Sarah Huckabee Sanders Called Colleague a "Foul-Mouthed Jew"
In her new memoir, former White House Press Secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, referred to a Jewish White House staffer as a “liberal, aggressive, foul-mouthed Jew.”
The staffer, Josh Raffel, served as a spokesperson for Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, and worked in the White House communications department in 2017 and 2018. Sanders claimed the two later became friends, and presented her antisemitic characterization as a joke. Joke or not, Sanders’ depiction of Raffel relies on antisemitic tropes of Jewish men as crude and perverted — and these tropes can fuel further antisemitic sentiment and even violence against Jews.
That this type of humor was welcome in the Trump White House speaks volumes about the degree to which the Trump Administration and the Republican Party have fully embraced antisemitism — from Trump’s own references to Jews as “disloyal” and “brutal killers,” to Stephen Miller’s record of sharing Nazi propaganda, to the Republican Party’s inclusion of antisemitic conspiracy theorists like Marjorie Taylor Greene in Georgia, and Laura Loomer in Florida.
Sanders’ phrase references another antisemitic trope: the “liberal Jew,” which was a staple of McCarthy-era antisemitism. This trope has emerged once more in the Trump era: Democratic Jews were the explicit target of Trump’s infamous “disloyal” comment; Sanders’ father, former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, falsely claimed in 2016 that “liberal Jewish Northwestern students trying to smear Trump and his supporters” were responsible for antisemitic and Islamophobic vandalism on campus; Republican politician and former Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio — who tortured immigrants he imprisoned, and was pardoned by Trump — referenced “radicals of the Jewish left” in a September 2, 2020 press release announcing his new initiative, America’s Sheriff.
As journalist Marcy Oster pointed out in a JTA article covering the news about Sanders’ memoir, the former press secretary avoided addressing questions about Trump’s incendiary accusation that “Democrats hate Jews.”