Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Fast Forward

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

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.

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

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse..

Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.