Bari Weiss

Weiss was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to Lou and Amy Weiss, former owners of Weisshouse, a Pittsburgh company founded in 1943 that sells flooring, furniture, and kitchens; they own flooring company Weisslines.

She grew up in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood and graduated from Pittsburgh's Community Day School and Shady Side Academy.

The eldest daughter among 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 Bedouins in the Negev desert and studying at a feminist yeshiva and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Bari Weiss (born March 25, 1984) is an American journalist, writer, and editor.

Following the release of the film Columbia Unbecoming in fall 2004, alleging classroom intimidation of pro-Israel students by pro-Palestinian professors, she co-founded Columbians for Academic Freedom (CAF) together with Aharon Horwitz, Daniella Kahane, and Ariel Beery.

Weiss said she had felt intimidated by Professor Joseph Massad in his lectures, and she thought he spent too much time talking about Zionism and Israel for a course about the entire Middle East.

In response to the release of the film, Columbia put together a committee to examine the allegations.

The committee criticized Massad, but emphasized a lack of civility on campus, including from pro-Israel students who heckled some of their professors.

Weiss criticized the committee for its focus on individual grievances, maintaining that students were intimidated because of their views.

Weiss was the founding editor from 2005 to 2007 of The Current, a magazine at Columbia for politics, culture, and Jewish affairs.

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.

Following graduation, Weiss was a Wall Street Journal Bartley Fellow in 2007 and a Dorot Fellow from 2007 to 2008 in Jerusalem.

As a student at Columbia, Weiss took an active role in the Columbia Unbecoming controversy.

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.

She was an op-ed and book review editor at The Wall Street Journal (2013–2017) and an op-ed staff editor and writer on culture and politics at The New York Times (2017–2020).

Since March 1, 2021, she has worked as a regular columnist for German daily newspaper Die Welt.

Weiss founded the media company The Free Press (formerly Common Sense) and hosts the podcast Honestly.

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.

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, opinion editor James Bennet 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, for misunderstanding the work of intersectional politics.

Other sources condemned the article as fundamentally misunderstanding the definition of intersectionality.

This account had been identified as fake in multiple media outlets in 2017 as a right-wing masquerade aimed at discrediting the left-wing protest movement.

In January 2018, Babe.net published an anonymous woman's allegation that comedian and actor Aziz Ansari's behavior during a date rose to the level of sexual assault.

Weiss published a piece titled "Aziz Ansari Is Guilty. Of Not Being a Mind Reader", one of many responses to this incident in the context of the.

Weiss was one of several writers, including Caitlin Flanagan of The Atlantic, who argued that the woman who wrote the piece ignored her own agency, not considering her own ability to speak up and leave the situation.

In March 2018, Weiss published the column "We're All Fascists Now" in which she argued that members of the left wing are increasingly intolerant of alternate views, presenting varied examples.

Shortly after publication, the piece was corrected and an editorial note was placed on it because one of the examples used was a fake antifa Twitter account.

In May 2018, Weiss published "Meet the Renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web".

This piece profiled a collection of thinkers who share an unorthodox approach to their fields and to the media landscape.

Weiss collectively described them as the Intellectual Dark Web, borrowing the term from Eric Weinstein, managing director of Thiel Capital.

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 (some of whom lacked tenure) be disciplined for their transgressions".

(Flanagan's essay was one of several that year for which she was a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary. )