With one question, Rep. Elise Stefanik became the general of a war against antisemitism on college campuses across America:
“Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate your university’s code of conduct?”
The Ivy League presidents she questioned in December 2023 — just weeks after the atrocities of Oct. 7 led to an explosion of antisemitism at their schools — couldn’t answer it.
The viral video of her query became the most-watched congressional hearing clip in history.
Stefanik’s new book “Poisoned Ivies” explains how elite universities arrived at that moment — and why it was no flash-in-the-pan controversy, but an indicator of a long decline.
The story she tells is about everything that led up to that hearing, and everything that followed — as reactions and responses came pouring into her office over weeks and months.
I personally observed Stefanik’s commitment to providing a safe place for those who found themselves victims of antisemitic hatred.
In 2024 I arranged a meeting between Stefanik and Or Gat, whose sister Carmel was taken hostage from their family home in Kibbutz Be’eri.
For over an hour, he recounted what happened — how his sister-in-law was also kidnapped and later released, how his brother and niece fled on foot and hid in a ditch for 12 hours, how his mother was murdered on that dreadful Saturday morning.
Stefanik cried as she listened, and as her staff stood by the door trying to move her on to the next meeting.
She stayed to hear every word of Gat’s testimony before giving him a long hug goodbye.
It was a demonstration of solidarity in its most human form.
And in “Poisoned Ivies,” her argument is ultimately about connection — about how the impact of what happens on campus extends far beyond it.
The rhetoric, the ideology, the unwillingness to draw moral lines clearly; all of it travels far beyond our campuses.
The viral hearing moment, she told me, was only the beginning.
“No office became the centralized office for these issues more than ours,” Stefanik said.
She was inundated, she told The Post, with “tens of thousands of emails … sometimes in a day,” from students, parents and faculty sharing their experiences of antisemitism on campus, at times crashing her office’s email servers.
What emerges from those accounts is a story of institutional failure.
“How we respond to this threat … matters to every American,” she writes, because it shapes norms, sets precedents and determines whether our universities can remain places of academic excellence — or devolve into hotbeds of hate.
“I view antisemitism as a canary in the coal mine . . . an attack on Western civilization,” she said.
The book builds that case by tracing how elite universities became agents of radical activism, hollowing out their core mission.
“Radical left-wing political ideology is now synonymous with higher education,” she argues, producing campuses that function not as places of debate but as monocultures, where faculty and administrators “operate like a herd” and dissent is all but unknown.
That ideological shift, she argues, has been reinforced by bureaucratic structures — particularly DEI offices — that don’t simply administer policy but enforce their beliefs about power, identity and justice.
Meanwhile, financial incentives pull universities in the wrong direction.
Elite institutions, Stefanik writes, are “no longer prioritizing American students” and are increasingly shaped by billions of dollars’ worth of foreign funding through donations, tuition and research partnerships.
The result is a system that’s less anchored in American principles and more responsive to outside pressures — a dynamic that, in her telling, has real consequences for what is taught, what is tolerated and what is ignored.
During our conversation, Stefanik described how deeply she was affected by her private conversations with faculty and alumni who were unwilling to speak publicly.
And as a graduate of Harvard, she was personally horrified to realize the truth: that the leadership of some of the most influential institutions in the country had, in critical moments, simply failed.
That’s the thread that runs through the book — and through a letter she received from Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, which has not previously been made public.
By “demanding answers and refusing to accept moral relativism,” Netanyahu wrote, Stefanik “exposed a collapse of leadership at some of the most influential institutions in the United States.”
Stefanik argues that if our universities cannot say, clearly and without qualification, that calls for genocide are wrong, then the problem is not simply academic.
She understands better than most in public life the lasting truth of Abraham Lincoln’s observation: “The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next.”
What happens in today’s lecture halls will have a tsunami effect in the halls of power for decades to come.
Bethany Mandel writes and podcasts at The Mom Wars.
