Hakeem Jeffries and His Antisemitic Uncle

Now that Hakeem Jeffries (D-New York) is the House Minority leader, his greater power demands that we look with closer scrutiny at his past. In particular, he has never distanced himself from, but rather defended in an opinion piece, his uncle Leonard Jeffries, one-time chair of the Black Studies Department at CUNY with most disturbing views. More on Hakeem Jeffries, and his defense of his uncle Leonard, and of Louis Farrakhan, can be found here.

“There is no statute of limitations for hiding the truth or defending haters of Jews. People must be held accountable for their actions. However, that does not mean we should try to cancel someone or brand them as antisemitic based on one incident alone. We must look at their record, and hear both sides of the story.

But it is clear that Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), the House Minority Leader, did something wrong in 2013, when asked about his controversial uncle, Leonard Jeffries, who chaired the Black Studies Department at the City University of New York.

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Hakeem Jeffries told The Wall Street Journal that he had a “vague recollection” of the controversy surrounding his antisemitic uncle, and neglected to tell the outlet that he was part of a student government group that brought his uncle to the State University of New York at Binghamton (now Binghamton University) campus, and wrote an op-ed in a campus newspaper defending his uncle as well as Louis Farrakhan. The story was broken by CNN.

Numerous Democrats were quick to defend Jeffries, including Reps. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL), and Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ).

Circling the wagons, two Jewish Democrats, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz and Josh Gottheimer, have now come to Hakeem Jeffries’ defense. Neither apparently thinks he owes the public any explanation, much less an apology, for his Op-Ed in which he defended his uncle Leonard Jeffries. They speak only about his support for Israel, but that is not a sufficient distancing from his op-ed in 2013. Just imagine if an op-ed by a sitting Congressman had been unearthed in which he was found to have defended, a decade ago, the views of an uncle who was in the Ku Klux Klan. All hell would break loose if he now remained silent. Hakeem Jeffries is remaining silent.

Professor Jeffries compared Jews to “dogs,” and said, “Russian Jewry had a particular control over the movies, and their financial partners, the Mafia, put together a financial system of destruction of black people.”

He was eventually removed as chair of the department, but after a lawsuit in which he claimed the removal was a violation of his First Amendment rights, he was reinstated, but not awarded monetary damages.

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In his op-ed at the time [2013], Hakeem Jeffries wrote that his uncle was subject to “a media lynching complete with character assassinations,” and defended Farrakhan as unfairly maligned for opposing the “ruling elite.”

Hakeem Jeffries has never disowned this disturbing op-ed. Why not? Does he still believe that those who criticized his uncle for his antisemitism were part of a “media lynching” and attacks on him nothing but “character assassination”? Is he now prepared, at long last, to denounce his uncle’s views and to apologize to those he attacked for conducting what he called a “media lynching” of his uncle?

Does Hakeem Jeffries’ still stand by his defense, too, of Louis Farrakhan, whose hair-raising antisemitism he ignored, and instead defended Farrakhan from attacks by a “ruling elite” – a phrase which in this context means “powerful Jews” who behind the scenes control the media, or the government, or very likely both, and who attacked Farrakhan precisely for his antisemitism. We need to hear from Hakeem Jeffries directly on this matter. Continued silence will not do.

And what does Hakeem Jeffries think of the anti-white racism of Leonard Jeffries? Leonard Jeffries was, and remains in his retirement, a proponent of melanin theory, which posits that greater skin pigmentation makes black people inherently superior to white people. Jeffries says that melanin allows black people to “negotiate the vibrations of the universe and to deal with the ultraviolet rays of the sun.” Jeffries has stated (but not published) the idea that whites are “ice people” who are violent and cruel, while blacks are “sun people” who are compassionate and peaceful. What does Hakeem Jeffries think of his uncle’s stark and crazed anti-white racism? Just how deep is his loyalty to his uncle?

What does Hakeem Jeffries, who has never criticized, but instead only defended his uncle, think of his uncle’s claims that Jewish businessmen financed the Atlantic slave trade and used the movie industry to hurt black people, and that whites are “ice people” while Africans are “sun people”? Does he have any opinion? Why haven’t the Republicans in Congress raised these questions? Is Hakeem Jeffries prepared to answer them?