Tone deaf: ‘SNL’ mocks Elise Stefanik, not college presidents, in skit on antisemitism hearing

The elite college presidents who waffled on whether calls for “genocide of Jews” violate their conduct codes have been widely excoriated, but as far as “Saturday Night Live” is concerned, the joke was on Rep. Elise Stefanik.

The NBC sketch-comedy show was accused of stunning tone-deafness for a skit that mocked not the Harvard, University of Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology presidents who stepped in it during last week’s House hearing, but the Republican Stefanik.

Chloe Troast, the comedian playing Ms. Stefanik, starts by saying, “Thank you, chairwoman. Now I’m going to start screaming questions at these women like I’m Billy Eichner.”

She then screams: “Antisemitism! Yay or nay?!”

The digs at Ms. Stefanik kept coming, including a line in which her character whines that “hate speech has no place on college campuses,” but that it belongs “in Congress, on Elon Musk’s Twitter, at private dinners with my donors, and in public speeches by my work husband, Donald Trump.”

“Saturday Night Live” has made no secret of its leftist sympathies, but attacking Ms. Stefanik for eliciting the pivotal testimony was blasted as wildly out-of-touch. All three presidents said that whether demanding the “genocide of Jews” runs afoul of campus rules would depend on the context.

Hours before the live late-night show aired, Penn President Liz Magill stepped down amid bipartisan congressional calls for her resignation.

Conservative entertainment critic Christian Toto said that the show’s “hard-Left biases refused to hold the presidents accountable.”

“Instead, the sketch mocked Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., who did nothing wrong save expose the trio’s moral rot for all to see,” said Mr. Toto on the Hollywood in Toto website. “She’s a Republican, though, and a Trump supporter. So she became The Target.”

They did it. They really did it.#SNL did the ‘Republicans Pounce’ sketch to deflect attention from Ivy League hate

Amazinghttps://t.co/bycesSGToL@megynkelly @ComfortablySmug

— Christian Toto (@HollywoodInToto) December 10, 2023

The conservative RedState site said that “it looked like someone decided there’s a Republican in the story so we have to take the opposite tack and attack her, even if she’s the one calling out antisemitism and the harassment of students at elite colleges.”

“Hey, SNL? Stefanik is the one doing her job and standing up for what is right in this matter,” said RedState writer Nick Arama in a Sunday post on the show’s “horrible, unfunny take.”

He added that there were “there were hardly any laughs, and it was painful.”

Conservative podcast host Gerry Callahan said that “I’m in awe. They wrote this, rehearsed this, decided to open the show with this.”

“Forget the tone-deafness of making Stefanik the butt of the joke. It is stunningly unfunny and awful,” he said on X.

Rabbi Shmuel Reichman called it “the most embarrassing SNL skit I have EVER seen!”

“Unfortunately, this is not surprising,” he said on X. “SNL hasn’t had their finger on the pulse for about a decade now; they’re about as out of touch with reality as Liz Magill.”