Two prominent Jewish leaders are stepping up to defend the Democratic presidential hopeful Robert F. Kennedy Jr. after accusations surfaced that he made antisemitic remarks during a New York City press event last week.

The president of the Zionist Organization of America, the country’s oldest pro-Israel group, Morton Klein, tells the Sun that the candidate’s statement that Covid may have been engineered to prevent people of Jewish and Chinese heritage from getting ill from it was “wrongly misinterpreted to falsely claim hostility to Jews.”

“Bobby nonmalevolently cited a published NIH funded study that suggested that docking features of the COVID-19 virus gave certain ethnicities heightened resistance to infection, including Finns, Chinese, and Ashkenazi Jews,” Mr. Klein says. “Kennedy acknowledges that those lab studies were meaningless as these groups proved equally vulnerable to COVID-19 in real life. Kennedy told me that he regrets ever discussing the study because, ‘I should have known that it’s mere mention could be distorted by malicious people to feed some blood libel.’”

Mr. Kennedy made the comments during a question-and-answer session at a restaurant on Manhattan’s upper east side last week. A video of the event was first posted online by the New York Post on Saturday.

“There is an argument that it is ethnically targeted,” Mr. Kennedy can be heard saying of the coronavirus. “Covid-19 attacks certain races disproportionately. Covid-19 is targeted to attack caucasians and black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese. We don’t know that it was deliberately targeted like that or not, but there are papers out there that show the racial and ethnic impact.”

In a series of Twitter posts Sunday, Mr. Kennedy vigorously denied any insinuation that he or his remarks are antisemitic and suggested that he was merely quoting a peer-reviewed academic study. Separately, he posted video of another prominent Jewish leader, Rabbi Schmuley Boteach, describing the son of the late Robert F. Kennedy as a “brilliant” man who feels “a great closeness to the Jewish people.”

“What bothers me about the attacks, including from my own community on you, is that they’re not framed in the context of the phenomenal support you’ve shown for our people, especially of late,” the Rabbi says in the video.

Other public figures, on hearing of the remarks, called Mr. Kennedy — who is currently polling at around 15 percent in the Democratic primaries — a “dangerous crackpot” and a “conspiratorial lunatic.” The leader of the House Democrats, Congressman Hakeem Jefferies of Brooklyn, said Mr. Kennedy’s comments should be “uniformly condemned.”

“The disgusting use of a vile antisemitic trope and unhinged xenophobic conspiracy theory by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is unacceptable and unconscionable,” Mr. Jefferies said in a statement released Sunday. “The dangerous language used by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. risks fanning the flames of violence against our Jewish and Asian-American brothers and sisters.”

Mr. Kennedy has raised eyebrows in the past for his allegations that the United States and China are engaged in an “ethnic bioweapons” arms race, but this is the first time he has publicly suggested that Covid might have been engineered to affect people of Jewish or Chinese heritage differently. The idea that Ashkenazi Jews of European heritage are genetically distinct from caucasians and more immune than others to certain diseases has fueled anti-Semitism for centuries.

No credible, mainstream reports have circulated that Jewish or Chinese people were more, or less, impacted by Covid than anyone else. The World Health Organization reports that nearly 100 million Chinese were infected by the virus, and more than 120,000 died. The origins of the Covid virus, whether from a laboratory — in Wuhan, China or anywhere else — or natural also remain hotly disputed.

Mr. Klein also categorically rejects the notion that Mr. Kennedy is antisemitic and says the accusations have caused the environmental lawyer “great pain.” 

“Robert Kennedy, Jr. is a great humanitarian, environmentalist and a sincere and devoted and genuine friend of Israel and Jewish people,” he adds. “I neither endorse nor oppose any candidates for public office, but I am honored that he is using me — an ardent Zionist — as an advisor on Jewish and Israeli issues.”