“Jews don’t count,” commented former New York Times editor Bari Weiss, breaking down anti-Semitism on the left and right in a Megyn Kelly interview.
By Algemeiner Staff
“Right now, Jews are in a very precarious and strange position,” said author and former New York Times editor Bari Weiss in a wide-ranging interview Friday, with former Fox News and NBC host Megyn Kelly.
“Jews don’t count,” she argued. “If someone said to another editor at the The New York Times, ‘are you writing about the Blacks again? Are you writing about the trans again? Are you writing about the gays again?’ — think about how that sounds to your ear; it’s disgusting. And yet some people think it’s acceptable to say about Jews.”
The former opinion section editor resigned from The New York Times in July 2020, publishing an open letter that criticized colleagues for “harassing” behavior.
“They have called me a Nazi and a racist; I have learned to brush off comments about how I’m ‘writing about the Jews again,’” she wrote in the letter.
Kelly, the former news anchor who launched “The Megyn Kelly Show” podcast in 2020, asked Weiss on Friday why anti-Semitism had recently become more prominent.
“In the anti-Semitic conspiracy theory … Jews or the Jewish state comes to stand for whatever a given culture or civilization defines as its most loathsome or disgusting qualities,” said Weiss, who in 2019 authored the book “How to Fight Anti-Semitism.”
“That’s how the Jews can be so many things at once” under ideologies like Nazism and Communism, she added.
“You have the accusation that comes from the far-right — from people like the killer who stormed into my synagogue in Pittsburgh two years ago, and he said ‘all Jews must die,’ and he killed 11 of my neighbors,” said Weiss, referring to the 2018 Tree of Life massacre in her home town.
For this kind of anti-Semite, Weiss explained, Jews are “fake white people” — the conviction that motivated the infamous chants of “Jews will not replace us” at the 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
“On the far left it’s kind of a mirror image,” she continued. “What the far-left says is: Jews claim to be a minority, they say that they’re oppressed … but hold on, they’re white, they’re white-passing, they’re white-adjacent.”
“More than that they support Israel, which is the last standing bastion of white colonialism in the Middle East,” Weiss continued, conveying what she calls the far-left breed of anti-Semitism. “So in fact, not only are they not a minority and they’re not oppressed — they’re handmaidens to white supremacy.”
“If you look at the world that way, our oppression, the physical attacks that are taking place almost every single day against visible Jews in neighborhoods of Brooklyn like Crown Heights and Boro Park — they don’t rank.”