“Most people, including many Jews, think of Yom Kippur as a 25-hour caffeine headache capped off by a lox-and-bagels binge. It’s undeniably that. But it is also, at its deepest level, a dry run. It is the one day of the year when we Jews are asked to look our mortality in the face.”
― Bari Weiss
“Few of us doubt that stealing is wrong, especially from the poor. But the accusation of ‘cultural appropriation’ is overwhelmingly being used as an objection to syncretism – the mixing of different thoughts, religions, cultures, and ethnicities that often ends up creating entirely new ones.”
― Bari Weiss
“Britain beat us to the abolition of slavery; the Isle of Man, New Zealand, and Finland all decided to give women the vote well before the United States. Eventually, we got smart and borrowed these egalitarian innovations.”
― Bari Weiss
“If the standard for art is the decency of its creators, we’re going to have a lot of empty museums.”
― Bari Weiss
“I believe that facts serve feminists far better than faith. That due process is better than mob rule.”
― Bari Weiss
“Australians have more fun. They just do. I guess I should not be surprised by this fact given that this is the place that birthed both Hugh Jackman and Kylie Minogue.”
― Bari Weiss
“In Israel, there is no civil marriage. All elements of religious life – from the kosher certification of food to conversion to marriages and burials – are controlled by the rabbinate. In Israel, then, the official religion is not just Judaism. It’s Orthodoxy.”
― Bari Weiss
“I don’t trade on my sexual identity in that way for political points. I think that’s lame, and it’s not my style.”
― Bari Weiss
“I’ve been in love with both men and women. I’ve been ghosted by both men and women.”
― Bari Weiss
“Literally everything good about this culture comes from mixing.”
― Bari Weiss
“Who wants to live in a world where you can only stay in the lane of your birth?”
― Bari Weiss
“To many American Jews, it is a truism that Barack Obama was the anti-Israel president. It was Mr. Obama who signed the Iran deal, which Israel portrayed as a mortal danger. It was Mr. Obama whose most contentious relationship with a foreign leader was with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.”
― Bari Weiss
“Tel Aviv was established in 1909 by a group of secular Jewish families; Judaism’s origin story is about 2,000 years older.”
― Bari Weiss
“Liberals shouldn’t cede the responsibility to defend free speech on college campuses to conservatives. After all, without free speech, what’s liberalism about?”
― Bari Weiss
“Shutting down conservatives has become de rigueur. But now anti-free-speech activists are increasingly turning their ire on free-thinking progressives.”
― Bari Weiss
“Reasonable people can debate whether or not social experiments like a Day of Absence are enlightening.”
― Bari Weiss
“Conservatives are often fond of La Rochefoucauld’s famous aphorism that ‘Hypocrisy is a tribute that vice pays to virtue,’ and so tend to downplay hypocrisy as a sin. But in the marketplace of ideas they champion, hypocrisy may yet turn out to be the deadliest – or costliest – of sins.”
― Bari Weiss
“Donald Trump’s election was a watershed moment. Even those like me, who had previously pulled levers for candidates of both parties, felt that Mr. Trump had not only violated all sense of common decency, but, alarmingly, that he seemed to have no idea that there even existed such an unspoken code of civility and dignity.”
― Bari Weiss
“The leaders of the Women’s March, arguably the most prominent feminists in the country, have some chilling ideas and associations. Far from erecting the big tent so many had hoped for, the movement they lead has embraced decidedly illiberal causes and cultivated a radical tenor that seems determined to alienate all but the most woke.”
― Bari Weiss
“The Women’s March moved me.”
― Bari Weiss
“Mr. Trump had campaigned on attacking the weakest and most vulnerable in our society.”
― Bari Weiss
“Has there ever been a crisper expression of the consequences of ‘intersectionality’ than a ban on Jewish lesbians from a Dyke March?”
― Bari Weiss
“In practice, intersectionality functions as kind of caste system, in which people are judged according to how much their particular caste has suffered throughout history.”
― Bari Weiss
“Victimhood, in the intersectional way of seeing the world, is akin to sainthood; power and privilege are profane.”
― Bari Weiss
“China may brutalize Buddhists in Tibet and Muslims in Xinjiang while denying basic rights to the rest of its 1.3 billion citizens, but ‘woke’ activists pushing intersectionality keep mum on all that.”
― Bari Weiss
“Dwayne Betts is the kind of man who should be receiving awards from the Connecticut bar. Instead, he hasn’t been admitted.”
― Bari Weiss
“Outrage is something Donald Trump typically has in no short supply.”
― Bari Weiss
“Since Britain handed over jurisdiction of its former colony to China 20 years ago, the city has operated under the notion of ‘one country, two systems.’ That increasingly appears to be an empty slogan.”
― Bari Weiss
“I believe the Earth is warming.”
― Bari Weiss
“I believe that babies should be vaccinated pretty much as soon as they exit the womb.”
― Bari Weiss
“I haven’t watched MTV’s annual Video Music Awards since Bill Clinton was president. I was wearing a plastic choker, and Alanis Morissette won for ‘Ironic.’”
― Bari Weiss
“Culture should be shared, not hoarded.”
― Bari Weiss
“There’s no question that Ben Shapiro loves to provoke college students.”
― Bari Weiss
“One of my favorite things on YouTube is the famous 1965 debate between James Baldwin and William F. Buckley at Cambridge University.”
― Bari Weiss
“I hate New Year’s Eve.”
― Bari Weiss
“There’s no question that I am biased toward the Hebrew calendar over the Gregorian one.”
― Bari Weiss
“If you crave an anti-new year New Year, consider adopting Rosh Hashana as your own.”
― Bari Weiss
“I no longer believe that I’m going to be struck down by a punishing God.”
― Bari Weiss
“When Kendrick Lamar blasts Mr. Trump, he is preaching to the choir. When Eminem does it, there’s a good chance Trump voters are actually listening.”
― Bari Weiss
“Eminem knows that Republicans buy songs – his songs – too. His message to them is to stop buying.”
― Bari Weiss
“Eminem isn’t the first entertainer to part ways with his conservative fans.”
― Bari Weiss
“Think tanks are chiefly supposed to provide independent expertise to policymakers. But they also seek to be politically relevant.”
― Bari Weiss
“At the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a hawkish, nonpartisan research group, at least two people left over the way the think tank responded to Mr. Trump’s election.”
― Bari Weiss
“The Heritage Foundation, by far the most influential think tank of the Trump era, is widely seen as a redoubt of Trumpism in large part because of the tremendous influence of the Mercers, who are major donors.”
― Bari Weiss
“One area where American Jews have something to teach Israel is religious pluralism, something that living in a democracy with a separation between church and state has helped us fine-tune.”
― Bari Weiss
“The Jewish state has so much to teach diaspora Jews about resilience, innovation, energy, and optimism.”
― Bari Weiss
“Israel’s highest aspiration may be to be a light among the nations, but it is also a normal nation, where regular people want to go about their business without a religious authority having a say.”
― Bari Weiss
“I’d venture a bet that no American hates ‘Prairie Home Companion’ more than I do.”
― Bari Weiss
“’Annie Hall’ and ‘The Graduate’ are incredible films. Why should we be deprived of watching them because some of the men that made them are bad?”
― Bari Weiss
“I think ‘Les Demoiselles D’Avignon’ is one of the most transfixing paintings of all time. And it was made by a monster of a man.”
― Bari Weiss
“Ever since Eve gave Adam that forbidden fruit, demonizing and disbelieving women has been the planet-wide policy. You don’t need to reach back to the Pleistocene to see the truth of that.”
― Bari Weiss
“I believe that the ‘believe all women’ vision of feminism unintentionally fetishizes women. Women are no longer human and flawed. They are Truth personified. They are above reproach.”
― Bari Weiss
“I believe that it’s condescending to think that women and their claims can’t stand up to interrogation and can’t handle skepticism.”
― Bari Weiss
“The best movie theater in the world is in a dingy basement on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. The worn seats are painful. There are probably bigger screens in half the apartments in the complex above the theater. And forget Fandango; the theater barely has a website. You want to buy a ticket? Get in line.”
― Bari Weiss
“In the Trump era, the Left has smartly and justifiably seized a moral high ground that the Right has abandoned by its embrace of the president.”
― Bari Weiss
“Christina Hoff Sommers is a self-identified feminist and registered Democrat with a Ph.D. in philosophy and a wicked sense of humor.”
― Bari Weiss
“We live in a world in which politically fascistic behavior, if not the actual philosophy, is unquestionably on the rise.”
― Bari Weiss
“Organized religion may be anathema on the political Left, but the need for the things religion provides – moral fervor, meaning, a sense of community – are not.”
― Bari Weiss
“It’s no rare thing for the Israeli prime minister to enrage the Jews of the diaspora.”
― Bari Weiss
“Anti-Semitism is the hatred that never dies. Violence that begins with the Jews never ends with them. All of this is true. What’s also true is that anti-Semitism is the oldest hatred in the world because individual people have sustained it in every generation. It cannot be defeated until we look these people and their ideologies in the face.”
― Bari Weiss
“Only the likes of Piers Morgan would be opposed to a Miss America contest that promises to be more ’empowering’ and ‘inclusive.’”
― Bari Weiss
“Our culture hasn’t stopped objectifying women. We – men and women both – are just getting better at pretending it’s not happening.”
― Bari Weiss
“I haven’t watched Miss America since I was in middle school, and I was incredulous even then.”
― Bari Weiss
“While men pretend not to judge women for the way they look, we go to great lengths to pretend we don’t care, either.”
― Bari Weiss
“Donald Trump is well known for liking people he thinks are tough.”
― Bari Weiss
“Women are hypocrites. Women are opportunists. Women are liars. They are abusers and bullies and manipulators. They are capable of cruelty, callousness, and evil. Just like men.”
― Bari Weiss
“’Believe women’ only works as a rule of thumb when all women are good. That myth falls flat outside Victorian England.”
― Bari Weiss
“We need a feminist movement that is robust enough to survive women who have preyed on others without trying to justify their behavior or maligning their victims.”
― Bari Weiss
“We need a feminist movement in which the facts of the case trump the identities of the parties involved.”
― Bari Weiss
“I am a serial denier. I try not to be. I tell myself, ‘You are going to die.’ I repeat it. I grasp it for a second or two, but then it escapes me, and I’m back to before.”
― Bari Weiss
“The Right has been damaged beyond belief by its embrace of Mr. Trump.”
― Bari Weiss
“A lawsuit can be a weapon.”
― Bari Weiss
“We are living in an age when anti-Semitism is on the rise here at home.”
― Bari Weiss
“Just as every Jewish couple gets married under a canopy open on all four sides – a replica of the tent modeled for us by Abraham and Sarah – so must Jewish communities keep our tents open. This is the true source of our longevity and resilience.”
― Bari Weiss
“Paris. Toulouse. Malmo. Copenhagen. Brussels. Berlin. For most people, they are lovely cities where you might happily take a holiday. But for the world’s Jews, they are something else, too. They are place names of hate.”
― Bari Weiss
“Anti-Semitism has been a fact of European life for more than 2,000 years.”
― Bari Weiss
“While racists see themselves as proudly punching down, anti-Semites perceive themselves as punching up.”
― Bari Weiss
“For reasons historic, aesthetic, and political, we Jews are most attuned to the anti-Semitism of the far Right – and we find the most sympathy among our progressive allies when these are our attackers.”
― Bari Weiss
“Most women who go public with #MeToo stories are fearful for obvious reasons. There is the pain of reliving traumatic experiences. There is the rage of not being believed.”
― Bari Weiss
“Australia’s defamation laws help explain why the #MeToo movement, while managing to take down some of the most powerful men in the entertainment and media industry in the United States, has not taken off there.”
― Bari Weiss
“I thought I would come to Australia and learn to surf. Instead, I learned to walk.”
― Bari Weiss
“Many older people I know are focused on the past. When they talk about the future, they are, quite understandably, preoccupied with the hassles and obstacles of their increasing age.”
― Bari Weiss
“Race walking is hard. Trying to do it while maintaining a conversation is much harder.”
― Bari Weiss
“In the States, time with friends can feel a bit like those PETA videos of chickens on factory farms: slotted and squeezed into tight compartments.”
― Bari Weiss
“Part of the beauty of the way Australians hang out isn’t just how relaxed it is, but the inclusive, rolling nature of how they socialize.”
― Bari Weiss
“In my experience, American office Christmas parties mean that everyone gets a thimbleful of lukewarm Champagne in a plastic cup.”
― Bari Weiss
“The conspiracy theory of the Jew as the hypnotic conspirator, the duplicitous manipulator, the sinister puppeteer is one with ancient roots and a bloody history.”
― Bari Weiss
“While there are perfectly legitimate criticisms that one can make of Israel or the actions of its government – and I have never been shy about making them – those criticisms cross the line into anti-Semitism when they ascribe evil, almost supernatural powers to Israel in a manner that replicates classic anti-Semitic slanders.”
― Bari Weiss
“Those who call themselves anti-Zionists usually insist they are not anti-Semites. But I struggle to see what else to call an ideology that seeks to eradicate only one state in the world – the one that happens to be the Jewish one – while empathetically insisting on the rights of self-determination for every other minority.”
― Bari Weiss
“One of the casualties of Israel becoming an increasingly partisan issue has been American Jews themselves, who vote overwhelmingly Democratic and who see Israel’s rightward turn as betraying fundamental liberal values.”
― Bari Weiss
“It is a strange experience to have another person spit on you.”
― Bari Weiss
“Despite the fact that the vast majority of Israeli Jews are not Orthodox, the ultra-Orthodox hold the keys not just to Israel’s Jewish sacred places, but to the life cycle events – conversions, weddings, divorces, burials – of the country’s more than six million Jews.”
― Bari Weiss
“I’m not someone who from a young age imagined myself being a writer or had dreams of being a novelist or anything like that, but I was always very driven by ideas and by values, and that is the reason I got into journalism.”
― Bari Weiss
“I am used to being politically homeless, which I think is a very, very Jewish position.”
― Bari Weiss
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