A Harvard student group in which Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson was a member hosted a known antisemite who accused Jews of slave trading and said Hitler “was not my problem.”
The Black Students Association at Harvard University, in February 1992, hosted Leonard Jeffries, then a professor at the City University of New York, for a lecture in which he accused Jews of being slave traders.
Jackson, who graduated from Harvard in 1992, was among the association’s members at the time of the event, according to a report by Fox News. However, a White House official told the Washington Examiner that Jackson “did not go to this.”
Jackson is currently a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for Washington, D.C., and was nominated last month by President Joe Biden to fill the seat of retiring Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer.
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Jeffries, the uncle of New York Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, made numerous controversial statements during his career, including claims that “rich Jews … financed the slave trade,” according to a report on antisemitism in higher education published by the Anti-Defamation League.
Of his 1992 lecture at Harvard, the Harvard Crimson reported at the time that Jeffries “allege[d] that Jews were heavily involved in the slave trade” and denied that enslaved Jews had built the Egyptian pyramids.
Jeffries also claimed during his lecture that “Adolf Hitler was a problem of Europeans” and “is not my problem.”
Any role that Jackson had in hosting Jeffries is not immediately known, including if she attended the 1992 event, which was controversial on Harvard’s campus at the time. The Harvard Crimson reported that the controversial academic “was met by … a sizable protest rally” and that the event was held with “tight security.”
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The Anti-Defamation League, which has highlighted Jeffries’s controversial statements in the past, has endorsed Jackson’s nomination to the Supreme Court, saying she would “bring an important new perspective to the work of the Court.” The organization did not respond to a request for comment.
The office of Sen. Charles Grassley, the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, also did not respond to a request for comment. Jackson is slated to testify before the committee beginning on March 21.
