(JNS) House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) has said for years that he had only a “vague recollection” of controversy surrounding his uncle Leonard Jeffries, who lost his professorship for antisemitic remarks.

But a CNN report last week revealed that not only did the Bingham University Black Student Union, where Jeffries was an executive board member, invite his uncle to speak after his hateful remarks, but Jeffries also penned an op-ed in the student paper defending him and Nation of Islam head Louis Farrakhan.

“White media” unfairly targeted his uncle and the antisemitic Farrakhan for their criticism of “the longstanding distortion of history,” Jeffries wrote in the op-ed. His uncle had described “rich Jews” in the African slave trade, as well as “a conspiracy, planned and plotted and programmed out of Hollywood” by Jewish executives to disparage Black Americans, according to CNN.

In a statement, the Republican Jewish Coalition demanded that Jeffries explain his defense of his uncle.