How Jared Kushner’s Making Shabbat Exciting Again — by Letting Trump Be Trump

Jake Tapper Image by courtesy of jake tapper

By Daniel J. Solomon February 6, 2017

Since Jared Kushner became the right hand man to the leader of the free world, folks have been puzzling over his Sabbath observance, when his phone’s off and he’s incommunicado.

Jake Tapper, CNN’s chief political correspondent, offered an appropriate analogy to explain the connection between Saturdays and the palace intrigue.

The nation hasn’t been this transfixed by the end of Sabbath since @matisyahu’s last album dropped

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— Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) February 5, 2017

Tapper hasn’t been coy in commenting on the new administration, criticizing Press Secretary Sean Spicer and White House chief strategist Steve Bannon for their hard line on the media.

Kushner, meanwhile, has been seen as a brake on the president’s more impulsive and radical tendencies, urging his father-in-law not to rollback gay rights protections and assuring elites that Trump will govern as a moderate.

But that hold seems to wane when Kushner and wife Ivanka Trump are out of reach of the telephone, with the president signing his ‘Muslim ban’ and haranguing the acting director of the National Park Service over his inauguration crowd while the couple were observing Shabbat.

Contact Daniel J. Solomon at [email protected] or on Twitter @DanielJSolomon

Daniel J. Solomon is the former Assistant to the Editor/News Writer at the Forward. Originally from Queens, he attended Harvard as an undergraduate, where he wrote his senior thesis on French-Jewish intellectual history. He is excited to have returned to New York after his time in Massachusetts. Daniel’s passions include folk music, cycling, and pointed argument.

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