Elise Stefanik has a new book on campus antisemitism. It’s missing something big.
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The new book Poisoned Ivies: The Inside Account of the Academic and Moral Rot at America’s Elite Universitiesby New York Rep. Elise Stefanik, is a actual time capsule. In taking on this book venture, Stefanik clearly wished to cement her second of political stardom—that one time in late 2023 that she asked the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and Penn a yes-or-no query at a congressional listening to on campus antisemitism, and people presidents responded disastrously—into a launchpad for her political profession. Poisoned Ivies recounts how, on the day of the hearings, Stefanik was enjoying the Congressional model of Michael Jordan’s flu game—she was sick, however went to work anyway, “armed with Kleenex, cough drops, and dosed with over-the-counter cold medicine.” Dramatically, Stefanik describes dithering over whether or not to just accept a colleague’s supply to yield their minutes: “The question heard around the world almost didn’t happen.” And in fact the truth that the listening to was so zeitgeisty as to appear on Saturday Night Live makes it into the book—though Stefanik describes the ensuing sketch, which mocked her in addition to faculty presidents Claudine Gay, Sally Kornbluth, and Liz Magill, as “the worst cold open ever,” you higher consider it charges a point out.
It’s awkward, then, that the political profession Stefanik wished to gasoline by memorializing the 2023/2024 campus politics fights in book type appears to have come crashing to a halt. The eleven average Republican and Harvard grad (’06) had gone full MAGA by the Joe Biden years, making various statements supporting Donald Trump’s 2020 “stolen” election claims. After the 2023 campus antisemitism hearings threw her into the highlight, and Trump got here again into workplace in 2024, Trump appeared to reward her loyalty by nominating her to be ambassador to the United Nations in early 2025. But the remainder of final 12 months was all downhill: Trump Stefanik’s ambassadorship nomination rescinded as a result of he did not wish to lose his congressional seat in a particular election. Then, the president declined to endorse his marketing campaign to win the Republican nomination for governor in New York state. In December of final 12 months, a mere two years after the hearings that put her on SNLStefanik announced she was suspending that gubernatorial marketing campaign and leaving Congress on the finish of her time period in 2026. She has a 4-year-old son, and says she’ll be spending time with him; Although she’s younger and more likely to return to public life, she hasn’t hinted at that but, even to a friendly recent interviewer in the Wall Street Journal.
Instead of attempting to see Stefanik’s future on this book, you possibly can learn Poisoned Ivies as an alternate actuality: a narrative of what occurred on campuses after Oct. 7 that manages to keep away from description of any facet of what was occurring in Gaza, to characterize Jewish campus response with out mentioning that there have been many Jewish college students and college members who publicly declared themselves to be nonsupporters of the warfare, and (in a single vivid and illustrative instance) to explain the occupation of Hamilton Hall at Columbia with out telling the story of Hind Rajabwhose title the occupiers used to rename the hall.
Former Harvard president Claudine Gay’s well-known response to Stefanik’s query at these hearings—Stefanik: “Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate your university’s code of conduct?”; Gay: “It depends on the context”—reappears a number of occasions over the book, as an epigraph, and because the kicker on the very finish. (“Truth and light will win. It does not depend on the context.”) Writing on the time of Gay’s resignation, AO Scott of the Times described that phrase as “a 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.” I understand that I’m following Gay into Stefanik’s entice by declaring that the very factor Poisoned Ivies lacks is context. But studying Poisoned Iviesyou understand that for those who inform the story of campus protests put up–Oct. 7 with out invoking Gaza, then the protesters, the college supporting them, and the directors who struggled to determine how you can reply all sound incomprehensible—antisemitic on the very least; presumably additionally possessed by demons.
That’s no mistake. The book cites most of the conservative shops and posters that coated campus politics across the time of the largest protests: the New York Post, Tablet journal, Bill Ackman, City Journal, the Free Press, the Heritage Foundation, Canary Mission. Reading it appears like studying right-wing X within the spring of 2024. There are loads of actual situations of rhetorical excess from pro-Palestinian campus teams to quote, and Stefanik actually latches onto these, however does not cease there, mixing these examples with uncritical copy of sure tales of campus antisemitism that will probably be very memorable to anybody who was on-line throughout that point, however that look considerably much less verifiable in hindsight. Eyal Yakoby, a Penn scholar who (Stefanik writes) “has bravely confronted and chronicled antisemitism on Penn’s campus since October 7,” had his lawsuit against Penn dismissed by a federal decide final 12 months. The former Columbia professor Shai Davidai, who was investigated by Columbia for allegedly harassing and doxing scholar activists and Columbia college, is, Stefanik writes, a “liberal” who favors a two-state resolution and denies any wrongdoing. But that investigation was dropped after Davidai left Columbia in the summertime of 2025 and not had the standing of worker. Stefanik describes how Sahar Tartak, a Yale undergrad, stated she was “jabbed in the face” with a Palestinian flag at a protest—“thankfully, she did not suffer any long-term damage to her eyesight,” Stefanik writes. But for those who watch the video of this “jabbing,” it’s miles from clear that is what occurred. As the New York Times corrected an April 2024 Bret Stephens column that coated Tartak’s story: “A video of the incident shows a flag hit her face; it does not clearly show that a demonstrator jammed a flag in her eye.”
In a extra advanced case of flattening-out, Stefanik lauds the “patriotic frat boys” who thwarted activists who replaced an American flag with a Palestinian flag on the University of North Carolina, restoring Old Glory to its place and guarding it in opposition to additional interference. Stefanik praises them with out mentioning that some frat boys on different campuses taunted pro-Palestine protesters with racist and demeaning chants—or, that among the frat boys at UNC later informed the media they did not get pleasure from being canonized by conservatives preventing tradition wars on the nationwide stage. “The use of our actions to promote a narrative that we were some right-wing, MAGA heroes have been a gross misrepresentation and a disservice to many of those who were actually there,” one stated to the Times In September 2024, after right-wingers on-line raised tons of of hundreds of {dollars} to pay for a “rager” so the boys may rejoice.
Stefanik pats herself on the again for kicking off the “generational upheaval” of the connection between the federal authorities and universities that has unfolded in the first year of Trump’s second administration. “Our hearing reset the course of American higher education,” she writes. This could also be considerably true, even when Trump, who does not like to share credit score, would possibly discover it annoying to learn. But issues look totally different in 2026 than they did in 2024, and so they do not all the time evolve in a straight line. In the weeks earlier than Poisoned Ivies was revealed, because the warfare on Iran unfolded, Tucker Carlson called Donald Trump to “slave” to Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the BBC, and Marjorie Taylor Greene known as for Trump to be faraway from workplace. Last week, the Pew Research Center published a survey displaying that majorities of adults below 50 in each political events now have a “very” or “somewhat” unfavorable view of Israel. In hindsight, what occurred on America’s elite campuses in 2023 and 2024 began something—but it surely’s removed from clear what that something would possibly be.
