Jared grew up a few houses behind me in Livingston New Jersey, a predominantly Jewish and Italian suburb about 20 miles from NYC. His house was at the top of the Hill in a new development where all the really big houses were built. I played around in all those houses as they were built including his. I met Jared when he was a toddler. My brother and I were exploring his house when it was being built and his father Charlie caught us in the house. We were scared for getting busted but his dad was super friendly though (what kids didn’t want to play around in new houses) and when I would see them periodically out on the street over the next few years Charlie would literally invite us in for milk and cookies with Jared. The Kushners were really nice — as long as you weren’t doing business with them.
To understand Jared’s behavior you need to understand the attitudes in Upper middle class Jewish Livingston New Jersey. I’m Jewish, and I was lucky in that my dad ran Safaris in Africa and tours of Egypt, Jorden and Israel — I travelled a lot overseas and consequently wasn’t as severely infected with the wealthy Jewish meme’s of the NYC area which are the following:
We were chosen by God, therefore we are above everybody else, we have a destiny and thus the ends justify the means — we must show our worth, and money and power are very easy to measure and show off (vs something like doing social good for non Jews) . And they WORSHIP this god without realizing it. When this is hammered into you from the time you were born those memes get wired into your lower brain functions, a part of the brain that has almost no elasticity after your childhood.
This attitude is in stark contrast to the more “true” view of what it means to be chosen which is exactly the opposite, but something that many American Jews unfortunately learn completely BACKWARDS. WE chose to serve god, and with that comes a responsibility to be a good citizen, a good leader and set at an example for those who don’t believe in god (this philosophy goes back thousands of years before Christianity and Islam when the world was mostly uneducated barbarians).
Whether you believe in god is irrelevant. Replace “god” with common decency and the desire to have a society that is in harmony with itself, the Earth, and evolution of both biology and memes. These two different attitudes are like two completely different religions that have the same name. And any religion is not about god, it’s about your value system, and these values systems and the stories that come with them drive everything, including Jared and DT’s behavior.
