Inside Bari Weiss’s Hostile Takeover of CBS News

Trump, for his part, was effusive in his praise of Weiss. “I think you have a great new leader, frankly, who’s the young woman that’s leading your whole enterprise,” he said during his sit-down with O’Donnell. “I don’t know her, but I hear she’s a great person.” After the recording concluded, Weiss stepped forward to introduce herself to the President. It was the first time that she’d met the man whose presence now loomed over her installation at the network. They greeted each other warmly, exchanging a kiss on the cheek.

Weiss grew up in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh, “raised in what can be accurately described as an urban shtetl,” she wrote in her 2019 book, “How to Fight Anti-Semitism.” Her great-grandfather Philip (Chappy) Goldstein was a successful flyweight boxer who sometimes sported a Star of David on his boxing silks. Her parents worked in the family’s furniture store, where Weiss’s father, Lou, had a flair for marketing, doling out a line of candies called Weiss Krispie Treats to customers. Weiss attended a Jewish day school—which one of her three sisters now heads—and the family spent a couple of summers in Jerusalem, where her parents learned Hebrew. “I grew up in a family where we belonged to three synagogues,” Weiss told an interviewer in 2019. “It was not unusual for me to read Torah at shul and then go, say, to a Chabad family for lunch before heading to basketball practice.”

The Weisses’ Shabbat dinners featured a rotating cast of guests and were often contentious. “I remember vividly, like, constant debate,” Weiss’s sister Casey told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette last year. “Sometimes it got really heated.” Lou, who grew up in a “McGovern liberal” household, had become a conservative at Kenyon College. He kept copies of Commentary magazine and the Financial Times around the house, and frequently contributed op-eds to local Pittsburgh papers. His politics were centered around free markets and support for Israel. “They hate gays, and they subject women to horrible second-class treatment—not every single person, but as a group,” he told the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle in 2017, for an article about Syrian refugees. “If you bring them here, ultimately, they will vote. If you think they’ll vote to support Israeli interests, you’re sadly mistaken.” Weiss’s mother, Amy, has described herself as a “very moderate liberal Democrat”; she threatened a Lysistrata-esque sex strike in 2016 if Lou voted for Trump. (He ended up writing in Amy’s name.)

Weiss’s bat-mitzvah ceremony was held at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue, which, in 2018, became the site of the deadliest antisemitic attack in U.S. history, a mass shooting that left eleven congregants dead. Weiss covered the massacre for the Times, writing a moving report about the aftermath. “When an anti-Semitic murderer mows down Jews in the synagogue where you became a bat mitzvah, you might find yourself in the sanctuary again,” she wrote. “But instead of family and friends, the sanctuary is host to a crew of volunteers—the chevra kadisha—who will spend the week cleaning up every drop of blood because, according to Jewish tradition, each part of the body must be sanctified in death and so buried.”

One of Weiss’s elementary-school teachers told the Post-Gazette that Weiss was “a power to reckon with, even in second grade.” At Shady Side Academy, a secular private high school, Weiss led pro-Israel events and organized student groups for interdenominational understanding. Students followed a dress code, inspiring a lifelong practice. “If you’re really getting down to work and you’re Bari Weiss,” her youngest sister, Suzy, told me, “you’re putting on a collared shirt.”

“Mr. Karamazov is my father’s name. You can call me Dmitri, Mitka, Mitya, Dima, Mityok, D-Man, D. Doggy-Dogg . . .”

Cartoon by Ivan Ehlers

After graduation, in 2002, Weiss worked on a kibbutz near the Gaza border and studied at a yeshiva in Jerusalem before entering Columbia the following fall. During her sophomore year, she took an introductory course with Joseph Massad, an assistant professor in the Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures department. Massad, a Jordan-born Palestinian academic, had recently become the subject of student accusations that the department’s faculty trafficked in antisemitism. In 2004, the Boston-based advocacy group the David Project helped produce a short film, “Columbia Unbecoming,” which featured interviews with Jewish students accusing certain professors of harassing them because of their support for Israel. A student who had served in the Israeli Army said that, during a public lecture, Massad asked him, “How many Palestinians have you killed?”