JANUARY 5 • 2023 | 35

265,000 subscribers who 
receive her Substack column. 
She now employs more than 
a dozen journalists, contrib-
utors and assistants. Demand 
is strong for her speak-
ing engagements. She has 
appeared several times on Bill 
Maher’s HBO show.
Having struck a chord with 
newsmakers, she attracts 
top names to her site and to 
her podcast, among them 
Israeli prime minister-des-
ignate Benjamin Netanyahu 
and former U.S. Attorney 
General William Barr, former 
Secretary of State Condoleeza 
Rice and former Secretary 
of State Mike Pompeo. Her 
collaboration with Taibbi at 
Twitter probably couldn’t 
have been possible without 
approval from Musk.
Growing up in Pittsburgh, 
Weiss attended Jewish day 
school, Shadyside Academy 

and Camp Ramah before 
matriculating at Columbia 
University. She celebrated her 
bat mitzvah at the Tree of Life 
Synagogue near her home in 
Squirrel Hill, site of the 2018 
shooting that killed 11 and 
wounded six, including several 
Holocaust survivors.
As a student at Columbia, 
she became embroiled in a 
protest against three profes-
sors who some students and 
faculty thought were biased 
against Israel. She co-founded 
Columbians for Academic 
Freedom while asserting that 
some students at the school 
were being intimidated because 
of their views and opinions.
In 2019 she wrote How to 
Fight Anti-Semitism, a book 
that won the Jewish Book 
Award for the year. Hillel 
Halkin, who reviewed it in 
the New York Times, called 
the book “brave.” Halkin 

also wrote: “That it must be 
(brave) is a badge of shame 
for the ‘progressive’ America 
with which she identifies.”
“Should she have to fear 
ostracism or damage to her 
journalistic reputation,” 
Halkin wondered, “for point-
ing out that anti-Zionism and 
antisemitism, while theoret-
ically distinguishable, have 
long merged into a single 
ugly phenomenon? Or that it 
is obscene, less than a century 
after the Holocaust, to class 
Jews with their historical 
‘white oppressors’?”
As Halkin pointed out, 
though Jews in the U.S. com-
prise a tiny minority of the pop-
ulation, hate crimes against Jews 
account for more than half of all 
such recorded acts. Moreover, 
once confined mostly to the 
right, such as the attack on the 
Tree of Life, antisemitic acts, 
speech and opinion now infect 

the left as well. 
Ultimately, Halkin wrote 
that he was disappointed 
with Weiss’ book because she 
failed to see that her identifi-
cation as an American liberal 
— at least in 2019 — blinded 
her to what Halkin calls the 
“deadening mental conformi-
ty” of liberalism. 
Indeed, concern for “the 
other,” respect for openness 
and democratic values and 
tolerance are precisely what 
antisemites from the left don’t 
practice on behalf of their 
Jewish brethren.
Three years on, Bari Weiss’ 
progressive views may have 
shifted somewhat, based on 
her experiences at the New 
York Times. I wish I could have 
discussed this point with her. 
She’s too busy at the moment 
for interviews, I was told, 
reviewing and evaluating files 
and documents at Twitter. 

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