Bari Weiss Calls Out Liberal Jews

She's back.

Bari Weiss is back. (via Maggie's Farm) Having been persecuted and harassed by anti-Semites at The New York Times, she is now writing for Tablet, a magazine about Jewish life. It is certainly not trivial that Times executives failed to defend one of their young rising stars. Rather than discommode the woke millennials they have been hiring-- people who almost certainly are long on ideological convictions and short on intelligence-- they sacrificed Bari Weiss.

In her first Tablet article Weiss offers a blistering critique of liberal Jewish complacency about the rising tide of anti-Semitism in America today. Jews are more worried about not being sufficiently anti-racist, so they are simply ignoring the anti-Semitism that is being purveyed.

In particular, Weiss wants to alert people to the fact that leaders of the anti-racism movement are unabashedly anti-Semitic. From the Squad to the anti-racism intellectuals on college campuses, the movement has targeted Jews and Israelis and Zionists.

If you would like some evidence, Weiss offers this brief excursus:

Did you see that the Ethical Culture Fieldston School hosted a speaker that equated Israelis with Nazis? Did you know that Brearley is now asking families to write a statement demonstrating their commitment to “anti-racism”? Did you see that Chelsea Handler tweeted a clip of Louis Farrakhan? Did you see that protesters tagged a synagogue in Kenosha with “Free Palestine” graffiti? Did you hear about the march in D.C. where they chanted “Israel, we know you, you murder children too”? Did you see that Twitter suspended Bret Weinstein’s civic organization but still allows the Iranian ayatollah to openly promote genocide of the Jewish people? Did you see that Mayor Bill de Blasio scapegoated “the Jewish community” for the spread of COVID in New York, while defending mass protests on the grounds that this is a “historic moment of change”?

No one should find this surprising in the least. Today’s Democratic Party has been coddling the anti-Semites in its midst. If it does not want to be the anti-Semitic party it should expel Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and all of the congresspeople who refused to denounce Louis Farrakhan.

But, liberal Jews have been jumping on the anti-racism bandwagon, showing a decided incapacity for serious thought. After all, they worship at the altar of Jeremiah Wright's protege.

Didn’t anyone notice that the New York Times 1619 Project, a warped history that sees America in terms of Black Liberation Theology. That is, as a perpetual struggle between white oppressors and black victims.

Bret Stephens described one aspect of the project in the Times:

… it seeks to dethrone the Fourth of July by treating American history as a story of Black struggle against white supremacy — of which the Declaration is, for all of its high-flown rhetoric, supposed to be merely a part.

Doesn’t that remind you of Black Liberation Theology?  Like its progenitor, Liberation Theology, BLT is an unholy amalgam of Marxism and Catholicism. Liberation Theology arose from the fevered brains of South American priests and intellectuals. It expressed the resentment of South and Central Americans against Protestant North Americans.

Naturally, Black Liberation Theology demeaned the accomplishments of white people and called for a revolution, an overthrow of white supremacists and white privilege.

In time, and under the aegis of one of its leading American proponents, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, it expanded the notion of whiteness to include Jews and Asians. Anyone who had achieved success was guilt tripped into bowing down to the gods of wokeness, and especially the gods of BLM.

Unsurprisingly, liberal Jews were among the first to comply. More conservative Jews and certainly orthodox Jews have not drunk the Kool-Aid.

Why are liberal Jews doing so? Of course, they are fighting Hitler, that is, Donald Trump. In fact, Weiss explains that Trump hatred has led liberal Jews to blame Trump for all of America’s racial divisions. As though BLM and BLT came to us from Trump.

Weiss writes:

There is also the X factor of Donald Trump, which is impossible to overstate. Understandable hostility toward him has prevented many Jews from seeing the problem on the other side. To even look away from the obscenity in the White House for a moment strikes many, as they have told me, as irresponsible or beside the point.

I share with the majority of American Jews’ disgust toward Trump and Trumpism, which has normalized bigotry and cruelty in ways that have crippled American society. That truth doesn’t detract from another: There is another danger, this one from the left. And unlike Trump, this one has attained cultural dominance, capturing America's elites and our most powerful institutions. In the event of a Biden victory, it is hard to imagine it meeting resistance. So let me make my purpose perfectly clear: I am here to ring the alarm. I’m here to say: Do not be shocked anymore. Stop saying, can you believe. It’s time to accept reality, if we want to have any hope of fixing it.

Let’s see. The Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, someone who is normally sensitive to such things, declared that President Trump was a friend to the state of Israel and was a friend to the Jewish people. He said it in English at the White House. And let’s add that the Israeli people hold Trump in very high regard. He would easily win an election in Israel and is more popular there than in any nation on the planet. 

To be clear, the reason for their approval lies in what Trump has accomplished in the Middle East.

Seeing this and hearing from Netanyahu, liberal Jews have decided that they will do anything it takes to destroy Trump. Led by Michael Bloomberg and certain tech oligarchs liberal Jews believe that they can best advance their ideological interests by destroying the man who has stood up against the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism-- terrorism against America and terrorism against Israel.

Keep in mind, the Obama administration appeased Iran and provided them with all the cash they needed to continue working on a nuclear weapon that they wanted to drop on Tel Aviv-- to say nothing of funding Hamas and Hezbollah.

Now, Trump has fought these modern day anti-Semites. As I said, the liberal Jewish response has been-- we have to destroy Trump.

This belies a fundamental stupidity, which ought to be emphasized.

How did their minds become so completely warped? It’s a difficult question, one that deserves an answer. Even a story.

Once upon a time there really was Hitler. He ravaged Germany, ravaged most of Europe, exterminated countless Jews and non-Jews and so on. Now, during nearly all of the time that Hitler was in power, the United States had exactly one president. 

And, during the first eight years of Hitler’s rule, the great FDR did precisely nothing to rein in Hitler, to shut him down. Yet Roosevelt did everything in his power to ensure that European Jews could not escape the Nazi menace. Including the cowardly act of sending a ship filled with Jewish refugees back to Europe and to their deaths. As you know, it was the St. Louis. Keep in mind, Anne Frank’s father wanted to immigrate to America. The Roosevelt administration turned him down.

We understand that labor union leaders lobbied against allowing Jews to land in America, but that just means that FDR cared more for votes than for lives. And he certainly did not care about what was happening to European Jews.

The normal rationalization for FDR's cowardice was that the Republicans made him do it. They were isolationists and did not want a war. In what other occasion did FDR capitulate to pressure from the right?

On the other side, Republicans did not send the passengers of the St. Louis back to the camps. And besides there are many other actions, diplomatic and otherwise, that a president can take-- short of war. It was the failure to act decisively that produced the war.

For his efforts to keep European Jews out of America, liberal Jews have continued to worship FDR. The betrayal was so egregious that they refuse even to consider it-- even though it has been documented for years now. They will immediately tell you that FDR won the war, which is true. They do not ask-- what was the cost of his pusillanimous failure to intervene sooner.

Winston Churchill raised the point, in relation either to WW I or WW II, that there was, in each of these great wars, only one man who could have shut it down before it got rolling-- and that was the president of the United States-- Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt.

No one seems to care about whether a great leader could have stopped these horrors before they visited destruction on tens of millions of people. Surely this counterfactual ought to be a blot on the records of both Wilson and Roosevelt. 

And yet, Roosevelt was and remained the champion of liberal Jews. They treated him like the Messiah. They were not going to believe and still do not believe that he betrayed European Jews. And they will never admit that they worshipped a man who sold their families and co-religionists out to Hitler. 

Today’s liberal Jews are intrepid Nazi-fighters. If you don't believe me, ask one. Only this time they are siding with the anti-Semitic left and are working to destroy a man who is a great friend to the Jewish people. They will never admit that FDR betrayed them and their European relatives. They are not going to admit that they are on the wrong side of history now.