‘Anti-Semitism is an intellectual virus’: meet the US writer taking on both the Left and Trump

The day I meet Bari Weiss, the controversial American columnist and author, I have a quick look at social media to see what’s being said about her. Weiss, one keyboard warrior snipes, is “toxic and creepy”. She is a “neocon,” alleges another; she “sells hate” and is, outrageously, the girlfriend of another (female) journalist who works at the New York Times. As for her new book, How to Fight Anti-Semitism, the trolls declare it apposite: “Bari Weiss is uniquely qualified to talk about anti-Semitism, as her existence is a leading cause of it.”

In person, Weiss could not be further from the foaming alt-Righter that she’s sometimes portrayed as online. Petite and radiant, she is younger-looking than her 35 years. She is the oldest of four daughters, and was raised in a rowdy family in the Jewish neighbourhood of Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh.

It was in October 2018, on an unremarkable morning when Weiss due to speak at a conference in Arizona, that she received a WhatsApp message from her sister, Suzy, that shook her to her core. It read: “There is a shooter at tree of life.” Suzy was referring to the synagogue in which Bari had celebrated her Bat Mitzvah as a teenager. Both women knew that there was a real chance that their father was there.

Thankfully, he was not. But he and his daughters knew many of the 11 people killed by the gunman, who screamed that he wanted “all Jews to die” as he opened fire. The attack – the deadliest mass killing of Jews in American history – drew a line in the sand for Weiss, dividing her life into a “before” and an “after”.

“I became obsessed,” she tells me over breakfast in central London, “by the question of how a pogrom had happened in the country I’d always been taught was singular.” She realised that she’d spent much of her life “on a holiday from history”. Like many in her community, she’d noticed a surge in anti-Semitic attacks and rhetoric in Europe – but she’d assumed that the rot wouldn’t spread to America.

“I was steeped in an optimistic world view that held that the arc of history was bending toward justice, and that there were fundamental things about America that inoculated us,” she says. “My idea of that shattered.” Her fears were confirmed six months later, when another gunman opened fire in a Los Angeles synagogue. More attacks followed. Weiss decided to shelve the book she was writing on liberalism, and investigate anti-Semitism instead: its roots, its manifestations and the most effective ways to fight it.

For Weiss, anti-Semitism is best understood as an “intellectual disease” embedded into the DNA of Western culture. “When our society’s immune system is healthy,” she writes, “the virus of anti-Semitism is kept in check.” When our social immune system is weakened, “the virus will out”. And President Trump, she suggests, may be no anti-Semite, but he allows anti-Semitism to flourish by undermining what Bret Stephens has called “the moral guardrails that keep bigotry down”.

At such moments, the Jews are maligned for embodying whatever characteristics are most feared. “So under Nazism, we were race contaminators,” Weiss says. “Under Soviet communism, we were arch-capitalists. And today, to the far Right, we’re the greatest trick the Devil has ever played – because we appear to be white, but in fact we’re loyal to immigrants, black people and brown people, who are sullying what white Western civilisation is.”

Weiss was a passionate critic of Jeremy Corbyn. Anti-Semitism, she warns, can be more insidious when it originates from the political Left than from the Right. Under Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party, she says, “Jew hatred in the Labour Party blossomed”, because for him and his ilk, “Israel, the Jew among the nations, is the last bastion of white, racist colonialism”.

She disputes the idea, wheeled out ad infinitum in the run-up to December’s election, that anti-Semitism is just racism by another name. “Racists see themselves as punching down, against a person with darker skin who they view as sub-human,” she says. “Anti-Semites sees themselves as punching up, because in their view of the world, the Jew is a wily manipulator.”

I ask Weiss if she is bored of talking about anti-Semitism. Authors, particularly female ones, are often pegged to one subject, and find that they can’t escape it. She says that she’s looking forward to getting stuck into her next book – the one on liberalism she shelved – but insists that “repping” her people and her community has made her a “more stand-up person”.

Weiss is certainly that. In the last two years, she has become a pi?ata for both the Left and Right in America. She aligns herself with neither, saying that as a liberal she feels politically “homeless”. The column that really stirred things up was about the 2018 Aziz Ansari affair. A woman who had been on a date with the actor alleged in an article that he had “ignored clear non-verbal cues”, made her feel “really pressured” and was culpable of sexual misconduct.

Weiss wrote a frank piece explaining that Ansari could not be expected to read his date’s mind, and that the incident amounted to little more than “bad sex”. For many, her article was a breath of fresh air. Others found it insensitive, triggering, anti-feminist. The usual suspects accused Weiss of being a fascist, and advised the New York Times to fire her.

In today’s super-sensitive climate, Weiss tells me, the temptation to steer clear of controversy is strong. “The incentive is to write a column every week about how Donald Trump sucks. One of the challenges, and it takes discipline, is to also write about things that matter that aren’t that.

“But it’s hard. There are topics where I’m like, ‘I don’t want to die on that hill. I don’t want to be the witch that gets burnt today.’” It has taken her some time to build up her resilience online, and she now has people she loves monitoring her social media: “They tell me if there’s something I need to know about.” She’s concerned by what she terms “closeted normalcy” – the growing online intolerance for middle-of-the-road views. People write to her to say that they agree with her, but they wouldn’t dream of admitting to it on a public forum for fear of reprisals.

Cancel culture, she says, is leading to a thinning of public discourse. “What worries me is that I’m seeing the spectrum of views and topics narrowing. The only way that changes is by being brave, and encouraging other people to be brave.” Weiss is not lacking in courage. I sense that she has her family to thank – she was raised to argue and to enjoy it. Her mother is liberal, while her father is a Republican. Weiss smiles: “He would have voted for Trump if my mother hadn’t withheld sex from him.”

Weiss has written about what she sees as our “broken sexual culture”. Her 24-year-old sister Suzy, she says, is being treated “like trash” by those she dates. Bari herself has been with her girlfriend, the journalist Nellie Bowles, for nearly two years, and seems deeply in love. Even though she was married for a time to a (male) environmental engineer, today she often finds it easier to tell people she’s gay. “There’s a connotation when you say you’re bisexual that it’s just a synonym for slut,” she says, twinkling. “I’ve been selective!”

Before we finish, we return to the subject of anti-Semitism. In her book, Weiss laments that many European Jews are living “partially in the closet”. Does she feel safe in London? “Very.”

But she admits that she’s still planning on taking a self-defence course, and the podcaster Joe Rogan “keeps texting” to ask her to go shooting with him. “I don’t think it would be a bad thing for me to know how to do that,” she says. “But I live in New York City. And I have a ten-pound dog who will – hopefully – protect me.”

How to Fight Anti-Semitism is published by Allen Lane. To order your copy for ￡14.99, call 0844 871 1514 or visit the Telegraph Bookshop