There wasn’t an obvious catalyst for this April 2013 tweet — Ross Luippold, writing for the Huffington Post, speculated that the future-president had responded the day before to a tweet from a man named Craig Devlin, who had tweeted at Trump’s account, “Please run for president, Jon Stewart would destroy you!” Trump responded to Devlin, “Jon (L) is not smart enough!”
The next day, Trump followed up with his “Jonathan Leibowitz” tweet.
Jonathan Stuart Leibowitz is Stewart’s given name — in November 2011, Jeremy Gillick wrote in Moment Magazine with a glee highly recognizable to any Jewish pop culture journalist, “Stewart, born Jonathan Stuart Leibowitz, has also become an ambassador of Jewishness…He has referred to himself as ‘Jewey Von Jewstein’ and cracked wise on Jewish noses, circumcision, anti-Semites, Jews who play baseball (a short list), Israel as ‘Heebie Land’ and his grandma at Passover.” As Gillick points out, he told the New Yorker in 2002 that growing up in Trenton, New Jersey, class bullies called him “Leibotits” and “Leiboshits.” As an athlete in college, opposing fans once screamed the word “kike” at him. And at one of his earliest comedy sets in New York City, the host mispronounced his last name. Because of that and, as he told the New Yorker, “some leftover resentment at my family,” he changed his name.
The Trump “Leibowitz” tweet doesn’t directly attack Stewart’s Judaism or contain a slur. But there’s no reason to mention the name, except to point out that it’s Jewish. If Stewart’s real last name was “Davidson,” for example, it’s hard to imagine that Trump would have written the same tweet. “Trump seemingly tried to either shame Stewart for hiding his Jewish heritage or for being Jewish altogether — the motives are unclear,” Tara Golshan wrote for Vox in May 2016.
Stewart retaliated on his show, christening (as it were) Trump with his own new name: “F**kface VonClownstick, musing, “I wish you would embrace the Von Clownstick heritage.” That footage isn’t available on YouTube, but Stewart says he remembers tweeting it (he didn’t), so the timeline here is a little confusing.
https://forward.com/schmooze/428146/here-are-the-resurfaced-tweets-where-trump-used-jewish-dog-whistles-on-jon/"I promise you that I'm much smarter than Jonathan Leibowitz - I mean Jon Stewart @TheDailyShow . Who, by the way, is totally overrated."
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