Janet Yellen ended 50-year friendship with ex-Fed official who was ‘rabid Trump supporter’: book

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen cut ties with a close friend of 50 years because she could no longer tolerate her “rabid” support for Donald Trump, according to a new book.

Carol Schwartz Greenwald, the first female assistant vice president of the Fed in Boston and an adviser to ex-Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis, was shunned by her longtime friend after having lunch with then-Fed Chair Yellen following Trump’s election in 2016, according to Owen Ullmann, author of “Empathy Economics: Janet Yellen’s Remarkable Rise to Power and Her Drive to Spread Prosperity to All.”

The two had met at Pembroke College in the late 1960s and had remained in touch despite having “veered off in very different political directions,” writes Ullmann, who interviewed Yellen for the book.

Yellen considered Greenwald “dynamite” for her “first-rate mind,” “keen intellect,” and having “broke[n] glass ceilings in the worlds of economics and finance,” according to the biography. “But Greenwald’s rabid support for Trump became more than Yellen could tolerate.”

“After a lunch during which Greenwald gushed about how wonderful Trump was, Yellen concluded she couldn’t continue their fifty-year-long friendship,” according to Ullmann.

“They stopped talking to one another.”

When reached by the author, Greenwald “flatly refused to talk about Yellen and their long friendship,” according to the book.

The Post has sought comment from Yellen and Greenwald.

A copy of Ullmann’s book, which was published by PublicAffairs, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, was obtained by The Post. The book goes on sale Sept. 27.

According to the book, Yellen harbored “personal contempt” for Trump and was
“dazed” and “appalled” when he defeated Hillary Clinton in November 2016.

Ironically, Trump considered naming Yellen to a second term as Fed chair shortly after he took office in January 2017. But, according to reports, the new president considered Yellen “too short” for the job and instead named Jerome Powell.

Yellen first met Greenwald when the two native New Yorkers were enrolled as economics students at Pembroke, which at the time was Brown University’s residential college for women.

After graduating from Pembroke, Greenwald would go on to become an economist at the Federal Reserve in New York. She would eventually earn a Ph.D. in economics from Columbia University.

As an adviser to Dukakis, Greenwald “earned a reputation as an outspoken battler for consumer rights,” according to an article in the New York Times.

Greenwald taught economics at Harvard Business School. In 1980, she was picked to be the first president of the National Consumer Cooperative Bank, an agency created by Congress to serve economically depressed areas where loans were less accessible.

Schwartz, who became Carol Schwartz Greenwald when she married in 1981, was “a very religious Jew who kept kosher” when the two met, according to the book.

“Over subsequent years, Greenwald became an avid pro-Israel activist and a conservative Republican who embraced Trump’s candidacy for president in 2016, co-founding the political group Jews Choose Trump,” Ullmann writes.

Greenwald has written several blog postings and opinion columns for Jewish websites and Israeli news outlets praising Trump for his avowedly pro-Israel positions.

During Trump’s presidency, the US broke longstanding policy and relocated its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, the disputed holy city which is also claimed by the Palestinians as the capital of a future state.

A majority of American Jews vote for Democrats, though a key pro-Trump constituency — evangelical Christians — consider support for Israel a key aspect of their plank.

Public opinion polls among secular Jews who lean toward the Democrats show eroding support for Israel and greater sympathy for the Palestinians.

Despite Trump’s warm embrace of Israel, the relationship was more complicated than it appeared at first glance, according to first-person witness accounts.

Trump was enraged when his ally, Israel’s then-prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, congratulated Joe Biden for his 2020 election victory — which the former president has long claimed was fraudulent.

Netanyahu’s congratulatory phone call to Biden prompted Trump to cut ties with one of the few world leaders who was supportive of the 45th president, according to a book by Israeli journalist Barak Ravid.

Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, wrote in his memoir that Trump was alienated by Netanyahu’s stance toward the then-president’s Middle East peace plan and contemplated endorsing the prime minister’s political rival, Benny Gantz, ahead of parliamentary elections in March 2020.