(JTA) — In a widely talked about Vanity Fair essay published Tuesday, journalist Lysandra Ohrstrom details her long and close friendship with Ivanka Trump — and it’s far from flattering. She claims Trump was “shamelessly vain” and has “laid waste to the image she worked so hard to build,” what Ohrstrom calls her “more polished and intellectual offshoot of the Trump brand.”
A couple of Jewish-themed claims in the essay are sure to raise eyebrows, too.
First, Ohrstrom writes about what she saw as Donald Trump’s envy of the “Waspy,” older and more established country clubs that his Mar-a-Lago club competes with in Palm Beach, Florida. Those clubs were historically more exclusive, especially of Jews and other minorities, while Trump’s clubs have been known to be more open. Trump is jealous of the exclusivity, Ohrstrom implies.
Ohrstrom remembers a time that Donald Trump boasted about the wealth of his club members in front of them — clearly many of them were Jewish.
“They laughed when he addressed them as the richest Jews in the world, complimented the array of luxury sports cars in the parking lot, and gleefully recounted the fight he was waging against the Waspy club across the street, which he dismissed as a dump,” she wrote.
Later in the essay Ohrstrom, who worked in Lebanon, says she is pro-Palestinian and that she wears a necklace with her name spelled in Arabic. Ivanka Trump “grew increasingly irritated by it,” Ohrstrom wrote.
Sometimes, she would randomly say, “I hate that thing.” Then one night in the middle of dinner, she glanced at the necklace and said, “How does your Jewish boyfriend feel when you are having sex and that necklace hits him the face? How can you wear that thing? It just screams, ‘terrorist.’”
Ohrstrom said that Ivanka’s aversion to the necklace started shortly after she began dating Jared Kushner, her future husband, who is Orthodox Jewish. Ivanka would convert to Judaism before marrying him.
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