Bari Weiss

Weiss was born on March 25, 1984, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to Lou and Amy Weiss, former owners of Weisshouse, a Pittsburgh company founded in 1943 that sells flooring, furniture, and kitchens; they own flooring company Weisslines. She grew up in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood and graduated from Pittsburgh's Community Day School and Shady Side Academy. The eldest of four sisters, she attended the Tree of Life Synagogue and had her bat mitzvah ceremony there. After high school, Weiss traveled to Israel on a Nativ gap year program, helping build a medical clinic for Bedouins in the Negev desert and studying at a feminist yeshiva and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Weiss attended Columbia University, majoring in history and graduating in 2007. She founded the Columbia Coalition for Sudan in response to the War in Darfur. From 2005 to 2007, Weiss was the founding editor of The Current, a Columbia magazine covering politics, culture, and Jewish affairs. After graduating, she was a Wall Street Journal Bartley Fellow in 2007 and a Dorot Fellow from 2007 to 2008 in Jerusalem.

Columbians for Academic Freedom

After the 2004 release of The David Project's film Columbia Unbecoming—which alleged classroom intimidation of pro-Israel students by professors critical of Israel and opposed to Zionism in Columbia's Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures department, allegations the professors denied—Weiss, Aharon Horwitz, Daniella Kahane, and Ariel Beery co-founded Columbians for Academic Freedom (CAF), which led a campaign against those professors. The NYCLU denounced the campaign. Weiss said she had felt intimidated by Professor Joseph Massad during his lectures and believed he devoted excessive time to Zionism and Israel in a course covering the broader Middle East.

A committee convened by Columbia University in response to public pressure after the film's release examined and dismissed most of the allegations made in the film against Massad and the other professors. The committee, which concluded its work in spring 2005, reported that it had "no basis for believing that Professor Massad systematically suppressed dissenting views in his classroom" and that it "found no evidence of any statements made by the faculty that could reasonably be construed as anti-semitic." The committee found it "credible" that Massad had been angered by a question from a student he understood to be defending Israel's conduct toward Palestinians and that his response "exceeded commonly accepted bounds by conveying that her question merited harsh public criticism"; it also described an environment of incivility in which pro-Israel students disrupted lectures on Middle Eastern studies and heckled professors. Weiss criticized the committee's focus on individual grievances, maintaining that students had been intimidated because of their views. In her 2019 book How to Fight Anti-Semitism, Weiss writes that the atmosphere of that period gave her "a front row seat to leftist anti-Semitism" at the university. Journalist Glenn Greenwald alleged that the campaign Weiss helped initiate was "designed to ruin the careers of Arab professors by equating their criticisms of Israel with racism, anti-Semitism, and bullying, and 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 said she "got involved in journalism through activism", referring to what she called her "Zionist activism" at Columbia.

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

2013–2017: The Wall Street Journal

Weiss was an op-ed and book review editor at The Wall Street Journal from 2013 until April 2017. She departed after deputy editorial page editor Bret Stephens resigned and subsequently joined him at The New York Times.

2017–2020: The New York Times

In 2017, as part of an effort by The New York Times to broaden the ideological range of its opinion staff after the inauguration of President Donald Trump, opinion editor James Bennet hired Weiss as an op-ed staff editor and writer on culture and politics. In her first year at the paper, she wrote opinion pieces defending the blending of cultural influences against criticism from what she termed the "strident left" as cultural appropriation. She criticized the organizers of the 2017 Women's March for their "chilling ideas and associations", singling out several she believed to have made antisemitic or anti-Zionist statements in the past. Her article about the Chicago Dyke March, which characterized intersectionality as a "caste system, in which people are judged according to how much their particular caste has suffered throughout history", was condemned by playwright Eve Ensler and others for misunderstanding intersectional politics.

In January 2018, Babe.net published an anonymous woman's allegation that comedian and actor Aziz Ansari's conduct during a date rose to the level of sexual assault. Weiss published a piece titled "Aziz Ansari Is Guilty. Of Not Being a Mind Reader", one of many responses to the incident in the context of the #MeToo movement. In March 2018, Weiss published the column "We're All Fascists Now", arguing that people on the political left were increasingly intolerant of dissenting views. Shortly after publication, the piece was corrected and an editorial note was added because one example Weiss cited was a fabricated antifa Twitter account that had been identified as a right-wing hoax in multiple outlets in 2017. In May 2018, Weiss published "Meet the Renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web", profiling a group of thinkers she argued shared an unorthodox approach to their fields and to the media landscape. Weiss applied the collective label Intellectual Dark Web, borrowing the term from Thiel Capital managing director Eric Weinstein.

In 2019, The Jerusalem Post named Weiss the seventh-most influential Jew in the world.

On June 7, 2020, Times editorial page editor James Bennet resigned after more than 1,000 staffers signed a letter protesting his publication of an op-ed by U.S. Senator Tom Cotton calling for soldiers to be deployed as backup for police amid protests in American cities. Bennet later said he had not read the op-ed beforehand. Weiss called the internal controversy a "civil war" between what she called young "social justice warriors" and older "free speech advocate" staffers. Other journalists at the Times disputed that characterization; technology reporter Taylor Lorenz called it a "willful misrepresentation" that ignored the many older staffers who had spoken out, while Jamal Jordan, the Times's digital storytelling editor, criticized Weiss for dismissing her Black colleagues' concerns as a "woke civil war".

While attending Columbia University, Weiss had an on-and-off relationship with comedian Kate McKinnon. From 2013 to 2016, Weiss was married to environmental engineer Jason Kass. Since 2018, she has been in a relationship with Nellie Bowles, a former technology reporter for The New York Times. They have since married and have two children. Weiss has said Bowles is their daughter's biological mother.