Bari Weiss’s Selective Sensitivity

Back in June 2020, opinion journalist Bari Weiss, then working as an op-ed contributor and editor at the New York Times, broke protocol by live-tweeting during a private Zoom discussion (those early COVID days) convened by the paper’s editorial leaders. Beyond the unprofessionalism, Weiss’s tweets conveyed her lack of basic empathy for others. Weiss objected that some of her colleagues dared to criticize the paper for publishing an op-ed by a far-right U.S. Senator calling for the military to take control of American cities during the BLM summer. Weiss characterized her adult colleagues as campus kids in search of “safetyism.”

What makes Weiss’s attitude offensive and hypocritical is that it was voiced against her Black colleagues dismissively, people who were rightfully worried about deploying armed troops trained not for crowd control but lethal combat. Black journalists have every reason to suspect that they would be more vulnerable than their white peers.

Weiss’s view that even unpopular or uncomfortable opinions should be heard in the public square is inviolable in a free society, including opinions that make some people feel unsafe. The problem was that Weiss couldn’t even wait until the meeting ended to express a contemptible and childish verdict, one disputed by other people in the meeting who rejected Weiss’s obsessive characterization of everything she does not like as “woke” cancel culture. Instead of hearing out her Black colleagues, who are expressing matters of life and death during a national reckoning over race, Weiss decided that she’d heard enough and proceeded to mock them.

Her lack of basic decency and humanity is a mark against her character, but she could at least apply the standards across the board, including toward her own Jewish community.

Weiss’s hypocrisy is unambiguous: She has a hawk-eye toward any real or perceived slight against Jewish people, demands the utmost deference to Zionist Jewish sensibilities, but does not model that behavior toward other communities.

In the past, on X (formerly Twitter), Weiss has even taken to using the hashtag #JewsDontCount (popularized by a Zionist Jewish British comedian infamous for wearing Blackface) whenever she thinks that American Jews are not being accorded the same respect that is ostensibly evident toward other minorities. This was always delusional and conjures up the expression: For those used to privilege, equality feels like oppression.

The idea that American Jews have ever been accorded less concern over their sensitivities than other minorities is belied by the political establishment’s suppression of the 2023-2024 anti-genocide campus movement when the sensibilities of pro-Israel Jewish students were given more due than the lives of Palestinians and the feelings of Palestinian students whose loved ones were either killed or under attack in Gaza.

In the name of Zionist Jewish sensibilities, professors were fired, students expelled, diplomas withheld, and foreign students detained or deported; moreover, the Trump Administration has used the erstwhile campus movement — branded as antisemitic despite the high participation of Jewish students and faculty — to shakedown univerities, including public institutions, and clamp down on academic freedom. Additionally, ICE is targeting people for their pro-Palestinian sympathies. Countless states have passed politicized definitions of antisemitism to shield Israel from criticism and anti-BDS laws restricting the political activity of Americans in the name of Israel.

If this is what a lack of deference looks like, one would hate to see a real underdog (except we do every day in the lives of people like Mahmoud Khalil). Weiss made her career attacking “wokism” and its alleged attack on free speech, decried campus and professional “safetyism,” and made opposition to cancel culture a high religion — unless it conflicted with her pro-Israel politics.

Here was a campus community — Zionist Jews — demanding that campus protests be disbanded, even at the cost of inviting in the police departments, because the slogans shouted — such as “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” and “globalize the intifada” — made them feel uncomfortable. Is this not the very safetyism Weiss normally condemns? Instead,  as the new founder of the reactionary Free Press, Weiss ran endless commentary attacking and maligning the student movement. Opposition to cancel culture on campus went out the window. It was illiberal to indulge the complaints of, say, Black or trans students, but some people are more worthy than others. This is a pattern.

Weiss has directed the Free Press to oppose every form of sensitivity toward every community on the planet, it seems, with one conspicuous exception. She employs, for instance, Black conservative Coleman Hughes, who exists to go after Black writers such as Ta-Nehisi Coates and Ibram X. Kendi, who speak out against anti-Black racism. She publishes notorious anti-Muslim bigots, such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who spread endless hysteria about the alleged threat of Muslims to the West. She’s given a big space to Israeli far-right writers like Amit Segal, who oppose Palestinian self-determination on any terms. She platforms British charlatan Douglass Murray, an anti-Muslim Western chauvinist who gleefully hates Palestinians. Alongside this, the Free Press runs countless pieces decrying any perception of antisemitism, which usually means opposition to Israel.

Weiss has a particular dislike for DEI. She’s in powerful company at a time when corporate America is very happy to jettison DEI, and the Trump Administration is waging legal efforts against any hint of DEI. Weiss has written that DEI is bad for Jews:

“For Jews, there are obvious and glaring dangers in a worldview that measures fairness by equality of outcome rather than opportunity. If underrepresentation is the inevitable outcome of systemic bias, then overrepresentation—and Jews are 2% of the American population—suggests not talent or hard work, but unearned privilege. This conspiratorial conclusion is not that far removed from the hateful portrait of a small group of Jews divvying up the ill-gotten spoils of an exploited world.”

There is so much wrong in one paragraph: There is no equal opportunity in American life. The U.S. does not even fund all public schools at equal levels, amongst other inequities across the land. Moreover, to argue one is not to argue the other. Underrepresentation is a mark of systemic inequality — Harvard admits more students from the top 1% of U.S. households by income than the bottom 50%, and not just because the top 1% are naturally more gifted — but that does not mean that individuals who do get into Harvard do not deserve this admittance.

What Weiss is saying, but is afraid of being too impolitic to actually spell out, is that DEI would come at the expense of American Jews. If American Jews are overrepresented in elite institutions, efforts to make way for Black and brown people could only come, all things being equal, at the expense of the existing makeup of the elite. Unless Harvard expands its class size, then admittance of more people of color would inevitably mean fewer Jews, white men, and white women. Just as decades ago, the admittance of more Jews into the Ivy League came at the expense of WASPs. Weiss is trying to preserve elite privilege by pretending it is the plea of a victim.

To support colorbind admission or the pretense of “merit-based” advancement is a reasonable argument, but to state that the reason for, say, Black unrepresentation and Jewish overrepresentation is just a byproduct of different outcomes and not also different opportunities — when 54% American Jews grow up in households making at least $100,000 and the median Black household income is $54,000 — is a joke beyond sickness. And it is implicit racism that DEI would advance less deserving students than the current privileged crop, as if intelligence is a simple metric.

Pretending that elite privilege reflects honest outcomes afforded to more deserving people explains why Weiss is popular with the billionaire class, happy to find someone to validate their self-flattery and self-serving claim that calls for higher taxation is class envy.

Weiss now presides over CBS News after a child of a billionaire used his father’s money to buy the venerable news division. All of this, Weiss would have us believe, is solely due to her and her employer, David Ellision, being naturally gifted and hardworking rather than a byproduct of contingencies in life that have privileged them more than others. Call it DEI for the rich.