Mohammed bin Zayed

For most Jewish Americans, Jared Kushner is the son-in-law and counselor of a president they didn’t vote for in 2016. He prays with a punctiliousness they romanticize but prefer not to emulate. Jared’s grandparents learned about history the hard way: they survived the Holocaust and immigrated with no money and little English. The typical Jewish American grandparents are boomers who vote Democratic all the way down the card. They believe America is different for the Jews, even if they were raised to believe that difference was un-American and bad for their careers. And here comes Jared, a frum Jew who married the boss’s blonde daughter. It could be a romance from Washington Irving’s Tales of the Alhambra. Less romantically, it is a tale from history.

It’s after 2 a.m. in Club 38, a nightspot in an old railway shed in Beirut. The DJ is in the cab of a rusty train. Lights sweep across a dense crowd below. My host is Andy Khawaja, a Lebanese-American businessman. We’re sitting at the club’s VIP table and he’s scrolling through photographs on his phone. Here he is with Hillary Clinton at a fundraiser. Here, he’s shaking hands with President Trump in the Oval Office. The men he’s with in the club have shaved heads, bushy beards, tattoos. I wonder if they’re mafia, militia, or mukhabarat (secret police). When I get up and walk to the restroom, a burly minder with a Glock in his waistband follows a step behind. He turns on the tap and hands me a towel.