‘Cowardice’: Bari Weiss slams NY Times for hiding reports on antisemitic murders

Bari Weiss: NYT passed on column about 2019 antisemitic killings because attackers “weren’t white supremacists carrying Tiki torches.”

By The Algemeiner

In an interview Sunday, journalist and former New York Times opinion editor Bari Weiss charged the paper with having once turned down a column about a series of antisemitic attacks because the perpetrators “weren’t white supremacists.”

Weiss, who resigned from the Times in July 2020, told conservative commentator Ben Shapiro that she had drafted a column in the wake of two deadly attacks on Jews in late 2019, including a mass shooting at a Jersey City, NJ kosher grocery store and a stabbing at the home of a Monsey, NY rabbi during Chanukah.

“I wrote a piece at the time … called ‘America’s Bloody Hanukkah,’ or ‘America’s Bloody Pogrom,’” she told Shapiro. “I thought it was really good column, it was really my subject. I’d written a book called “How to Fight Antisemitism;” I was Bat Mitzvah’d at the synagogue in Pittsburgh, Tree of Life, where the most lethal attack against American Jews in all of American history was carried out. I have some skin in the game, and I know a lot about this subject.”

“And I was basically called into my editor’s office and was told, ‘we can’t really run this.’ And the reason, at the end of the day why we couldn’t really run it, is that the people that were carrying out the attacks weren’t white supremacists carrying tiki torches,” Weiss continued, referring to the notorious 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville.

The former opinion section editor, who now runs a newsletter on the Substack platform, resigned from the Times in July 2020, publishing an open letter critical of the paper.

“That was a moment for me where I thought to myself, ‘hold on, this is news, this is important. I’m an expert in this subject, and I’m being told that it doesn’t have a place in the Times,‘” she continued on Sunday.

“And this is the really insidious nature of it: ideas, and op-eds and columns that I would write that sort of suited the narrative, those went right into the paper,” Weiss said. “The amount of energy, and sort of diplomacy and political capital, you needed to sort of smuggle through pieces that didn’t suit the ideology. It just took so much work.”

Watch Weiss’ full interview below: