A decades-old college opinion article by new Democratic House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries is coming back to haunt him. In the article, Hakeem is defending his controversial uncle, former college professor Leonard Jeffries, who had been called out in the 1990s for being antisemitic.

Republicans have pounced on Hakeem for his past comments.

“Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, and now Hakeem Jeffries,” the National Republican Congressional Committee tweeted. “Why are House Democrats so interested in giving a platform to anti-Semitic voices?”

In 2013, Hakeem told The Wall Street Journal that he only had “vague” recollections of the controversy surrounding his uncle. Leonard Jeffries was a New York City college professor in Black Studies who, in the early 1990s, called “rich Jews” puppet masters of the slave trade. He also claimed that Jews were orchestrating a “conspiracy” against Black Americans, Newsweek reported.

“I have a vague recollection of it,” Jeffries said during The Wall Street Journal interview. “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.”

In 1992, Hakeem, then an undergraduate student at Binghamton University, wrote an editorial mentioning Jeffries for The Vanguard, the BSU student newspaper. 

In the article, which was recently discovered by CNN, Hakeem defends his uncle as well as Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, who has also been condemned as antisemitic.

“Dr. Leonard Jeffries and Minister Louis Farrakhan have come under intense fire,” Hakeem wrote at the time. “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.”

Also, the school’s Black Student Union, of which Jeffries was an executive board member, had invited the university professor to speak after the controversy, The Daily Mail reported.

Leonard Jeffries eventually lost his job at City University of New York following a series of legal battles over his comments about Jewish people, including reportedly referring to Jews as “dogs” and “skunks” hoping to “stink you all up.”

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., listens during a news conference, March 30, 2023, on Capitol Hill in Washington. (AP Photo/Mariam Zuhaib)/An undated photo of New York professor Leonard Jeffries