Anne Helen Petersen, Buzzfeed’s senior culture writer, accused President Donald Trump’s oldest daughter Ivanka of downplaying her Jewish faith so she can “remain as publicly palatable as possible.”
The piece, in which the author the claims to “analyze” her social media accounts, is a lengthy attack on Ivanka and President Trump. It concludes, “Together, they compose a particularly 21st-century propaganda aesthetic — one that attempts to blind us to the discrimination and destruction committed by her father and performed in the name of rebuilding America.”
BuzzFeed employees at the company’s headquarters in New York (Reuters Pictures)
Complaining that both Trumps have not been vocal enough in their condemnation of a rash of anti-Semitic bomb threats to Jewish community centers and vandalism of Jewish cemeteries, Peterson write of how Americans would be too uneducated to understand that “#JCC” would mean Jewish Community Centers in Ivanka’s tweet on the subject.
She writes, “There was no invocation of her own identity as a Jew, and in fact, no invocation of Jewishness at all — save the hashtag, #JCC, whose meaning, for most, would remain opaque.”
Not addressed in the piece was the near-silence from the mainstream media and the White House about more than 7000 anti-Semitic attacks during the tenure of Barack Obama.
Then Peterson speculates Ivanka, who converted to orthodox Judaism when she married her husband Jared Kushner in 2009, might be “ashamed” of her faith. “Which isn’t to suggest that Ivanka is ashamed, per se, of being Jewish; rather, she understands that to remain as publicly palatable as possible, Jewishness cannot be central to her public identity.”
The author does not explain why or how being Jewish would make Ivanka “unpalatable,” rather she wonders at the end: “Will historians of the future look to Ivanka’s digital footprint and excuse her…or look to her willful blindness and condemn her?”
Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact [email protected].