{"id":108093,"date":"2026-04-15T12:27:41","date_gmt":"2026-04-15T15:27:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ubirataonline.com.br\/elise-stefanik-has-a-new-book-on-campus-antisemitism-its-missing-something-big\/"},"modified":"2026-04-15T12:27:49","modified_gmt":"2026-04-15T15:27:49","slug":"elise-stefanik-has-a-new-book-on-campus-antisemitism-its-missing-something-big","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ubirataonline.com.br\/en\/elise-stefanik-has-a-new-book-on-campus-antisemitism-its-missing-something-big\/","title":{"rendered":"Elise Stefanik has a new book on campus antisemitism. It\u2019s missing something big."},"content":{"rendered":"


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The new book Poisoned Ivies: The Inside Account of the Academic and Moral Rot at America\u2019s Elite Universities<\/em>, by New York Rep. Elise Stefanik, is a real time capsule. In taking on this book project, Stefanik clearly wanted to cement her moment of political stardom\u2014that one time in late 2023 that she asked<\/a> the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and Penn a yes-or-no question at a congressional hearing on campus antisemitism, and those presidents answered disastrously\u2014into a launchpad for her political career. Poisoned Ivies<\/em> recounts how, on the day of the hearings, Stefanik was playing the Congressional version of Michael Jordan\u2019s flu game<\/a>\u2014she was sick, but went to work anyway, \u201carmed with Kleenex, cough drops, and doused with over-the-counter cold medicine.\u201d Dramatically, Stefanik describes dithering over whether to accept a colleague\u2019s offer to yield their minutes: \u201cThe question heard around the world almost didn\u2019t happen.\u201d And of course the fact that the hearing was so zeitgeisty as to appear on Saturday Night Live<\/em><\/a> makes it into the book\u2014though Stefanik describes the resulting sketch, which mocked her as well as college presidents Claudine Gay, Sally Kornbluth, and Liz Magill, as \u201cthe worst cold open ever,\u201d you better believe it rates a mention.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s awkward, then, that the political career Stefanik wanted to fuel by memorializing the 2023\/2024 campus politics fights in book form seems to have come crashing to a halt. The once moderate Republican and Harvard grad (\u201906) had gone full MAGA by the Joe Biden years, making various statements<\/a> supporting Donald Trump\u2019s 2020 \u201cstolen\u201d election claims. After the 2023 campus antisemitism hearings threw her into the spotlight, and Trump came back into office in 2024, Trump seemed to reward her loyalty by nominating her to be ambassador to the United Nations in early 2025. But the rest of last year was all downhill: Trump rescinded Stefanik\u2019s ambassadorship nomination<\/a> because he didn\u2019t want to lose her congressional seat in a special election. Then, the president declined to endorse her campaign to win the Republican nomination for governor in New York state. In December of last year, a mere two years after the hearings that put her on SNL<\/em>, Stefanik announced<\/a> she was suspending that gubernatorial campaign and leaving Congress at the end of her term in 2026. She has a 4-year-old son, and says she\u2019ll be spending time with him; although she\u2019s young and likely to return to public life, she hasn\u2019t hinted at that yet, even to a friendly recent interviewer in the Wall Street Journal<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Instead of trying to see Stefanik\u2019s future in this book, you can read Poisoned Ivies<\/em> as an alternate reality: a narrative of what happened on campuses after Oct. 7 that manages to avoid description of any aspect of what was occurring in Gaza, to characterize Jewish campus response without mentioning that there were many Jewish students and faculty members who publicly declared themselves to be nonsupporters of the war, and (in one vivid and illustrative example) to describe the occupation of Hamilton Hall at Columbia without telling the story of Hind Rajab<\/a>, whose name the occupiers used to rename the hall<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Former Harvard president Claudine Gay\u2019s famous response to Stefanik\u2019s question at those hearings\u2014Stefanik: \u201cDoes calling for the genocide of Jews violate your university\u2019s code of conduct?\u201d; Gay: \u201cIt depends on the context\u201d\u2014reappears multiple times over the book, as an epigraph, and as the kicker at the very end. (\u201cTruth and light will win. It does not depend on the context.\u201d) Writing at the time of Gay\u2019s resignation, A.O. Scott of the Times described <\/a>that word as \u201ca careful, neutral piece of language that struck some listeners as outrageous for precisely that reason: an attempt at anti-inflammatory rhetoric that had the opposite effect.\u201d I realize that I\u2019m following Gay into Stefanik\u2019s trap by pointing out that the very thing Poisoned Ivies<\/em> lacks is context<\/em>. But reading Poisoned Ivies<\/em>, you realize that if you tell the story of campus protests post\u2013Oct. 7 without\u00a0invoking Gaza, then the protesters, the faculty supporting them, and the administrators who struggled to figure out how to respond all sound incomprehensible\u2014antisemitic at the very least; possibly also possessed by demons.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s no mistake. The book cites many of the conservative outlets and posters that covered campus politics around the time of the biggest protests: the New York Post, Tablet magazine, Bill Ackman, City Journal, the Free Press, the Heritage Foundation, Canary Mission. Reading it feels like reading right-wing X in the spring of 2024. There are plenty of real instances of rhetorical excess from pro-Palestinian<\/a> campus groups to cite, and Stefanik certainly latches onto those, but doesn\u2019t stop there, mixing these examples with uncritical reproduction of certain stories of campus antisemitism that will be very memorable to anyone who was online during that time, but that look somewhat less verifiable in hindsight. Eyal Yakoby, a Penn student who (Stefanik writes) \u201chas bravely confronted and chronicled antisemitism on Penn\u2019s campus since October 7,\u201d had his lawsuit against Penn dismissed<\/a> by a federal judge last year. The former Columbia professor Shai Davidai, who was investigated by Columbia<\/a> for allegedly harassing and doxing student activists and Columbia faculty, is, Stefanik writes, a \u201cliberal\u201d who favors a two-state solution and denies any wrongdoing. But that investigation was dropped <\/a>after Davidai left Columbia in the summer of 2025 and no longer had the status of employee. Stefanik describes how Sahar Tartak, a Yale undergrad, said she was \u201cjabbed in the face\u201d with a Palestinian flag at a protest\u2014\u201cthankfully, she did not suffer any long-term damage to her eyesight,\u201d Stefanik writes. But if you watch the video of this \u201cjabbing,\u201d it\u2019s far from clear that\u2019s what happened. As the New York Times corrected<\/a> an April 2024 Bret Stephens column that covered Tartak\u2019s story: \u201cA video of the incident shows a flag hit her face; it does not clearly show that a demonstrator jammed a flag in her eye.\u201d<\/p>\n