This F*cking Guy: Jared Kushner

**Erin Ryan** (0:00)
Welcome to another episode of This Fucking Guy, the show where we spotlight one fucking guy making America worse and explain why they suck. I'm Erin Ryan, host of Crooked Media's Hysteria podcast.

**Alyssa Mastromonaco** (0:10)
And I'm Alyssa Mastromonaco, the other host of Crooked Media's Hysteria podcast.

**Erin Ryan** (0:14)
Alyssa, have you ever wondered what would happen if a haunted doll were put in charge of the Middle Eastern peace process?

**Alyssa Mastromonaco** (0:20)
No, I can't say that I have.

**Erin Ryan** (0:22)
Well, wonder no more.

**Alyssa Mastromonaco** (0:24)
I literally haven't been wondering.

**Erin Ryan** (0:26)
Well, the answer is this episode's subject, Jared Kushner. In order to get the full Jared, we need to go back a bit further in his family history than we normally do with fucking guys to two Jewish kids living in Eastern Poland during World War II named Josel Berkowitz and Ray Kushner.

**Alyssa Mastromonaco** (0:42)
Eastern Poland was a bad place to be during World War II for pretty much everybody, but especially for Jewish people.

**Erin Ryan** (0:48)
Ray Kushner and her family escaped the Nazis by hand-digging tunnels from their occupied village into the woods where there was a larger group of Jews living in holes to evade detection.
One of the others was a young man named Josel Berkowitz. Ray and Josel were married and Josel took his wife's last name because she came from a higher status family than he did.

**Alyssa Mastromonaco** (1:06)
How very modern.

**Erin Ryan** (1:08)
Yes.
Jared Kushner's grandpa, the original feminist. After Soviet troops liberated their village, Ray and Josel lived in a refugee camp while they waited to find out if any countries would let them in.

**Alyssa Mastromonaco** (1:18)
Writing for ProPublica, Alan Sloan dug up an interesting excerpt from an interview Ray Kushner gave in 1982, where she recalled how miserable the ordeal was for her family. Quote, the day after we got married in Budapest, Hungary, we smuggled ourselves over the border into Italy, Ray Kushner said. This was our honeymoon. In Italy, we sat in a displaced person's camp. It was like being in the ghetto again. Nobody wanted to take us in. So for three and a half years, we waited until we finally got a visa to come to the United States.

**Erin Ryan** (1:48)
Yeah, the Kushners were ultimately able to leave the camp after Josel, who had by then changed his name to Joshua, fudged his immigration forms a bit, and claimed that his father was already living in the US. It was actually his father-in-law.

**Alyssa Mastromonaco** (2:00)
Can't be grudge people doing what they need in order to survive. But imagine how willfully unsympathetic Jared Kushner would have to be to fail to see the connection between the ways his own family was harmed by restrictive immigration policies and the ways that the Trump Administration is doing the same thing to families now.

**Erin Ryan** (2:16)
Yeah, what the Kushners did to get into this country would be by MAGA standards, grounds for incarceration at a migrant detention center.
So, the Kushners moved to the US and settled in New Jersey. They had three kids, Murray, Esther, and Charles. Joseph got into real estate and became part of what's known as the Holocaust Builders, European Jews who settled in the same part of Jersey around the same time and worked in the same business. The Holocaust Builders were typically people who kept their heads down and their minds on their businesses and their families. They weren't flashy or fame seeking and they certainly didn't want to draw too much attention by getting mixed up in politics.

**Alyssa Mastromonaco** (2:51)
But Charles Kushner was not like that. He was flashy, pushy and ambitious and was seen as gauche by others in their small community. In other words, he was kind of a dick.

**Erin Ryan** (3:01)
Charles Kushner wasn't ha ha, put this character on a reality show trashy. He was throw him in the Basura trashy for reasons we'll get to in a minute. Charles and his wife, Sarah had four children, Dara, Nicole, Joseph and today's fucking guy, Jared Corey Kushner, born on January 10th, 1981

**Alyssa Mastromonaco** (3:19)
Jared Corey, a name meant to be airbrushed on a t-shirt on the Wildwood Boardwalk.

**Erin Ryan** (3:25)
Yep, that name comes with a Trans Am and a Valtrex prescription. Jared was the older of the two Kushner boys and his father's favorite. According to Vicki Ward's book Kushner, Inc., Charles Kushner thought of himself as a kind of Joseph Kennedy figure and thought that Jared would make a great JFK.
I think of Charles Kushner more like the George Bluth and Jared more like the Buster.