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(November 10, 2025 / JNS) A few days after Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) announced her entry into the gubernatorial race against New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, the pro-Israel congresswoman received extensive praise from billionaire philanthropist and physician Dr. Miriam Adelson at a Zionist Organization of America gala in Manhattan.
“When I heard you talking to the heads of the universities, I said to myself, ‘She has the guts to say the truth,’” Adelson told Stefanik on Sunday, as she introduced the congresswoman, whom the ZOA awarded its Maccabee Warrior Award for Leadership.
Adelson’s late husband, Sheldon Adelson, “used to say, ‘Stand up for what you believe in even if you stand up alone,’ and you showed us and all the world courage,” she told Stefanik. “You had the courage to do it, and you stood up for what you believe in, and it was fantastic. You are a great leader.”
Stefanik, who has been one of the leading voices on the House Education and Workforce Committee probing colleges and universities over their responses to Jew-hatred on campus, showed “courage to stand up for the Jewish people, Israel and the free world,” said Adelson, who said, “I hope to visit you in the office of New York governor next year after the election.”
In her remarks to an audience of about 500, Stefanik said that she is “proud to be one of the foremost champions of the Jewish people in the United States Congress, ensuring Israel’s right to defend herself, and fiercely opposing efforts by some of my colleagues to undermine it.”
“I have stood shoulder to shoulder with the American Jewish community and the people of Israel through war, terror and tragedy,” she said. “But a few years ago, I realized that there was another front in this battle—a battlefield we were losing, and one much closer to home: university campuses where we saw a scourge of antisemitism after Hamas’s terrorist attacks on Oct. 7.”
Stefanik told attendees that she will never forget putting a “simple” moral question to the Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and University of Pennsylvania presidents.
“‘Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate your university’s code of conduct?’” she said. “I expected them to say ‘yes.’ But one after another after another said, ‘It depends on the context.’ And the world heard. Let me be clear. It does not depend on the context.”
The congresswoman said that she is running for governor because New York “is not just a city and state in crisis. It is the epicenter of the battle for the very Western values that have shaped America. The fight for democracy, for capitalism, for the dignity of work, for the belief that through effort and perseverance anyone can achieve the American Dream.”
New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani is “a raging antisemite, defund the police, tax-hiking communist,” who “openly traffics in sympathy for those who chant ‘Globalize the Intifada,’ who refuses to condemn the glorification of terror, who has said he would arrest Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu, whose family history and political ideology is steeped in sympathy for suicide bombers and terrorists,” Stefanik said.
“At the very moment that New Yorkers were looking for strength and moral clarity, our weak Gov. Kathy Hochul, the worst governor in America, showed weakness and endorsed the jihadist for mayor,” Stefanik said. “She propelled him to this office putting every Jewish New Yorker at risk.”
Morton Klein, national president of the ZOA, said at the event that “there has been a generalization and mainstreaming of bigotry against Jews.”
“Bigotry has been disguised as principle, hatred is baptized as virtuous and the ZOA will fight these dangerous lies with no appeasement and no dilution,” he said. “Total war against hatred.”
Klein told JNS that the “most important goal of this event is to expose the lies propagated against the Jewish people.”
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