Ivanka Trump

b. October 30, 1981

by JWA Staff
Our work to expand the Encyclopedia is ongoing. We are providing this brief biography for Ivanka Trump until we are able to commission a full entry.

Ivanka Trump in 2011. Image courtesy of Rich Girard via Wikimedia Commons.

 As a teen, Ivanka Trump had a modeling career, appearing on the cover of Seventeen in 1997 and doing several runway shows. She earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton Business School in 2004 and briefly worked for Forest City Enterprises, a real estate company. In 2005, she joined the Trump Organization, where she served as an executive vice president until she left the company during her father’s presidential term. She made her first appearance as a judge on her father’s reality show The Apprentice in 2006, became a regular the following season, and served as a judge on the spinoff, Celebrity Apprentice. In 2007 she launched her own line of designer jewelry. She converted to Orthodox Judaism and married Jared Kushner in 2009, the same year she published her first book, The Trump Card: Playing to Win in Work and Life. During the 2016 election, Ivanka Trump often served to soften the explosive rhetoric Donald Trump employed in his speeches. Following her father’s election, she served in an official capacity as an advisor to him from 2017 to 2021. She advised his decisions about women’s issues, focusing especially on supporting women entrepreneurs. She released her second book, Women Who Work: Rewriting the Rules for Success, in 2017. She terminated her fashion line in 2018 amidst widespread controversy. In 2019 she launched the Women’s Global Development and Prosperity Initiative, which aimed to help women succeed in the workplace. Since leaving the White House, she has stated that she believes that her father lost the 2020 election fairly and is said to have counselled him against supporting the riots on January 6, 2021. As of 2023, she, like the rest of her family, is embroiled in a number of fraud cases. 

Donate

Help us elevate the voices of Jewish women.

donate now

Listen to Our Podcast

Get JWA in your inbox

Read the latest from JWA from your inbox.

sign up now

How to cite this page

Jewish Women's Archive. "Ivanka Trump." (Viewed on November 21, 2024) <https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/trump-ivanka>.