Bari Weiss


Bari Weiss is an American opinion writer and editor. From 2013 until 2017 she was an op-ed and book review editor at The Wall Street Journal. From 2017 to 2020, Weiss was an op-ed staff editor and writer about culture and politics at The New York Times.

Early life and education

Bari Weiss was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to Lou and Amy Weiss. She grew up in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood, and graduated from Pittsburgh's Community Day School and Shady Side Academy. The eldest of four sisters, she attended the Tree of Life Synagogue and had her bat mitzvah ceremony there. After high school, Weiss went to Israel on a Nativ gap year program, helping build a medical clinic for Bedouin in the Negev desert, and studying at a feminist yeshiva and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Weiss attended Columbia University in New York City, graduating in 2007. She founded the Columbia Coalition for Sudan in response to the War in Darfur. Weiss was the founding editor from 2005 to 2007 of The Current, a magazine at Columbia for politics, culture, and Jewish affairs. Following graduation, Weiss was a Wall Street Journal Bartley Fellow in 2007, and a Dorot Fellow from 2007 to 2008 in Jerusalem.

Columbians for Academic Freedom

As a student at Columbia, Weiss co-founded Columbians for Academic Freedom in fall 2004, in response to allegations of classroom intimidation by faculty in the department of Middle East and Asian Langaguages and Cultures, relating to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Weiss personally said she had felt intimidated by faculty member Joseph Massad in his lectures. In an interview with The New York Sun, she added that Massad spent disproportionate time talking about Zionism and Israel for a course about the entire Middle East, he "glossed over" human rights violations in Middle Eastern nations other than Israel, in "nearly all his lectures" he found a way to denounce Israel and the West, and he did not present any material that argued Zionism was not racist. Course notes taken by Weiss and 2 other students suggested that, during the course, Massad denied the Middle Eastern descent of European Jews and accused Israel of starting the Middle Eastern trend of plane hijacking. A roommate of Weiss' who took the same course by Massad later noted that the course unit focused on Palestine lasted no more than 2 weeks.
In November 2004, The David Project released a short film, Columbia Unbecoming, which depicted the testimony of several students, including CAF members, who say they were demeaned or harassed by professors for holding pro-Israel views. Weiss criticised Columbia Unbecoming in April 2005, saying it "conflat issues" and made some unfounded allegations. In response to the release of the film, Columbia president Lee Bollinger put together a committee to examine the allegations. The committee found one instance of intimidating behavior by Massad, but also criticized a lack of civility on campus, including from pro-Israel students who heckled some professors. Weiss criticised the report for its focus on individual grievances, which "didn’t happen in a vacuum," adding
"These students were intimidated because of their ideological positions."
In her 2019 book, How to Fight Anti-Semitism, Weiss describes the contentious atmosphere during this period as giving her "a front row seat to leftist anti-Semitism" at the university. The activism initiated by Weiss was alleged by Glenn Greenwald to be "designed to ruin the careers of Arab professors by equating their criticisms of Israel with racism, anti-Semitism, and bullying, and its central demand was that those professors be disciplined for their transgressions." Weiss has called Greenwald's characterizations "baseless", saying that she "advocated for the rights of students to express their viewpoints in the classroom", adding, "I don't know when criticizing professors became out of bounds."

Career

In 2007, Weiss worked for Haaretz and The Forward. In Haaretz, she criticized the tenure promotion of Barnard College anthropologist Nadia Abu El-Haj over a book that Weiss alleged caricatured Israeli archaeologists. From 2011 to 2013, Weiss was senior news and politics editor at Tablet.

2013–2017: ''The Wall Street Journal''

Weiss was an op-ed and book review editor at The Wall Street Journal from 2013 until April 2017. She left following the departure of Pulitzer Prize winner and deputy editor Bret Stephens, for whom she had worked, and joined him at The New York Times.

2017–2020: ''The New York Times''

In 2017, as part of an effort by The New York Times to broaden the ideological range of its opinion staff after the inauguration of President Trump, the paper hired Weiss as an op-ed staff editor and writer about culture and politics. Through her first year at the paper, she wrote opinion pieces advocating for the blending of cultural influences, something derided by what she termed the "strident left" as cultural appropriation. She criticized the organizers of the 2017 Women's March protesting the inauguration of President Trump for their "chilling ideas and associations", particularly singling out several individuals she believed to have made antisemitic or anti-Zionist statements in the past. Her article about the Chicago Dyke March, asserting that intersectionality is a "caste system, in which people are judged according to how much their particular caste has suffered throughout history," was condemned by playwright Eve Ensler, creator of the Vagina Monologues.
On June 7, 2020, the Times editorial page editor, James Bennet, resigned after more than 1,000 staffers signed a letter protesting his publication of an op-ed by U.S. Senator Tom Cotton saying that since "rioters have plunged many American cities into anarchy", soldiers should be sent as backup for the police to end the violence. Bennet later stated he had not read the op-ed beforehand. Weiss characterized the internal controversy as an ongoing "civil war" between what she called young "social justice warriors" and what she identified as older, "free speech advocate", staffers. This characterization was disputed by numerous other journalists and opinion-writers at the Times; Taylor Lorenz, a technology reporter who covers internet culture, described it as a "willful misrepresentation" that ignored the numerous older staffers who had spoken out, while Jamal Jordan, the Times' digital storytelling editor, criticized her for not listening to her black colleagues and instead dismissing their concerns as a "woke civil war".

2020: Resignation from ''The New York Times''

Weiss announced her departure from The New York Times on July 14, 2020, publishing a resignation letter on her website in which she criticized the Times for capitulating to criticism on Twitter, and for not supporting her when she was bullied by her colleagues. Weiss wrote that consensus at the Times had become "that truth isn’t a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else." Weiss accused her former employer of "unlawful discrimination, hostile work environment, and constructive discharge".
In her letter Weiss said, "Stories are chosen and told in a way to satisfy the narrowest of audiences, rather than to allow a curious public to read about the world and then draw their own conclusions." She also wrote, "Twitter is not on the masthead of The New York Times, but Twitter has become its ultimate editor."
Her letter was praised by U.S. Senators Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and Kelly Loeffler, Donald Trump Jr., political commentator Ben Shapiro, former Democratic presidential candidates Andrew Yang and Marianne Williamson, and political commentator Bill Maher.

Political views

Weiss has been described as conservative by Haaretz, The Times of Israel, The Daily Dot, and Business Insider. In an interview with Joe Rogan, she described herself as a "left-leaning centrist". According to The Washington Post, Weiss "portrays herself as a liberal uncomfortable with the excesses of left-wing culture," and has sought to "position herself as a reasonable liberal concerned that far-left critiques stifled free speech." Vanity Fair has described Weiss as being "a provocateur". The Jewish Telegraphic Agency said that her writing "doesn't lend itself easily to labels."
Weiss has expressed support for Israel and Zionism in her columns. When writer Andrew Sullivan described her as an "unhinged Zionist", she responded saying she "happily plead guilty as charged." In 2018, she said she believed the sexual assault allegations against Supreme Court justice nominee Brett Kavanaugh, but questioned whether they should disqualify him from serving on the Supreme Court because he was 17 when he allegedly committed the assault against Christine Blasey Ford. After backlash in the press, Weiss conceded that her sound bite was glib and simplistic, and said instead that Kavanaugh's rage-filled behavior before the Senate Judiciary Committee should have disqualified him. Also in 2018, she criticized the #MeToo Movement.
Following the Tree of Life synagogue massacre in Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh, Weiss was a guest on Real Time with Bill Maher in early November 2018. She said of American Jews who support President Donald Trump: "I hope this week that American Jews have woken up to the price of that bargain: They have traded policies that they like for the values that have sustained the Jewish people—and frankly, this country—forever: Welcoming the stranger; dignity for all human beings; equality under the law; respect for dissent; love of truth." In 2019, The Jerusalem Post named Weiss the seventh most influential Jew in the world.

Personal life

While attending Columbia University, she had an on and off relationship with comedian Kate McKinnon. She also dated Ariel Beery, with whom she had co-founded Columbians for Academic Freedom. From 2013 to 2016, Weiss was married to environmental engineer Jason Kass, the founder of Toilets for People, a company designing and manufacturing waterless self contained composting toilets. Weiss prefers not to label her sexual orientation but has stated that she is mostly attracted to women, though had been married to a man. During 2018–2019, Weiss dated Nellie Bowles, the Times's tech reporter.

Works