The Kushner Clan’s Orthodox Infamy
Why Jared Kushner is so weird: his dad. “Mr. Kushner pled guilty, he admitted the crimes, so what am I supposed to do as a prosecutor?” the former N.J. governor, Chris Christie, said Tuesday. “If a guy hires a prostitute to seduce his brother-in-law, and videotapes it, and then sends the videotape to his sister in an attempt to intimidate her from testifying before a grand jury, do I really need any more justification than that?” The elder Kushner served 14 months in prison for tax evasion, witness tampering and illegal campaign contributions, and Christie said it was one of the worst he prosecuted.
“It’s one of the most loathsome, disgusting crimes that I prosecuted when I was U.S. attorney,” Christie told PBS’s “Firing Line With Margaret Hoover.” “And I was a U.S. attorney in New Jersey, Margaret — so we had some loathsome and disgusting crime going on there.”
Kushner senior is also Netenyahu’s best friend. The Israeli premier used to sleep in Jared’s room when he visited the States, when the Kushners would always host his visits. Jared’s Orthodox Judaic conditioning explains Kushner junior’s inbred authoritarianism, his unthinking loyalty and weekly visits to his “loathsome” convicted felon of a father while in jail, and his submission to Trump as the senior male authority and reigning patriarch in his new, White House situation. But it doesn’t explain the current Kushner patriarch, his dad, Charles Kushner, destroying his brother-in-law, his own sister, their marriage and his own family over money and control of the family business — or does it?
Is it one of those Cain and Abel things, where Cain slew Abel (in Genesis) because Abel’s burnt offering (of flesh, or meat) was found more pleasing in the eyes of the Lord than Cain’s own (of grain, or bread), and he was jealous? Is the Kushner’s story not, perhaps, the whole, entire patriarchal dance, played out in modern American terms — tawdry, nasty, destructive, annihilating in its competitiveness, and ineluctably dumb?
The Genesis tale is actually an example of patriarchal nomadic-pastoralist propaganda in that it’s a parable about the shift to the feminine-technological revolution of agriculture, from gathering, painting the preference for settled living as being corruptive and the founding the great cities, which is to say civilization, as being a move away from Yahweh, a storm, war, lightning, and mountain god of the herds, of herding, and of the “high places” — mountain pastures for grazing the flocks. With his grain offering — reaped from the proceeds of organized agriculture and from working the “base” earth of the settled plains — Cain was found inferior in the eyes of Yahweh, who was the father-god of the nomadic patriarchal herder tribes, the protector of the flocks. Cain, the grower of grain, is transformed into a murderous pariah, condemned to wander the Earth thereafter in eternal misery and woe, making the term, the ‘sons of Cain,’ a byword for corruption.
