House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries under fire for defending uncle’s antisemitic comments while in college

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) is under fire for defending his antisemitic uncle and Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan after an op-ed he wrote in college over 30 years ago resurfaced this week.

After he was elected to Congress in 2013, Jeffries told the Wall Street Journal that he only had a “vague recollection” of the controversy surrounding his uncle, Leonard Jeffries — a former college professor and department chair of Black Studies at the City University of New York.

In the early 1990s, Leonard Jeffries faced severe backlash after he denounced “rich Jews” and their involvement in the African slave trade and claimed there was “a conspiracy, planned and plotted and programmed out of Hollywood” of Jewish executives disparaging black Americans in movies.

“I have a vague recollection of it,” Jeffries told the Wall Street Journal. “There was no internet during that era and I can’t even recall a daily newspaper in the Binghamton, N.Y., area but it wasn’t covering the things that the New York Post and Daily News were at the time.”

However, CNN on Wednesday uncovered a previously unreported opinion piece that a young Hakeem Jeffries penned in 1992 while at Binghamton University in upstate New York.

In the piece, Jeffries addressed his uncle’s controversy and came to his and Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan’s defense.

“Do you think that a ruling elite would promote individuals who would seek to dismantle their vice like grip on power?” Jeffries wrote in the piece, published in the Black Student Union’s newspaper, The Vanguard.

“Dr. Leonard Jeffries and Minister Louis Farrakhan have come under intense fire,” Jeffries continued. “Where do you think their interests lie? Dr. Jeffries has challenged the existing white supremacist educational system and long standing distortion of history. His reward has been a media lynching complete with character assassinations and inflammatory erroneous accusations.”

Jeffries’ office maintained on Wednesday that he does not agree with his uncle’s view and believes in “bringing communities together.”

“Leader Jeffries has consistently been clear that he does not share the controversial views espoused by his uncle over thirty years ago,” spokesperson Christiana Stephenson told CNN.

Following the initial outrage sparked by his comments, Leonard Jeffries continued to denigrate Jews, comparing them to “dogs” and “skunks,” CNN reported.

Then-New York Gov. Mario Cuomo and New York City Mayor David Dinkins both condemned the professor for his remarks.

After a lengthy legal battle, Leonard Jeffries left his position as Black Studies chair in 1995.

While an executive board member of Binghamton’s Black Student Union, Hakeem Jeffries invited his embattled uncle to speak on campus in February 1992 for an undisclosed fee, according to CNN.

The invitation drew ire from students on campus and members of the Jewish Student Union, who asked for the BSU to cancel the event.

In response, Jeffries held a press conference and defended his uncle, saying he had no intention to cancel, CNN reported.

“The proper way to way to debate scholarship is with scholarship–not with high-tech lynchings, media assassinations, character desecrations and venomous attacks,” he said in a statement reported in the student newspaper, The Pipe Dream.

In response, the JSU wrote their own editorial in the student paper comparing Leonard Jeffries to the Ku Klux Klan.

A senior in college at the time, Hakeem Jeffries blasted black conservatives in his Vanguard opinion piece, calling them “house negroes” and lamenting their acceptance by the “white media.”

“Perhaps this is the problem with the Black conservative politician of today. Their political agenda is not designed to contribute to the upliftment of their people,” he wrote. “These right-wing opportunists espouse the political ideology of the power structure and, in return, they are elevated to positions historically reserved for whites.”

Republican Congressman Byron Donalds of Florida called for Jeffries to “apologize for what he wrote in that article” and invited him to “have a real conversation about whose policies will unleash not just Black America but all of America.”

Others jumped to Jeffries’ defense, including Democratic Representative Dean Phillips of Minnesota, who is Jewish.

“Leader @RepJeffries spent an hour with me on my first day in Congress in 2019. I nominated him for Speaker and now serve on his leadership team,” he tweeted. “Few Americans are more committed defenders of the Jewish community, and all communities subject to hate, than Hakeem Jeffries. “