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Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield
The fact is Weiss is a decent writer who was forced to work among zealots. She’s a provocateur only because the left is so unhinged. She’s actually kind of dull and conventional.
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If this review of Bari Weiss's book gets at her views, you're batting .333 -- your first two sentences are wrong, but your third is sadly correct.
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According to Weiss, the far left (a category never delineated but which seems to include everyone from the Women’s March to Rashida Tlaib to all of academia) engages in a less violent but no less troubling form of anti-Semitism. The left, she says, “asks the Jews to commit cultural genocide, to abandon their traditions and to worship false idols to survive.” In the typical airy manner of someone more used to writing polemic than fact-based analysis, Weiss posits that “intersectionality” has created a “reverse” caste system on the American left, in which the more marginalized people are, the greater their credibility. Jews, designated as white, are thus “incapable of being victims.” As is the case throughout the book, she furnishes no evidence for her claim, thereby failing to prove how widespread this mode of thought is, what groups it permeates, and how it is materially expressed.
Another of Weiss’s hobbyhorses is anti-Zionism on the left. She writes that leftist positions on Israel are absolutist and are directed at the complete destruction of the Jewish state and, moreover, that they conveniently exclude every other state around the world that commits similar abuses. This plaintive call to focus on other human rights abuses—any abuses other than Israel’s—ignores that it is precisely the left that brings up such issues as, for example, the detention of Muslim Uighurs in China. (Weiss has not addressed this deplorable state of affairs in a single column.) Anti-Zionist Jews, meanwhile, are compared to members of the Yevsektsiya, Stalin’s committee to control the Jewish community, whose members terrorized their coreligionists. Jews who support the BDS movement or oppose Zionism, she asserts, are “part of a long history of left-wing anti-Semitic movements that successfully conscript Jews as agents in their own destruction.”
For someone who is just 35, Weiss sounds an awful lot like an old fashioned cold warrior, and her anticommunism has the stale smell of a House Un-American Activities Committee hearing room about it. With the ferocity of someone for whom “healthy centrism” is the only solution to America’s current ills, she conjures up a nebulous far-left menace whose objections are not solely to Israel’s policies but to the very existence of Jews.
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By "dull and conventional," I take it that you mean you don't really have any interest in anything Bari Weiss has ever said, but if she's pissing off people to her left then she must be doing something right. Punching hippies never gets old.
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Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield
We must have some elitism. The virtue signaling left is filled with too many people cruising on sentiment and fervor. It’s not the smart set in the debate. Not by a long shot. But zealots are rarely smart.
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Yes, no virtue signaling at all in anything Weiss writes.
It's pretty clear that virtue signaling doesn't bother you at all unless the virtues being signaled are valued by the left but not the right.
