Photo: AP

Yesterday Jared Kushner penned a loving tribute to his father-in-law, Donald Trump, drawing on his own Jewish heritage and family history with the Holocaust to bolster the argument that Trump is not anti-Semitic. In response, Kushner’s family advanced the argument that he’s a real idiot.

“I am the grandson of Holocaust survivors,” Kushner wrote in the op-ed, published yesterday in the newspaper he owns, the New York Observor. His grandparents, he wrote, escaped from the occupied Belarus ghetto Novogroduk in the fall of 1943 and hid out in the woods, where they lived off the land for most of the winter.

On the night before Rosh Hashana 1943, the 250 Jews who remained of the town’s 20,000 plotted an escape through a tunnel they had painstakingly dug beneath the fence. The searchlights were disabled and the Jews removed nails from the metal roof so that it would rattle in the wind and hopefully mask the sounds of the escaping prisoners.

My grandmother and her sister didn’t want to leave their father behind. They went to the back of the line to be near him. When the first Jews emerged from the tunnel, the Nazis were waiting for them and began shooting. My grandmother’s brother Chanon, for whom my father is named, was killed along with about 50 others. My grandmother made it to the woods, where she joined the Bielski Brigade of partisan resistance fighters. There she met my grandfather, who had escaped from a labor camp called Voritz. He had lived in a hole in the woods—a literal hole that he had dug—for three years, foraging for food, staying out of sight and sleeping in that hole for the duration of the brutal Russian winter.

He shared this story, Kushner wrote, because he found it important “that people understand where I’m coming from when I report that I know the difference between actual, dangerous intolerance versus these labels that get tossed around in an effort to score political points.”

So when he says Trump isn’t a racist, you have to believe him, because he is related to people who know from racists.

But Politico reports at least two family members—Marc Kushner and Jacob Schulder, both cousins—say it’s a shanda, which is Yiddish for “My cousin is a moron.”

“I have a different take­away from my Grandparents’ experience in the war,” Kushner wrote on Facebook Thursday. “It is our responsibility as the next generation to speak up against hate. [Sic] Anti­semitism or otherwise.”

But the real response came from Schulder, who wrote that his grandfather would have done a better job running the Trump campaign from the forest.

“When an out of touch with reality nominee hires an out of touch with reality campaign manager, who is also a son­-in-­law, you get the BS Jared wrote. I don’t think Trump is an anti­Semite; I think he’s a lying idiot (among other things) with little to no experiences outside his teetering fiefdom of failed development projects, divorces, bankrupted sports leagues, fraudulent “Universities” and golf courses (and the list keeps going),” Schulder wrote on Facebook, emphasis ours. “The very first thing a responsible campaign manager should do, I’d think, and I mean the very first thing, would be to take away his father-­in­-law’s Twitter account. Even Joseph Kushner would’ve had the street smarts to figure that one out while living on boiled potatoes in the forest.”

And they should know...