Journalist Marisa Fox-Bevilacqua, writing for Israel’s left-wing Ha’aretz daily, called Ivanka Trump a “leggy glamazon, a ‘shiksa goddess’ trophy wife for the shy son of a disgraced macher” in a recent profile of her husband, Jared Kushner (emphasis added).
“Shiksa” is a typically derogatory Yiddish term for a non-Jewish woman. A song with that title features in the musical The Last Five Years, describing the anguish and excitement a Jewish man feels at dating a non-Jewish woman.
“Macher” is a Yiddish term for “big shot” — sometimes derogatory and sometimes laudatory. Ivanka Trump is president-elect Donald Trump’s daughter; the “macher” in question is Kushner’s father, Charles, who was sent to federal prison a decade ago in a lurid witness tampering scandal.
The “shiksa” insult is compounded in this case by the fact that it is against Jewish law to refer to a convert in derogatory terms, or to remind people of her origins. Ivanka Trump underwent an Orthodox Jewish conversion before marrying Kushner.
Fox-Bevilacqua does not indicate whether the description she provides — including the phrase “shiksa goddess,” which appears in quotation marks– are the words of the congregants at Kushner’s synagogue, or her own innovation.
Attempts to contact Fox-Bevilacqua via Twitter were unsuccessful. However, she did respond publicly (albeit obliquely) by disparaging Breitbart News, tweeting a false, defamatory and largely unoriginal column by the Washington Post‘s Ruth Marcus.
The rest of the Kushner profile is largely derogatory, one-sided and mean-spirited.
Much of the English-language coverage of the recent U.S. election provided by Ha’aretz and the Times of Israel has proceeded in the same vein, with bitter and often wildly inaccurate articles by agenda-driven journalists posing as neutral observers.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. His new book, See No Evil: 19 Hard Truths the Left Can’t Handle, is available from Regnery through Amazon. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.