I am Jewish. The response Weiss received has nothing to do with being Jewish. There are countless other Jews who work at the NYT without issue. Her job is to voice opinions in the pages of the NYT. She is being criticized for how she chooses to perform that job. I was focusing on the discrimination aspect of her accusations because I do agree that some of the treatment she received qualifies as harassing. However nothing she experienced is discrimination.
It's always extremely amusing when I see Bari Weiss libeled in a such a manner. yes, the Jewish Lesbian with a degree from Colombia, numerous journalism awards, nearly a decade of experience working at the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times is totally a right-wing activist rather than a well educated, well reasoned, experienced journalist with views you don't agree with (almost certainly because your views are at least partially wrong).
James Bennet, the Op-Ed Editor who had hired both Weiss and Stephens is Jewish. His brother is Colorado Senator Bennet. Their mother was in the Warsaw Ghetto and was sent out as a child by her parents just before the Nazis shipped the entire ghetto to the camps. She has an on-line oral history in the holocaust museum.
Both Stephens and Weiss are not only Jewish, but pro-Israel. Weiss had even written an entire recent book about anti-Semitism [1]. Many in the far left support the anti-Semitic Boycott Divest Sanction (BDS) movement against the only Jewish country in the world. China invaded Tibet, puts 3 million Muslims in camps, taking their DNA and facial recognition but no China BDS.
Bennet had also been Jerusalem Bureau Chief for NYT for 3 years and thus would be knowledgeable about the situation there. He may have stopped inaccuracies printed about Israel in his role.
Bennet was the likely candidate to be elevated to Exec Editor when the current one retired in a couple of years. I believe a lot of the staff didn't like Bennet because of Jewish/Israel stance and the idea of him being the Exec Editor frightened/angered them.
I believe that an external inspector general type figure should evaluate the entire situation. Weiss's complaints are consistent with a toxic work environment that nobody should have to deal with. She said the source of some of the harassment she experienced was on an internal slack channel and thus easy to investigate.
Readers of HN are analytical enough to realize that when something obvious isn't mentioned it may well be the underlying cause.
Weiss kind of made a career out of pearl clutching and decrying the "intolerant left" in academia [0]. A stopped clock is right twice a day, as they say, but Weiss (like most opinion columnists) is largely just in the outrage peddling business, deploying facts only sparingly and selectively. I include Greenwald - linked below - in this group as well, but it's difficult to find any kind of serious rebuttal against her from a non-columnist (because that's kind of the game that's being played here).
Anyway, Weiss is both a troll and a hypocrite, so it's easy to discount her posts as flamebait. That doesn't mean she's always wrong, of course, but she's got a well earned reputation which suggests one should take her with more than a pinch of salt (IMO, this is basically true for anybody who decides to "publish" on a substack blog).
This was written by a person, not the editorial board of NYT. Could you please back your claims of antisemitism? That is a serious accusation that is unfortunately overused to apply to anyone who criticizes Israel.
Bari Weiss is a problematic character in this area.
She has played gatekeeper herself quite stridently and successfully.
She is quite fine with her own "involvement in numerous campaigns to vilify and ruin the careers of several Arab and Muslim professors due to their criticisms of Israel" per Glenn Greenwald in the Intercept:
I tend to think the last few thousand years have given us well-honed antisemitism detectors. I definitely see this as antisemitic.
Would anyone dare to say about literally any other group "If I were x I wouldn't be able to live with myself because..."?
I'm not saying everyone who says something like that 14 years ago should be fired. But a head of diversity?
Addendum: Unfortunately, and very sadly for me, my antenna is also beeping at the fact that every post related to this story is getting flagged to death here on HN.
Not white knighting, as a Jew I find it alarming when false accusations are made of antisemitism because it reduces the sting of the claim when it’s real. But again. Fantastic deflection.
I can’t believe the anti-Semitism at the NYT is so unapologetic that they gladly doxxed a Jewish man in this climate of hate and violence. Blood is on their hands.
> I then looked at the public comment section and users there were discussing how to best gas as many Jews as possible in the US. I'm sure they cleaned up the site a bit since then, but this is a true story.
Yet the founder, Andrew Breitbart, was raised Jewish, the co-founder, Larry Solov, is Jewish, as is the editor-in-chief Alex Marlow, and the senior editor-at-large Joel Pollak. That's 4 out of the 6 key people at Breitbart [1].
In the words of Alex Marlow: "we're consistently called anti-Semitic despite the fact that we are overwhelmingly staffed with Jews and are pro-Israel and pro-Jewish." [2]
There was a mountain of accusations of anti-semitism that boiled down to "she said something anti-zionist which we think implies she is anti-semitic if you look at it in the right light".
Meanwhile, over in actual Israel they're busy setting up an apartheid state and enacting race based policies.
It's simply not possible to be consistently anti racist without being accused of anti-semitism. Rebecca Long Bailey getting fired is simply the latest illustration of that.
> It seems like there's something bordering on unhinged in that behavior.
While I personally wouldn't do it and also think it comes across as kind of weird and unsettling I also think that what you are saying is based on your own cultural perspective. Let's take a few steps back and look at it. Is it really that bad if you talk about having a harmful belief in the past and how you let go of that? Should you be fired overt that? I think Google just chose the easy way here; Fire the person involved, least chance of having a controversy.
I don't know where you live but I can tell you in most western European countries there is a very strong hatred against Jews under Arab migrants. This hatred is also passed along to newer generations. A blog post this might actually make the world a bit of a better place instead of a worse one...
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