Jared Kushner

Jared Corey Kushner (born January 10, 1981) is an American businessman, investor, real estate developer, and government official. He is the son-in-law of President Donald Trump through his marriage to Ivanka Trump and served as Senior Advisor to the President during Trump's first administration from 2017 to 2021. In February 2026, Trump appointed Kushner as a U.S. peace envoy, and he has continued in an informal advisory and diplomatic capacity focusing on Middle East issues during Trump's second term.

In 2009, Kushner married Ivanka Trump, daughter of Donald Trump, integrating his business interests with the Trump organization. During the Trump administration, despite lacking prior government experience, he was tasked with brokering Middle East peace deals, culminating in the 2020 Abraham Accords, which established diplomatic normalization between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco—marking the first such Arab-Israeli agreements in over 25 years without preconditions involving Palestinian statehood. He also contributed to criminal justice reform through the First Step Act and efforts on opioid crisis response, though his role drew scrutiny for operating outside traditional channels and potential conflicts with family business dealings, including loans from foreign entities like Qatar to refinance Kushner properties.

Jared Kushner was born on January 10, 1981, in Livingston, New Jersey, to Charles Kushner, a prominent real estate developer, and Seryl Kushner (née Stadtmauer). As the eldest of four siblings, he grew up alongside his brother Joshua and sisters Nicole and Dara in an affluent Orthodox Jewish community in northern New Jersey. The family's wealth stemmed from Kushner Companies, which Charles expanded from his father Joseph Kushner's initial post-World War II investments in New Jersey apartment buildings into a portfolio of thousands of units by the 1980s and 1990s.

The Kushners trace their roots to Novogrudok, then part of Poland and now Belarus, where Jared's paternal grandparents, Joseph and Rae Kushner, were born into Jewish families before surviving the Holocaust through hiding and escaping Nazi occupation. Joseph, originally named Yossel Berkowitz, and Rae reunited after the war in Budapest while fleeing Soviet control, immigrating to the United States in 1949 and settling in New Jersey, where Joseph began acquiring rental properties to support the family. Charles, born in 1954, joined his father's ventures in the 1970s after graduating from Hofstra University, formalizing the business as Kushner Companies in 1985 and growing it through aggressive acquisitions in residential and commercial real estate.

Kushner's upbringing emphasized Modern Orthodox Jewish observance, including Shabbat adherence and community involvement, in a suburban setting that balanced family modesty with substantial wealth from real estate holdings. His parents instilled values tied to their immigrant heritage and religious tradition, with Seryl actively discouraging interfaith marriages among their children, reflecting the family's commitment to Orthodox continuity. This environment, marked by philanthropy through Jewish causes and exposure to the family business from a young age, shaped Kushner's early worldview amid the stability of pre-2000s prosperity, prior to his father's 2005 federal conviction on charges including tax evasion and witness tampering, which occurred after Jared's late teens.