Bari Weiss

• 1. Introduction

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  Bari Weiss, an American political commentator born in 1984, has collected an unusually long list of labels. Vanity Fair called her a provocateur. In a 2019 interview with Joe Rogan, she described herself as a left-leaning centrist. At other times she has used the phrase radical centrist.

  She is now editor-in-chief of CBS News. The route there passed through a Pittsburgh synagogue, a bitter campus dispute at Columbia University, and opinion desks at The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. It also passed through a public resignation letter that drew praise from senators and scorn from left-leaning magazines.

  Why did one writer provoke such sharply opposed readings? And what happens when a commentator who built her own publication is handed the newsroom of a major network?

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• 2. Squirrel Hill To Columbia

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  The 25th of March 1984 is the date Bari Weiss was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to Lou and Amy Weiss. Her parents are former owners of Weisshouse, a company founded in 1943 that sells flooring, furniture, and kitchens. They still own a flooring business called Weisslines.

  She was the eldest of four sisters and grew up in Pittsburgh's Squirrel Hill neighborhood. Her schooling took place at Community Day School and then Shady Side Academy. The family attended the Tree of Life Synagogue, where she had her bat mitzvah ceremony.

  After high school, Weiss spent a gap year in Israel with the Nativ program. She helped build a medical clinic for Bedouins in the Negev desert. She also studied at a feminist yeshiva and at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

  At Columbia University she majored in history and graduated in 2007. Moved by the war in Darfur, she founded the Columbia Coalition for Sudan. From 2005 to 2007 she was the founding editor of The Current, a campus magazine about politics, culture, and Jewish affairs.

  After graduating, she became a Bartley Fellow at The Wall Street Journal in 2007. From 2007 to 2008 she lived in Jerusalem as a Dorot Fellow. Yet the activism that most defined her Columbia years began with a film released in 2004.

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• 3. The Columbia Campaign

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  The David Project's film Columbia Unbecoming appeared in 2004. It alleged that professors in Columbia's Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures department intimidated pro-Israel students in class. The professors were critical of Israel and opposed to Zionism, and they denied the allegations.

  Weiss joined Aharon Horwitz, Daniella Kahane, and Ariel Beery to found Columbians for Academic Freedom. The group campaigned against those professors. The NYCLU denounced the campaign.

  Weiss said she had felt intimidated in lectures by Professor Joseph Massad. In her view, he spent too much time on Zionism and Israel in a course meant to cover the entire Middle East.

  Under public pressure, Columbia assembled a committee to examine the claims. It finished in spring 2005 and dismissed most of them. Its report said it had "no basis for believing that Professor Massad systematically suppressed dissenting views in his classroom". It also "found no evidence of any statements made by the faculty that could reasonably be construed as anti-semitic."

  The committee did find it "credible" that Massad was angered by a student's question, which he took as a defense of Israel's conduct toward Palestinians. His reply, it said, "exceeded commonly accepted bounds by conveying that her question merited harsh public criticism". But the report also described a climate of incivility. Pro-Israel students, it said, disrupted lectures on Middle Eastern studies and heckled professors.

  Weiss objected that the committee dwelt on individual grievances. In her view, students were intimidated because of what they believed. In her 2019 book How to Fight Anti-Semitism, she wrote that the period gave her "a front row seat to leftist anti-Semitism".

  Journalist Glenn Greenwald saw it very differently. He alleged the activism was "designed to ruin the careers of Arab professors by equating their criticisms of Israel with racism, anti-Semitism, and bullying." He said its central demand was that those professors, some of whom lacked tenure, be disciplined for their transgressions.

  At a panel at the 2012 Conference of the American Zionist Movement, Weiss linked the episode to her profession. She said she "got involved in journalism through activism", referring to what she called her "Zionist activism" at Columbia.

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• 4. Opinion Pages

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  In 2007, Weiss worked for both Haaretz and The Forward. In Haaretz she attacked the tenure promotion of Barnard College anthropologist Nadia Abu El-Haj. Her target was Abu El-Haj's book Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society, which Weiss alleged caricatured Israeli archaeologists. From 2011 to 2013 she served as senior news and politics editor at Tablet, an American Jewish conservative magazine.

  The Wall Street Journal came next. From 2013 until April 2017 she edited op-eds and book reviews there. She worked for deputy editorial page editor Bret Stephens, and when he left the paper, she followed him to The New York Times.

  Her arrival at the Times in 2017 belonged to a larger effort. After Donald Trump's inauguration, the paper wanted to broaden the ideological range of its opinion staff. Opinion editor James Bennet hired her as an op-ed staff editor and writer on culture and politics.

  During her first year, she wrote pieces favoring the blending of cultural influences. People she called the "strident left" derided such blending as cultural appropriation. She also criticized the organizers of the 2017 Women's March for their "chilling ideas and associations". She singled out several people she believed had made antisemitic or anti-Zionist statements in the past.

  Her article on the Chicago Dyke March called intersectionality a "caste system, in which people are judged according to how much their particular caste has suffered throughout history". Playwright Eve Ensler condemned the piece for misunderstanding the work of intersectional politics. Others also condemned it as a basic misreading of the idea.

  In January 2018, Babe.net published an anonymous woman's allegation that comedian and actor Aziz Ansari's behavior on a date amounted to sexual assault. Weiss answered with a piece titled "Aziz Ansari Is Guilty. Of Not Being a Mind Reader". It was one of many responses in the context of the #MeToo movement.

  In March 2018 she published "We're All Fascists Now", arguing that the left was growing less tolerant of other views. Soon after publication, the Times corrected the piece and attached an editorial note. One of her examples was a fake antifa Twitter account. Multiple media outlets had exposed it in 2017 as a right-wing masquerade meant to discredit left-wing protest.

  In May 2018 she published "Meet the Renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web". The piece profiled thinkers who shared an unorthodox approach to their fields and to the media landscape. She borrowed the term from Eric Weinstein, a managing director at Thiel Capital. Outlets kept commenting on and critiquing the label through 2020, the year her time at the Times came to a close.

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• 5. Resignation From The Times

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  On the 7th of June 2020, James Bennet resigned as the Times editorial page editor. More than 1,000 staffers had signed a letter protesting his decision to publish an op-ed by U.S. Senator Tom Cotton. Cotton wrote that "rioters have plunged many American cities into anarchy" and argued that soldiers should back up the police. Bennet later said he had not read the piece beforehand.

  Weiss called the internal fight an ongoing "civil war". She cast it as a clash between young "social justice warriors" and older "free speech advocate" staffers. Other journalists and opinion writers at the Times disputed that picture.

  Taylor Lorenz, a technology reporter who covers internet culture, called it a "willful misrepresentation". She said it ignored the many older staffers who had spoken out. Jamal Jordan, the paper's digital storytelling editor, criticized Weiss for not listening to her black colleagues. He said she dismissed their concerns as a "woke civil war".

  On the 14th of July 2020, Weiss announced her departure by publishing a resignation letter on her website. She faulted the Times for giving in to criticism on Twitter. She also said it failed to defend her against alleged bullying by colleagues. She accused her former employer of "unlawful discrimination, hostile work environment, and constructive discharge" and of "caving to the whims of critics on Twitter".

  Her letter said that "Stories are chosen and told in a way to satisfy the narrowest of audiences, rather than to allow a curious public to read about the world and then draw their own conclusions." She added, "Twitter is not on the masthead of The New York Times, but Twitter has become its ultimate editor." The resignation drew considerable news coverage.

  U.S. Senators Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and Kelly Loeffler praised the letter. So did Donald Trump Jr., commentator Ben Shapiro, former Democratic presidential candidates Andrew Yang and Marianne Williamson, and commentator Bill Maher.

  Left-leaning outlets responded harshly. Alex Shephard, writing in The New Republic, called the resignation a form of "self-cancellation". He saw it as part of a pattern of "taking thin, anecdotal evidence and framing it in grandiose, culture-war terms". In The Guardian, Moira Donegan called Weiss a "professional rightwing attention seeker". She disputed Weiss's claim that social media had created a hostile media environment for conservatives. The Financial Times labeled her a "self-styled free speech martyr".

  On the 27th of October 2020, Weiss appeared on the talk show The View to discuss cancel culture. She called it "wrong and deeply un-American". She also said, "I believe that no one should be hung or have their reputation destroyed or lose their job because of a mistake or liking a bad tweet." In 2021 she compared her own professional troubles to those of Galileo Galilei, who was threatened with being burned at the stake unless he renounced his scientific views.

  Beginning in 2020, she also wrote occasional articles for the German newspaper Die Welt.

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• 6. Building The Free Press

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  In January 2021, Weiss launched a Substack newsletter called Common Sense. The name later changed to The Free Press, and the newsletter grew into a media company of the same name. She also hosts the podcast Honestly.

  In February 2021, she interviewed actress Gina Carano about her firing from The Mandalorian. On the 8th of November 2021, Pano Kanelos, formerly the president of St. John's College, used her newsletter to announce the creation of the University of Austin.

  In 2023, Weiss publicly criticized Palestinian professor and poet Refaat Alareer. His offense, in her telling, was an internet post ridiculing a debunked claim that a baby was burned in an oven during the October 7 attacks. Alareer afterward received rape and death threats from some of Weiss's online followers. The IDF later killed Alareer and six members of his family in a targeted airstrike.

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• 7. Inside CBS News

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  In October 2025, Paramount Skydance bought The Free Press for $150 million. It put Weiss in charge of CBS News, though she had no prior experience in broadcast journalism. She reports to David Ellison, the head of Paramount Skydance.

  Critics read the announcement as a sign that CBS was shifting rightward in the Trump era. Trump himself praised it. Layoffs followed shortly afterward. One former CBS producer alleged they hit racial minorities hardest, while white employees were simply moved to other jobs. Reported losses totaled around 100 employees, including eight on-air hosts, all of them women.

  On the 10th of December 2025, Weiss named CBS Mornings co-host Tony Dokoupil as anchor of the CBS Evening News, effective the 5th of January 2026. On the night of his first broadcast, she rewrote his script to cast Donald Trump's Venezuela military operation in a better light. The rewrite made the text appear twice on the teleprompter, and Dokoupil stumbled over his words. "First day, big problems here", he said on the air.

  Later that month, Weiss spiked a 60 Minutes segment titled "Inside CECOT". It was an investigation by journalist Sharyn Alfonsi into the Salvadoran Terrorism Confinement Center. At a meeting with 60 Minutes staff the next day, Alfonsi said Weiss had never contacted her before killing the story. Journalist Scott Pelley charged that Weiss had attended none of five internal screenings during the final stages of editing. In CNN Business, journalist Brian Stelter wrote that Weiss had "sparked a crisis".

  Then the full episode was inadvertently published online in Canada. The streaming platform belonged to Global TV, which held the Canadian streaming rights to 60 Minutes. The episode spread rapidly across the internet. It eventually aired on the 18th of January 2026, largely unchanged apart from minor additional context.

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• 8. Labels And Convictions

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  Haaretz, The Times of Israel, The Daily Dot, Business Insider, and Al Jazeera have all described Weiss as conservative. The Washington Post, The New York Times, and NPR call her a critic of the "mainstream media" with prominent "anti-woke" and pro-Israel views. NPR added that her views are "somewhat hard to pin down". It noted that she once called herself a "Jewish, center-left-on-most-things-person" and claimed to have voted for Mitt Romney, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden.

  The Washington Post says she portrays herself as a liberal uncomfortable with the excesses of left-wing culture. The New Republic called her "anti-woke, anti-trans, pro-Israel". She has been described as anti-trans because of her editorial decisions on transgender issues at The Free Press. The Jewish Telegraphic Agency said her work "doesn't lend itself easily to labels". The Times of Israel reported that her public fight with The New York Times made her a hero among some conservatives.

  According to The New York Times, a team retreat once asked her to share something that shaped her values. She chose a clip from the show Transparent, which features a trans protagonist. She reportedly chose it because "she never wanted to forget the humanity of those with whom she vehemently disagrees".

  Weiss has voiced support for Israel and Zionism in her columns. Writer Andrew Sullivan once called her an "unhinged Zionist". She replied that she "happily pleaded guilty as charged".

  In 2018, she said she believed the sexual assault allegations against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. She questioned, however, whether they should disqualify him, because he was 17 when he allegedly assaulted Christine Blasey Ford. After backlash in the press, she conceded the sound bite was glib and simplistic. She said instead that Kavanaugh's "rage-filled behavior" before the Senate Judiciary Committee should have disqualified him.

  In November 2018, after the massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue in Squirrel Hill, she appeared on Real Time with Bill Maher. Speaking of American Jews who support President Trump, she said, "I hope this week that American Jews have woken up to the price of that bargain." She said they had traded policies they liked for the values that sustained the Jewish people. She listed those values this way: "Welcoming the stranger; dignity for all human beings; equality under the law; respect for dissent; love of truth."

  In 2019, The Jerusalem Post named her the seventh-most influential Jew in the world. In January 2022, a doctor appearing on CNN criticized her for a remark on Real Time with Bill Maher. She had said that pandemic restrictions caused mental health problems, and that she was therefore "done with COVID".

  As of 2024, Weiss had visited Israel more than 15 times, including after the October 7 attacks. She compared pro-Israel social media commentators to Natan Sharansky, the former Soviet refusenik whose years in prison made him an icon of the movement to free Jews from the Soviet Union. In 2024, the documentary films October 8 and Tragic Awakening featured comments from her and others about rising antisemitism in the United States and worldwide.

  Her private life has seen several chapters. At Columbia she had an on-and-off relationship with comedian Kate McKinnon. She also dated Ariel Beery, her co-founder at Columbians for Academic Freedom. From 2013 to 2016 she was married to environmental engineer Jason Kass. Since 2018 she has been in a relationship with Nellie Bowles, a former tech reporter for The New York Times. They have married and have two children. Weiss has said Bowles is their daughter's biological mother.

  Her listed honors include the Bastiat Prize from the Reason Foundation in 2018 and a National Jewish Book Award from the Jewish Book Council in 2019. The LA Press Club gave her its Daniel Pearl Award in 2021. The National Journalism Center listed her for Excellence In Investigative Journalism in 2022. Her books are How to Fight Anti-Semitism in 2019 and The New Seven Dirty Words in 2020.

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