to move away from: Group stereotypes and definitions.”Americans go to the polls on November 8.“I think one has to ask oneself,” Sarna said, “if they are prepared to vote for president someone who judges individuals based on their group.”Josh Solomon in New York and Elaine Moshe in Jerusalem contributed to this report.