Republicans address antisemitism in their ranks more effectively than Democrats do, and after Hamas’s Oct. 7 terror attack, the best way to protect Jews is via implementing policy, according to the Jewish spokeswoman for the Republican National Committee.
“When you see 1,200 of your own slaughtered, all that you should be worried about is policy,” said Elizabeth Pipko, 29, a model and new RNC publicist.
“Policy dictates what happened on Oct. 7. It dictated the response on Oct. 8, which would have been much stronger. It dictates why they’re still being held hostage right now, including five Americans,” Pipko told JNS on the sidelines of the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee on Thursday. “The policy is what matters.”
The self-identified “Jew first, then a Republican,” told JNS that she stepped away from being spokeswoman for the so-called exodus movement—which encourages progressive Jews to leave the Democratic Party—because she thought it was more important to convince Jews to become more religious than more politically conservative.
“It would then lead to the same result,” she said.
Prior to Oct. 7, Pipko figured that Jewish voters would move to the right after looking at the differences between Democrat and Republican policies, and they would see that the latter was better for them. Then Hamas’s attack opened the eyes of many Jews who voted Democrat, she told JNS.
“There actually wasn’t a major shift until Oct. 7—until people saw what happened, until they realized that all the policies of this administration might have contributed to that,” Pipko said. “Until they sat and thought, ‘Would this be the same under a Donald Trump administration?’”
A first-generation American, whose parents fled Soviet persecution, Pipko admitted to JNS that there is antisemitism within her party.
“I think both parties have made mistakes. I think everybody can do better,” she said. “When antisemitism exists in our party, in the fringes, people don’t always call it out as they should. I have always stood on the front lines of calling it out.”
When Jew-hatred has found its way into Republican institutions and other places of impact, “I’ve always seen the Republicans move forward and make sure it’s called out or eliminated,” she told JNS. “I can’t say the same for the other side.”
She cited far-left progressive Democrats, who spread antisemitic tropes. “They still have their seats. They still have their power,” Pipko told JNS. “I think that’s a giant problem, especially in the wake of what we saw on Oct. 7.”
Pipko feels “safer as a Jew standing here at the RNC right now than I would on the other side,” she said. She added that she prefers the transactional foreign policy tendencies of those like former president Donald Trump and his running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) to the Biden administration’s Israel policy.
“Would you rather someone who tells you the right things but doesn’t provide you the policies and the decisions that you need, or someone who you may not be sure where they come from on certain issues, but at least the policies are exactly what you want and the policies to keep you and your family safe?” she said. “I think the answer is obvious.”
After Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, Pipko returned to the modeling world and also created a Holocaust education project. Then in May, the Republican National Committee asked her to become its spokeswoman.
“I’ve done a lot of things on the media front, so it’s very comfortable for me,” she told JNS. “It comes from the heart. If I didn’t believe this, I wouldn’t be standing here.”
Pipko feels that she is representing the Jewish people in the Trump apparatus.
“It means the world to be here, represent them and fight for them, truly, in the best way that I know,” she told JNS. “If I didn’t think this was the best thing for the Jewish people, I wouldn’t be here.”