Bari Weiss

Bari Weiss was an op-ed and book review editor at The Wall Street Journal. She has also worked at Tablet, the online magazine of Jewish politics and culture. On October 27, 2018, eleven Jews were gunned down as they prayed at their synagogue in Pittsburgh. It was the deadliest attack on Jews in American history. For most Americans, the massacre at Tree of Life, the synagogue where Bari Weiss became a bat mitzvah, came as a total shock. But anti-Semitism is the oldest hatred, commonplace across the Middle East and on the rise for years in Europe. So, could it happen here? In How to Fight Anti-Semitism (Crown) her debut as author, Weiss offers an answer. The luckiest Jews in history are beginning to face a three-headed dragon Jews of other times and places had faced: the physical fear of violent assault, the moral fear of ideological vilification, and the political fear of resurgent fascism and populism. Anti-Semitism now finds a home in identity politics and the reaction against identity politics, in the renewal of America First isolationism and the rise of one-world socialism, and in the spread of Islamist ideas into unlikely places. Once a taboo, anti-Semitism is migrating toward the mainstream. Weiss’s book is a reminder that Jews must never lose their instinct for danger, and a powerful case for renewing Jewish and American values in uncertain times. Rabbi David Wolpe, author of David: The Divided Heart praised How to Fight Anti-Semitism as “urgent, frank, and fearless. There is something here to offend everyone—because there is something here to awaken everyone.”