By Ben Sales
House Republican Conference Chair Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) speaks to reporters at a press conference following a House Republican Conference meeting at the U.S. Capitol Building, July 18, 2023. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
(JTA) — President-elect Donald Trump has chosen Rep. Elise Stefanik, a close ally whose questioning about campus antisemitism led to the resignations of two Ivy League presidents, as his ambassador to the United Nations.
“I am honored to nominate Chairwoman Elise Stefanik to serve in my Cabinet as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. Elise is an incredibly strong, tough, and smart America First fighter,” Trump said in a statement, according to CNN.
Stefanik, 40, a Republican who represents an upstate New York district, has grown increasingly close to Trump in recent years and is a member of the House leadership. Before Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Israel and the outbreak of the war in Gaza, she had drawn condemnation for comments echoing the white supremacist “great replacement theory,” a conspiracy theory whose original form claims that Jews are orchestrating mass immigration to displace the white populations of Western countries.
But last December, she gained praise from Jewish Democrats and Republicans for pressing the leaders of three elite universities — Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — on whether calls for the genocide of Jews would violate school policy. All three said that the answer would depend on context. The leaders of Penn and Harvard both stepped down in subsequent weeks.
Trump’s first ambassador to the U.N. in his first term, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, was an outspoken defender of Israel at the international body, which the United States and Israel have both accused of longstanding anti-Israel bias. She was succeeded by Kelly Craft and then, under President Joe Biden, by Linda Thomas-Greenfield.
But Haley ran against Trump for the Republican presidential nomination ahead of this year’s election, and he recently announced that she would not take a role in his incoming administration.
Upon news of Trump’s pick, Amir Ohana, the speaker of Israel’s Knesset and an ally of right-wing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, called Stefanik “The right woman, in the right place, at the right time.”
“A brilliant pick by President-Elect Trump,” Ohana tweeted. “@RepStefanik is a strong voice of moral clarity and a fierce fighter for what is right—exactly what the UN lacks nowadays and everything the US stands for.”