5 Things We Just Learned About Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner
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By Thea Glassman August 23, 2016
If Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner weren’t famous, they’d probably just be that annoyingly perfect couple you hate-stalk on Instagram. But with Republican nominee Donald Trump feeding the headlines day after day, they’ve become the Jewish power couple par excellence.
And that means juicy new tidbits about their relationship drop regularly. Here’s a collection of new ones.
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1) Their chemistry started from day one.
The two were introduced by a real estate broker who thought the two could do business together. “They had an instantaneous crush,” a friend of the couple told The New Yorker.
2) They once broke up over religion.
Kushner’s mother Seryl vocalized her concern that Trump wasn’t Jewish and Kushner himself was unsure about dating outside his faith. The couple broke up in 2008 and were reunited after Trump agreed to convert Judaism.
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3) Trump’s conversion process was “rigorous.”
According to Esquire, Charles Kushner, Jared’s father, wanted to make sure that Trump’s conversion process was thorough. “This wasn’t like, ‘Talk to a rabbi, read a couple of paragraphs,’ ” Bob Sommer, a former executive at the Observer, said. “It was hard and difficult, and it was on Charlie’s terms.”
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4) Kushner’s father gave a heartfelt speech at the wedding.
Once she had passed the test, Charles Kushner gave a tearful speech at the couple’s wedding — the gist of which, according to a guest, was: “Look, everyone thinks she’s great, but being Jewish is just unbelievably important to us, and she’s not Jewish. It’s a problem for me, a genuine problem. Then I watched and got to see she’s in love with my son and it wasn’t what I thought in the beginning. I feel right about it.”
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5) Donald Trump — not so much.
Esquire reports that a source from the wedding deemed Trump’s speech “the most pathetic, lame, embarrassing speech I’ve heard in a long time.”
Thea Glassman is the Forward’s multimedia fellow. Contact her at glassman@forward.com or on Twitter, @theakglassman
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