Congresswoman Elise Stefanik celebrated the resignation of the president of the University of Pennsylvania in a storm over campus antisemitism, but faced criticism regarding her support for Donald Trump, who associates with antisemites himself.
Referring to Liz Magill, who quit after a stormy congressional hearing last week, and the presidents of Harvard and MIT, who by Monday had not stepped down, Stefanik – the House Republican caucus chairperson – tweeted: “One down. Two to go.”
In response, the Maryland Democrat Jamie Raskin asked on MSNBC: “Where does Elise Stefanik get off lecturing anybody about antisemitism when she’s the hugest supporter of Donald Trump, who traffics in antisemitism all the time?
“She didn’t utter a peep of protest when he had Kanye West and Nick Fuentes over for dinner,” said Raskin, who is Jewish, about a controversial event at the former US president’s Mar-a-Lago property last November.
“Nick Fuentes, who doubts whether 7 October [the Hamas attacks which killed about 1,200 people in Israel] even took place because he thinks it was some kind of suspicious propaganda move by the Israelis.
“The Republican party is filled with people who are entangled with antisemitism like that and yet somehow [Stefanik] gets on [her] high horse and lectures a Jewish college president from MIT.”
The hearing concerned official responses to claims of rising campus antisemitism, surrounding protests against Israeli tactics in response to 7 October and student calls for a ceasefire in the Israel-Gaza war. During the war, more than 18,000 Palestinians have reportedly been killed by airstrikes in Gaza.
Sally Kornbluth, president of MIT, and Claudine Gay, president of Harvard, were also grilled. MIT expressed support for Kornbluth. Gay apologised for her testimony, saying: “Words matter”, as nearly 600 professors backed her in a public petition.
Magill resigned as president of Penn on Saturday. Stefanik, who led Republicans’ questioning, then tweeted: “One down. Two to go.
“This is only the very beginning of addressing the pervasive rot of antisemitism that has destroyed the most ‘prestigious’ higher education institutions in America. This forced resignation of the president of Penn is the bare minimum of what is required.”
Promising a “robust and comprehensive congressional investigation of all facets of their institutions[’] negligent perpetration of antisemitism including administrative, faculty, funding, and overall leadership and governance”, Stefanik called on Harvard and MIT to “do the right thing”.
Stefanik, a Harvard graduate, began her congressional career widely seen as a moderate New York Republican. But she adopted increasingly extreme Trumpist rhetoric as she rose to become House Republican caucus chair.
Raskin is a prominent Democrat who led impeachment efforts against Trump over the January 6 attacks, then sat on the committee that investigated the attack his supporters aimed at Congress. He told MSNBC he was “thinking about” the issue of campus antisemitism “as a father, as a parent”, concerned for students’ safety.
Raskin said: “I want to know that if somebody is actually calling for the genocide of the Jews or anybody else on campus, that we’ve got a college president who will say: ‘Quickly get campus police over there, that person could be a danger to other people around them.’
“Especially in the age of the AR-15 [assault rifle], when we’ve had, you know, genocidal-style language being used but also massacres taking place like at the Tree of Life synagogue, in Pittsburgh [in 2018], or at the Buffalo supermarket [in 2022].
“Those are rightwing antisemites who talk about the great replacement theory. We [also] had a guy at Cornell who was making death threats towards Jews, and we had three Palestinian college kids who were shot in Burlington, Vermont, of all places.”
The great replacement theory holds that Democrats encourage immigration and multiculturalism in order to bolster their political chances.
Last year, after a white gunman killed 10 people in an attack on a supermarket in a predominantly Black area of Buffalo, New York, Stefanik came under scrutiny for campaign ads which, in the words of the New York Times, “play[ed] on themes of the white supremacist ‘great replacement’ theory”.
Liz Cheney, the former Wyoming congresswoman turned anti-Trump Republican, said then that Stefanik and other Republicans had “enabled white nationalism, white supremacy and antisemitism”.
Last week, after the campus antisemitism hearing, the Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin praised Stefanik’s questioning of the college presidents – but also noted her use of great replacement theory.
Stefanik’s “ability … to sustain a rational argument about antisemitism at elite universities makes her [Make America great again] rhetoric that much worse”, Rubin wrote.
“She knows better.”
