(JTA) – Former White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders in her new book refers to a former colleague as a “liberal, aggressive, foulmouthed Jew from New York City.” Sanders says she and Josh Raffel, a senior White House communications official in 2017 and 2018, later became good friends. He also was a spokesperson for Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump. The book, which is due out next week, is quoted in a report in Jewish Insider.

Raffel worked in public relations in Hollywood until Kushner recruited him into the White House in early 2017 to manage communications for the Office of American Innovation. In late 2017 he led communications for the Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations.

Sanders said she did not know Raffel before he started working at the White House. “He was a liberal, aggressive, foulmouthed Jew from New York City who had spent most of his career working in Hollywood. I was pretty much his total opposite,” she wrote in the book, according to Jewish Insider. Sanders also wrote that “despite our differences, I had grown to love Josh. He is one of the funniest people I know, intensely loyal, and probably the most talented communications strategist I’ve ever worked with. Nobody in the White House could work a story better than Josh, and he was always one of the first colleagidues I turned to for help on the toughest assignments.”

Raffel, in turn, told Jewish Insider that Sanders is a “close friend.”

Main Photo: Then-White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders giving a briefing, May 11, 2017. (Mark Wilson/Getty Images)