Charles Kushner

Charles Kushner is an American real estate developer and diplomat who serves as the United States Ambassador to France and the Principality of Monaco, a position to which he was confirmed by the Senate on May 19, 2025. He founded Kushner Companies in 1985, growing it into a firm that owns and develops over 30,000 multifamily residences across multiple states and several million square feet of commercial real estate. In 2005, Kushner pleaded guilty to 18 federal counts, including assisting in the preparation of false tax returns, retaliating against a cooperating witness with an attempt to blackmail the witness's brother through hiring a prostitute for a staged sexual encounter recorded on video, and making illegal campaign contributions; he was sentenced to two years' imprisonment. President Donald J. Trump granted him a full and unconditional pardon on December 23, 2020, citing his subsequent record of philanthropy and business reform. Kushner is the father of Jared Kushner, a former senior advisor to President Trump.

Charles Kushner was born on May 16, 1954, to Joseph and Rae Kushner, Jewish immigrants from Novogrudok, Poland (now in Belarus), who survived the Holocaust and immigrated to the United States in 1949 as impoverished refugees. Rae Kushner, born in 1923 as the second of four children in a middle-class Jewish family, endured the Nazi occupation of her hometown, where thousands of Jews were killed; she and her family hid in forests and forests before liberation. Joseph Kushner, also a survivor, had lost family members in the genocide and arrived in America with limited resources, initially settling in Brooklyn, New York, before moving to New Jersey to pursue opportunities in construction trades.

The Kushners raised Charles and their other three children, including son Murray, in a working-class Modern Orthodox Jewish household in Elizabeth, New Jersey, an area with a tight-knit Jewish community. Joseph's work as a carpenter and builder exposed the family to the rigors of manual labor and small-scale home construction, fostering an environment of self-reliance amid post-war economic hardship and cultural emphasis on communal ties within Jewish enclaves. This formative setting, marked by the parents' resilience in rebuilding their lives from Holocaust trauma, instilled in Charles an early appreciation for entrepreneurship and perseverance, shaped by the immigrant ethos of hard work in trades over reliance on institutional aid.