Jared Kushner and Hakeem Jeffries met privately in New York City in recent weeks, and neither man wanted to discuss it afterward.
The New York Times reported the encounter on August 23, citing five people with knowledge of a session held in a New York City space a mutual friend provided. The two men discussed housing, immigration, and the cost of living. Kushner urged Jeffries to sit down with White House chief of staff Susie Wiles as a follow-up. NBC News confirmed the account the same day. Jeffries’s initial statement never acknowledged the meeting at all, insisting only that “the affordability crisis is not a hoax and nothing short of transformational policy change is acceptable.” He later posted a video on X acknowledging that “Kushner asked for a meeting.”
The timing carried its own message. Democrats lead in nearly every midterm poll, and Jeffries becomes speaker if they capture the House in November. Kushner has told associates that Jeffries ranks as “the most serious” Democratic leader. House Speaker Mike Johnson shrugged at the news on Fox News, saying “I don’t know what that’s about.” Crooked Media co-founder Tommy Vietor was less charitable, posting on X: “Jared Kushner has no actual government job; he just uses his family connections to get money from gulf autocrats and fund corrupt deals. The only way Jeffries should work with him is with demands for documents and subpoenas.”
That reaction captures a long-standing problem with Jeffries. Namely, the qualities that make Jeffries someone Trump’s inner circle can work with are the same qualities that have made him a target inside his own party and nowhere is more apparent than on the issue of Israel.
Jeffries reached that position by a steady ascent through the House. He won New York’s 8th Congressional District in 2012, succeeding Ed Towns, and quickly built a legislative profile around criminal justice reform. He introduced legislation to criminalize chokeholds after Eric Garner’s death and served as the lead Democratic sponsor of the bipartisan First Step Act of 2018, a jailbreak bill that became one of Donald Trump’s most significant legislative accomplishments of his first term.
House Democrats unanimously elected Jeffries to succeed Nancy Pelosi as House minority leader on November 30, 2022, making him the first Black American to lead either party in either chamber of Congress. He was re-elected to the post in 2024. In July 2025 he set the record for the longest House floor speech in modern history, speaking for eight hours and 44 minutes against the One Big Beautiful Bill Act and breaking the mark Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) set in 2021. Heading into the 2026 midterms, Jeffries is widely positioned to become speaker if Democrats retake the House.
With Jeffries potentially becoming House Speaker, American Jewry could breathe a sigh of relief knowing that they have a safe pair of hands wielding the speaker’s gavel. Jeffries represents Brooklyn’s 8th District, which Jewish Currents has described as the 15th most Jewish congressional district in the country, and he was raised in Crown Heights, home to the global headquarters of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement. He has extolled that constituency, telling reporters and audiences that “in New York City we consider Jerusalem to be the sixth borough.”
His public language and, more importantly, his legislative record on Israel have been reliably pro-Zionist throughout his congressional career. Jeffries backed the $1 billion Iron Dome replenishment in September 2021, which passed 420 to 9 over objections from eight progressive Democrats. He voted in favor of the $26.4 billion Israel Security Supplemental, H.R. 8034, in April 2024, which split House Democrats 173 to 37. He voted no on a GOP standalone Israel aid bill, H.R. 6126, in February 2024 that Democrats viewed as a partisan maneuver, and he supported the 2019 anti-BDS resolution H.Res.246 as well as the Antisemitism Awareness Act in May 2024. By 2022 alone, Jewish Currents documented Jeffries raising $440,000 from Israel-advocacy groups—the sixth-highest total among House members that cycle, per OpenSecrets—and he has traveled to Israel five times on AIPAC-sponsored trips since entering Congress in 2013. Jeffrie’s pro-Israel funding surged to over $1 million by the 2024 election cycle.
In July 2026, Jeffries continued his pro-Israel antics. Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) offered an amendment stripping $3.3 billion in Foreign Military Financing for Israel from the fiscal 2027 State Department bill. It failed 104 to 314. Among Democrats, 103 voted yes, 98 voted no, and 10 voted present, with Massie the lone Republican supporter. Jeffries voted no. In a Dear Colleague letter, he called the measure “overly broad,” arguing it would hinder humanitarian aid efforts, refugee resettlement, and efforts to undermine resistance groups like Hamas. Notably, he declined to whip the vote, telling members there would be “good faith reasons that will result in members voting in a variety of different ways.”
They would proceed to do so, with his own deputy, Minority Whip Katherine Clark (D-MA), announcing she would vote yes because “the status quo is not tenable.” Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi voted yes as well, saying “the Netanyahu government cannot maintain its current course.” Caucus Chair Pete Aguilar (D-CA) stayed with Jeffries. The party’s top two leaders had split publicly on the defining foreign policy question of the cycle, and Jeffries found himself on the shrinking side.
The money surrounding that vote drew immediate scrutiny. Sludge reported that on May 20, AIPAC’s PAC routed two earmarked payments totaling $149,300 to the Jeffries Battleground Protection Fund, the largest earmarked disbursement in the PAC’s history, listed in Federal Election Commission records as an earmark of Jewish billionaire investor Daniel Och.
The AIPAC money flowing into Jeffries’ coffers has raised concerns among progressives. When Jeffries told WNYC’s Brian Lehrer Show in November 2025 that AIPAC’s PAC could give only “$5,000 or $10,000 per cycle, that’s it,”Sludge called the characterization misleading, noting the group’s conduit system has funneled more than a million dollars in earmarked donations to his campaigns.
That financial relationship has fueled further backlash. When AIPAC’s United Democracy Project super PAC spent $14.5 million in June 2024 to defeat Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY), Jeffries offered only a muted response, telling Punchbowl News that “pro-Israel groups are going to support pro-Israel members of Congress.” Radio host Charlamagne tha God has mockingly nicknamed Jeffries “AIPAC Shakur” for his close alignment with pro-Israel donors.
Other leftist outlets have taken Jeffries to task for his devotion to Israeli interests. His 2026 partnership with liberal Zionist organization J Street to oppose the Massie-sponsored arms amendment drew a pointed critique from CounterPunch, which accused him of coupling rhetoric about restraint with continued support for weapons transfers amid allegations of Israeli conduct in Gaza.
Jeffries’s financial entanglements do not end with AIPAC. Sam Bankman-Fried, the FTX founder later convicted of fraud, donated to Jeffries’s campaign, and Jeffries pledged to donate the funds after FTX’s collapse, according to Bloomberg. Separately, 2026 reporting found that committees tied to Jeffries and other Democratic leaders donated to candidates who had pledged to reject corporate PAC money, even as those same committees accepted funds from corporations including Barclays, CVS and UnitedHealthcare, raising accusations of an indirect funding workaround.
The financial ties only reinforce a rhetorical record that consistently delegitimized Palestinian resistance to Israeli transgressions. In February 2022, he called claims that Israel is an apartheid state “demonstrably false, dangerous and designed to isolate Israel in one of the toughest neighborhoods in the world,” responding directly to Amnesty International’s report on Israeli apartheid. After October 7, 2023, he declared in a press release that “America stands firmly and unequivocally with Israel” and that Congress “must stand with Israel until the invasion by Hamas has been crushed.” He also criticized the phrase “from the river to the sea” in a November 2023 statement as a call for “the complete destruction of Israel,” and stressed in February 2025 that “our commitment to Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish and Democratic state and eternal homeland for the Jewish people is ironclad.”
The most recent flashpoint in Jeffries’s career came in August 2026 with a private meeting with Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law and top outside adviser, to discuss “potential areas of common ground” on housing, immigration, and the cost of living. The New York Times noted the meeting’s timing “underscored that those around Mr. Trump were well aware of the likelihood of a Democratic-led House,” and that Kushner suggested Jeffries also meet with White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles. Kushner reportedly told associates that if anything bipartisan gets done with Congress, Jeffries is “the most serious person among Democratic leaders.”
Despite the criticism he received from progressives, Jeffries defended the meeting on CNN and in a video posted to X, insisting “no one from the Trump cartel is getting a pass” and that he agreed to the sit-down only to “discuss the affordability crisis that exists, that is not a hoax.” This was not the first time Jeffries and Kushner had found common ground. He and Kushner have a prior working relationship dating to their collaboration on the 2018 First Step Act.
Taken together, Hakeem Jeffries is a reliable servant of Israel and the broader Jewish community. Both Trump terms have been Judeo-accelerationist to the core, with Israel getting nearly everything it wants. Naturally, the American public has grown tired of these escapades that only advance Jewish interests and are now prepared to vote the bums out in the upcoming midterms.
Though it should be stressed that in the Jewish-dominated plutocracy we live in there is no meaningful opposition to the Pan-Judah. At best, voters will have to pull the lever for another competing faction of Jewish proxies.
Enter Hakeem Jeffries and his minions.
Regardless of how the political pendulum swings later this year, the Jewish donor networks and political action committees backing Israel face no real downside, secure in the knowledge that a Democratic flip merely elevates Jeffries, an empty suit who is a certified coon for the Cohens in word and in deed.
NEXT:
Buck-Dancing for Zion: Tracking Van Jones’ Slavish Devotion to American Jewry
When popular leftist streamer Hasan Piker told his massive audience that Hamas is “a thousand times better than Israel” and that he would “vote for Hamas over Israel every single time,” Van Jones did not dismiss him or call him names. He wrote a Substack essay engaging with the argument directly. Published under the title “Breakdown: Is Hasan Piker Righ…
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