Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Harvard group hosted ‘anti-Semitic’ speaker

FIRST ON FOX: President Biden’s nominee to exchange retiring Supreme Courtroom Justice Stephen Breyer was a part of a Harvard College scholar group that hosted a speaker with a historical past of anti-Semitic remarks, Fox Information Digital has realized. 

Choose Ketanji Brown Jackson was a member of the Black College students Affiliation (BSA) her senior yr at Harvard, in response to her yearbook, when the Harvard BSA invited Leonard Jeffries, the controversial then-Metropolis College of New York professor of Black research and Black research division head, to talk.

Jeffries — the uncle of Home Democratic Caucus chairman Hakeem Jeffries of New York — has been closely criticized for his previous anti-Semitic remarks, and the 1992 Harvard talking engagement drew strong campus protests.

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The Harvard College chapters of Jewish advocacy group Hillel, the Homosexual-Straight Alliance, and School Democrats themselves protested the BSA’s talking occasion that includes Jeffries, in response to a Feb. 4, 1992 article within the Harvard Crimson reviewed by Fox Information. 

The day earlier than the Crimson article, scholar Jessica Yellin — who went on to change into a chief White Home correspondent at CNN — known as on the BSA to take again their invitation, warning that it will provide “a Harvard podium to an avowed anti-Semite” whose “teachings are laced with vicious assaults on Jews and distorted interpretations of historical past.”

Professors on campus torched Jeffries’ speech after it was given, with authorities professor Martin Kilson calling on “black college students at Harvard and elsewhere” to “get up towards Jeffries’ sort of ethical rot” in a Feb. 5 Crimson piece.

The Crimson reported on Feb. 6 that Jeffries denied he was an anti-Semite and claimed that Black folks valued peace and equality greater than the “folks of the ice” – his time period for White folks – do. 

Jeffries had reportedly been requested by a scholar throughout his speech if he realized that his “Pyramid Evaluation” system was just like the one utilized by Adolf Hitler, to which Jeffries replied, “Adolf Hitler was an issue to the Europeans.”

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“Adolf Hitler shouldn’t be my drawback,” Jeffries continued.

Conversely, members of the Harvard BSA applauded Jeffries’ speech, in response to a Feb. 7 Crimson article.

Jackson’s yearbook web page for her senior yr listed her as a member of the BSA the yr that Jeffries spoke at Harvard. It isn’t clear whether or not she attended the speech. There isn’t any public document of her talking out towards Jeffries’ invitation on the time. 

The American Jewish Committee (AJC) launched a report in 1991 – on Jeffries “and the Anti-Semitic Department of the Afrocentrism Motion,” highlighting a number of of the now-former CUNY professor’s feedback on Jews, in addition to his controversial Afrocentrist historic claims.

The report, launched the yr earlier than Jeffries spoke at Harvard, stated that he “preaches Jew-hatred like a faith.” The report famous that Jeffries organized a 1990 convention for Black lecturers that featured anti-Semitic rhetoric and studying supplies. 

Based on the report, Jeffries additionally claimed that Jesus, Moses, and Buddha have been all Black. The report famous that “the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the anti-Semitic Czarist forgery that alleges a worldwide Jewish conspiracy, and which fueled many pogroms, was bought on the convention.” 

Choose Ketanji Brown Jackson speaks after President Joe Biden introduced Jackson as his nominee to the Supreme Courtroom within the Cross Corridor of the White Home, Friday, Feb. 25, 2022, in Washington. Vice President Kamala Harris listens at proper. 
(AP Photograph/Carolyn Kaster)

In a 1991 speech, Jeffries reportedly claimed the portrayal of Black folks in films was “a conspiracy, deliberate and plotted and programmed out of Hollywood, the place folks known as Greenberg and Weisberg and Trigliani and what not.”   

In the identical speech, Jeffries blamed Jewish folks as being principally liable for the Trans-Atlantic slave commerce, in response to the AJC report. 

The report additionally famous Jeffries’ racially-charged rhetoric “educating that blacks are racially superior to whites” and his references to Black folks as “solar folks” because of “extra melanin of their pores and skin than whites, whom he calls ‘ice folks.’”

Anti-Semitism watchdogs, together with the left-leaning group the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) dubbed Jeffries an “anti-Semitic” speaker in a report protecting anti-Semitism on faculty campuses.

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“Leonard Jeffries, the previous head of the Black Research Division on the Metropolis School of CUNY, and a professor there since 1972, has espoused racist and anti-Semitic views and theories since a minimum of the early Eighties, when his feedback – made whereas he was division head – started to draw public consideration,” the ADL wrote.

“Within the spring of 1988, a white scholar wrote an account within the scholar newspaper of his experiences in Jeffries’ class, Black Research 101,” the ADL, that continued. “The scholar recounted quite a few instances when Jeffries constructed massive components of his class round anti-white arguments.”

The ADL additionally famous the 1990 New York Instances article which “reported that in an April 1990 class on African heritage, Jeffries stated that ‘wealthy Jews who financed the event of Europe additionally financed the slave commerce,’ and that ‘the Jewish Holocaust is raised as the one Holocaust.’”

“On March 23, 1992, CUNY’s Board of Trustees voted to take away Jeffries as head of the division, changing him with Dr. Edmund W. Gordon, previously chairman of the African-American Research Division at Yale College,” the ADL wrote.

Jeffries challenged the removing in court docket, claiming that CUNY violated his First Modification rights. The court docket present in favor of Jeffries, who was reinstated to his chair.

Jeffries’ rhetoric about Jewish folks continued after his Harvard look as properly. In 1994, he sparked backlash after evaluating Jewish folks to “skunks” who “stunk up every little thing.” 

Biden nominated Jackson earlier this yr to the Supreme Courtroom bench after Breyer introduced he would retire, fulfilling the president’s promise to decide on a Black lady for the court docket. 

Jackson will face the Senate scorching seat on March 21 for her affirmation listening to. 

Neither the White Home nor Jeffries responded to Fox Information Digital’s request for remark by press time.