Jewish 'New York Times' writer to pen book on antisemitism

Bari Weiss signed a two-book deal with Crown Publishing.

By AMY SPIRO
Flowers and candles are placed beneath a police cordon outside the Tree of Life Synagogue after a shooting there left 11 people dead in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh on October 27, 2018 (photo credit: BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI / AFP)
Flowers and candles are placed beneath a police cordon outside the Tree of Life Synagogue after a shooting there left 11 people dead in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh on October 27, 2018
(photo credit: BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI / AFP)
New York Times opinion editor and columnist Bari Weiss will be writing a book about fighting antisemitism.
Weiss has signed a two-book deal with Crown Publishing, a division of Penguin Random House, she announced on Twitter this week. The first book, due out in September, is titled How to Fight Anti-Semitism, and was described as “an urgent wake-up call to all Americans, exposing the alarming rise of antisemitism in this country and in Europe – and explains what we can do to defeat it.”
Weiss gave a speech on the topic of fighting antisemitism on Monday evening, at the Temple Emanu-El Streicker Center in New York City.
The Jewish writer and editor, who grew up in Pittsburgh, worked at Tablet magazine and The Wall Street Journal before landing at The New York Times in 2017.
During her time there, she has written several columns on the Jewish-American experience and antisemitism in the 21st century.
Weiss called US President Donald Trump’s refusal to condemn neo-Nazis in Charlottesville an “utter moral failure,” and called out Rep. Ilhan Omar for “making accusations based on nothing more than prejudiced stereotypes.” In October, after the massacre at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, where Weiss held her bat mitzvah, she penned a moving op-ed.
“The heartbreak is indescribable,” she wrote. “But Squirrel Hill, I am certain, will continue to live by the values that the Jews have sustained for more than 2,000 years. They can never be gunned down.”
The second book in Weiss’s deal, which is due out in 2020, is titled The New Seven Dirty Words. That book is based on a speech Weiss gave last year, riffing on the famous comedy routine by George Carlin. The new words, Weiss said, are imagination, humility, proportion, empathy, judgment, reason and doubt.