This article refers to an article which has since been changed, following formal complaints to the Board of Varsity Publications Ltd. You can find the amended version here.

On Friday a profile on Jared Kushner appeared in Varsity. It correctly identifies Kushner as a heinous person. He is one of Trump’s key advisors, his support for settlements in the West Bank is at odds with 50 years of US policy and the nepotism that elevated him to his current position is an embarrassment to American democracy.

That was a summary of everything wrong with Kushner without mentioning the fact that he is Jewish. The article could easily have done the same thing; even better, it could have avoided century-old anti-Semitic tropes. It could, but it did not.

It began with the title, in which Kushner was described as “the most powerful man you’ve never heard of”. [NB. The headline now reads: “Trump should not be taking advice from Jared Kushner”.] Anybody who’s followed American politics this year knows who Jared Kushner is. Anyone else probably hasn’t heard of Jeff Sessions, the KKK sympathiser currently in charge of the Department of Justice, or Steve Bannon, the neo-fascist propagandist overseeing Trump’s strategy, or Rex Tillerson. All wield far more power than Kushner, so where does this language come from? It’s the ancient motif of the Jew exerting power undetected. It also excuses Bannon, Sessions and other white supremacists currently operating the White House.

The article went on to list Kushner’s “conflicts of interest – nepotism, financial matters and religion”. The notion that anybody’s religion creates a conflict of interest when they serve their country is a direct attack on that religion. Kushner’s support for settlements is a conflict of interest, but to say the same about his Judaism depicts Jews as agents of a foreign power (once the Jewish God, later a Jewish conspiracy, and now the Jewish state). This style is popular in the UK: in 2011 Paul Flynn MP argued against the appointment of a Jewish ambassador to Israel “to avoid the accusation that they have gone native”.

Next, we were told that “through marrying Ivanka ... [Kushner] won a seat at the right hand of the President”. This is a broader racist theme, and it also carries misogyny. Quickly dismissing the possibility that two horrifyingly right-wing people could fall in love, the writer speculates that Kushner’s motive was political ascent. As in most attacks on interracial and interreligious marriage, common from apartheid South Africa to Jim Crow America, the image is that of the unworthy under-race preying on the innocent, white daughter. Ivanka’s agency is ignored, and the Trump family is the victim of a non-white plot.

After a thorough look at the nepotism in Kushner’s career, the writer dropped the biggest anti-Semitic myth of them all: Jewish money buying Jewish power. “Kushner will not draw a salary”. Although his appointment has not yet been challenged, precedent suggests that the loophole he is using has to do with the status of the White House, and has nothing to do with his salary. Not so according to this alternative reality in which, by falling back on his (Jewish) money, Kushner can circumvent anti-nepotism laws and access the President.

When we were finally told Kushner’s religion – “an Orthodox Jew with strong ties to Israel” – it is relevant because he supports settlements. Never mind that a majority of American Jews oppose settlements and support a State of Palestine; Kushner’s Jewishness is central to his bad Middle Eastern politics.

Mike Pence and Mike Huckabee, who have done far more to support settlements than Kushner, are Christian – arguably Christian fundamentalists. But Kushner also supports settlements, and that’s because he is Jewish.

We, as Jews, should not have to educate others on how not to oppress. By chance, I currently have the emotional energy to do so. But when I see the sentence “Kushner’s social network has already contaminated the White House”, I can’t bring myself to put a paragraph together. Nobody should ever entertain the thought of describing anybody with the word “contaminate”, and none of the substance of this sentence relies on an image used extensively by the Nazis and countless other anti-Semites. The implication – that Kushner infects American politics like a disease (and, disturbingly, that somehow the White House would be clean without him) – is clear enough, but in this case the word itself is enough to ruin my day.

Your conspiracy theory is anti-Semitic

Here’s the truth that any article about the Jews and Trump should stress: American Jews voted against Trump in larger numbers than any other religious group large enough to appear in Pew polling, including “unaffiliated” and “other faiths”. Trump is anti-Semitic; he has published anti-Semitic tweets, made anti-Semitic statements, appointed anti-Semites as his advisors, including to the National Security Council, and engaged in Holocaust denial on Holocaust Memorial Day. Since his election, anti-Semitic attacks have mushroomed, Jewish community centres have faced bomb threats and Nazis are being broadcast on TV and physically protected.

Some of the scariest characters in recent political history currently sit in the White House, and we should be resisting them at every opportunity. But resisting Kellyanne Conway with misogyny, resisting Ben Carson with racism or resisting Jared Kushner with antisemitism is not resistance; it feeds the machinery of hatred that Trump currently controls. Stop doing it.

Cambridge Jewish Society gave the following statement: “Cambridge Jewish Society express concern about what we perceive to be anti-Semitic rhetoric that was used in the Jared Kushner article, and our external officer is in talks with the editor to see how this issue can be resolved, and how this article came to be published”