Bari Weiss and Nellie Bowles

RABBI AMMI HIRSCH I am Rabbi Ammi Hirsch of the Stephen Wise

Free Synagogue in New York, and you're listening to In These Times. Last month at our synagogue's Spring Benefit, we honored Bari Weiss and Nellie Bowles with our Light of Freedom Award. Bari and Nellie who founded the Free Press, have made prodigious contributions to journalism and to a free and open exchange of ideas in this country.

During the program, I sat down with Bari and Nellie to interview them about the free press, their Jewish journey, and several of the central challenges facing the American Jewish community. Well, this is really a fantastic honor. It's a little intimate conversation with some of our closest friends here in the synagogue.

What you've done is amazing. I want to ask you first about the media. Empire that you have or are about to establish or are establishing the free press. I hope everybody, uh, has a chance to read the free press. You should be, you should be receiving it. We're, I love this room. This is very, we're turning this into a subscription drive.

It's a fabulous contribution of course, to Jewish discourse, but to American society as well. Um, both of you left the New York Times. I don't think you originally thought that you would establish something as immense as the free press, but can you tell us about the circumstances of your leaving the New York Times and how that led you to establishing the free press?

BARI WEISS One thing I should say from the start is that we

never would've met had it not been for the New York Times, so. For that, I will always be grateful to Ag g Sulzberger and his family for introducing me to my wife, and I would say like the greatest addition to the Jewish people since Ruth herself,

NELLIE BOWLES but also the New York Times, refusing to cover

all of the interesting stories in the most interesting time, really created a market opportunity. Exactly. So we owe them a really a debt.

RABBI AMMI HIRSCH Nellie was already at the New York

Times when you arrived, right?

BARI WEISS Nellie was at the New York.

Okay. So for those of you who have no idea who we are, the TLDR as the kids say is, uh, I was working on the opinion desk of the New York Times. Nellie was, I think it's very fair to say like the golden girl, beloved by everyone at the newspaper, San Francisco lesbian, and with the politics that go along with that.

And I was already hated from day one. Why It took me a long time to realize this, but it was Israel like pretty plain and simple, and to make a very long, complicated, but in a way, not complicated story short, because it's really one of the major stories of our epoch is that the mission that the New York Times claim to be pursuing was not at all the mission that it.

Was pursuing at the time that we were there. In other words, the idea of pursuing the truth, holding up a mirror to the world as it actually is, and trying to reflect it back to people so they can make practical decisions about where to live and who they should be taxes to, and who they should vote for, and where they should send their kids to school that had been sort of quietly, subtly insidiously replaced with a different mission, and that mission was about ushering readers to the correct political conclusion.

We each. Encountered this ideology in our own ways. Perhaps Nellie will tell stories about the kinds of reporting she was doing that ended up sort of not seeing the light of day. We each had our own moments, but the upshot of it was we both had gotten into journalism because we are chutzpadik people that like to pursue our curiosity and the idea that you can get paid.

To go and talk to strangers and then report back to the public. What you find is like an unbelievable thing. The idea that we could get paid for that I think still astonishes us to this day. And you know, I ended up leaving in the summer of 2020. I. In the aftermath of, you know, a very hot summer politically, and in the aftermath of this decision to publish an op-ed by Senator Tom Cotton, and again, to make a long story short, I was sort of bumping into walls, drinking at 4:00 PM telling Nellie that anything short of becoming the next Rupert Murdoch was not gonna be enough for me, and I needed to extract my vengeance.

NELLIE BOWLES I thought you should become a rabbi.

I I was suggesting that at that time, go study. And,

RABBI AMMI HIRSCH but they, they did hire you and they

knew, they knew your background. They knew your views. Yeah. They knew it was to the right of many of the journalists and the opinion, well, I was the most right

BARI WEISS wing person at the New York Times, which is to say

on like a Scoop Jackson Democrat.

RABBI AMMI HIRSCH So why did they hire you in the first place

if they had a very specific. Agenda that they wanted to push

BARI WEISS because after the election of Donald Trump in 2016, and everyone in

this room will remember the needle that night, everyone remembers the needle. You're all triggered when I say that word that told us that Hillary Clinton was gonna win by 99.8% certainty, there was a brief moment of reflection even at the New York Times of how did we get this so wrong? How did we, the paper that's supposed to be the most important newspaper in the country get the biggest political story of the 21st century so far, so unbelievably wrong, and I'll be blunt, I was a diversity hire.

I mean, I might not look like it, but I was intentionally brought in to bring in sort of heterodox. Independent and gasp conservative views to an opinion page that would not otherwise know where to look for those stories. And they did a damn good job of it. So the problem wasn't the pieces I was bringing in and, and frankly, the problem wasn't even really at the top of the paper.

There was cowardice at the top of the paper ultimately, but they wanted what I was doing. The problem were the colleagues around us and that was very much, and I think this is a great place for Nellie to come in like. Just tell the story if you would, just about Kenosha what happened when you went and reported on that story as a business journalist.

'cause I think it kind of summarizes the whole, the whole everything. Yeah, I just,

RABBI AMMI HIRSCH just say Nellie, you, you were a star

reporter for the New York Times. Like you, you were like this kind of debutante that came from San Francisco and it was going great. And then I met Bari Wise,

BARI WEISS I, and I will say when we got together, I said, this is

going to be so bad for your career. And she looked at me, she was like, whatcha talking about like nothing bad had ever happened to her. And then everything happened exactly as I said this. Her roast,

NELLIE BOWLES no.

Basically in 2020, the realm of things that you could report on was starting to get tighter and tighter and kind of the, the rules around what was considered kosher to be curious about were getting tighter and tighter. And so when the riots were happening, I was a business reporter and I wanted to go to Kenosha to see.

The businesses that had been burned down and kind of report on the build back. And when I went there, what I realized was that actually the wealthy white neighborhood had not been burned down at all. Those businesses were fine. They had a business association that boarded everything up and it was the poor minority business district that had a bunch of like cell phone shops and stuff that had been burned down.

So I, I reported the story out and they were all totally underinsured and so couldn't really be rebuild. And we were at the time being told that basically these. These riots were victimless that everyone had insurance, that that property destruction is not violence and and shouldn't be thought of as such.

And that was being promoted by one of the top reporters at the time. And anyways, when I came back with that story, I. I, I basically hit a wall with it where I was told it it wouldn't be able to run until after the election. It was all of a sudden kind of this verboten topic to talk about, like all of my stories before had sailed through and then all of a sudden anything I wrote that was critical of the moment or that was documenting that moment, it became impossible.

And then people were just being jerks about it and leaking my story list to New York Magazine and making fun of me, and it was just. It was like a crazy, like stassy time in all of Media New York Times, and our experience is not at all specific. It was the entire media ecosystem of New York went absolutely mad for a couple years,

BARI WEISS and I don't even think it's the story of the media.

I think it's the story of just so many elite institutions in American life. It was like Harvard, you know? It was all of these places that we assumed huge to a certain set of values. Betrayed them and in some cases very publicly and in other cases, more subtly. The reason I think that story is important though, is I think a lot of Jews, especially that read the New York Times.

And C, its bias against Israel and its blind spots to our community and our concerns. Imagine that there's, at least my dad imagines this, that there's some like secret cabal meeting where they talk about these sorts of topics. But really a huge aspect to the way the bias itself plays out is just the things you're not allowed to be curious about.

And a lot of times those are the things that are politically inconvenient.

RABBI AMMI HIRSCH So there, it's like if you want to control the narrative, I guess

there are two main ways of doing that. One is to present stories in a certain specific ideological way, and the second is not to report on stories at all. Exactly.

NELLIE BOWLES That's the key.

It's the, that the facts that you read are probably accurate, but the things that reporters are allowed to be curious about. And what is uncovered, that's where kind of the bias comes in. And also when it comes to Israel and Jewish issues, the facts probably aren't even accurate in the story you're reading.

RABBI AMMI HIRSCH So would you say that, would both of you say,

is it fair to say that you felt canceled at the New York Times?

NELLIE BOWLES I

RABBI AMMI HIRSCH didn't feel it.

NELLIE BOWLES And I think basically you self deported.

You wrote your I self canceled, very self canceled, which is a really good way

BARI WEISS to go.

NELLIE BOWLES And then.

You started the substack and you started writing and it started getting subscribers. And so, and, and I was still at the Times thinking, I'm, I'm gonna like, like white knuckle through this, this moment will pass. My bosses were really great and they were saying like, we're so sorry this is happening.

We don't know what to do, but like, we're gonna figure it out. And the Substack started growing and it was making their salary and then it was making twice your salary. And I was kind of like. Uh, this seems like fun. And so part of this is a story of like the institution was getting toxic and the moment was toxic, but also all of a sudden we had these tools to build something new that was exciting and positive and fun and like the future.

BARI WEISS And I think that's one of the great stories of this moment.

Like if one of the tragedies. And I think one maybe that a lot of people in our community are understandably still mourning, which is the loss of all of these institutions and frankly, just more generally like cultural morays that we took for granted. The positive story and the one that we try and really focus on, we never even think about the New York Times anymore.

The, the positive story is the fact that this is a moment for builders. This is a moment for, and, and I think. People in the Jewish community are incredibly adep at building because we've had to do it for our entire history. This is a moment for that. And you know, neither of us are entrepreneurs. Neither of us imagine that we would do anything like this.

And now we have a company and we have 55 people working for us, having never managed either of us, anyone in our lives. And I, I emphasize that only because. I, I emphasize that only because you in your own ways, especially maybe the younger people may not think of yourselves as being capable of starting something new.

And like we are middle-aged moms that have a nine month old and a two and a half year old, and we did it knowing nothing about how to do it. And I, I really like to emphasize that because I think it's. An important thing to be clear about with people that like, there's a sense of like, who am I to do something?

Ugh, we'll just keep our head down. We'll just go along with this thing that we kind of know is bad because could we start a new school? Could we start a new synagogue? Could we start a new art museum? Could we start a new nonprofit? Could we start a new publishing house? And the answer is yes to all of those things.

We're just doing it in the area that we know how to do it in. But I think the broader message in American Jewish life right now is that we need all of those things to be built and maybe some of the people that are gonna start those things are in this room right now.

RABBI AMMI HIRSCH Just before we move on to just, if you could just tell us

what is distinctive about the Free Press? What idea is it dedicated to and how is it distinctive? How does it differ from other media outlets?

NELLIE BOWLES I think I'm gonna butcher our slogan, but it's something like the,

the fearlessness of the new world paired with these standards of the old world. So our first hire was a fact checker. Like it's the idea that we're going to report on things that led legacy media ignores or downplays, but we're going to bring still the legacy standards and the quality you would expect.

Whereas I think in the, in a lot of the like wild world of Substack and various blogs, you won't find that pairing. So that's what we try to do.

BARI WEISS I think the other part of what makes us distinctive is

we are unapologetic in our values. We believe in the American project and the goodness of America and the goodness of the West. And everyone that works at the free press signs onto that as one of our values. And we think that that is non-controversial and in fact essential because without a belief in the American project and a.

Sense of duty to defend it. There wouldn't be a free press at all. There wouldn't be a business at all. None of our lives would be possible, and I think that the fact that that feels maybe radical to certain people in this moment says so much more about the state of the rest of the press than it says about us.

I would say the other thing that makes us really unique is the makeup of our newsroom. We took a straw poll two weeks before the election, and this is, I guarantee you, it is the only newsroom in the country like this. A third of people voted for Kamala. A third of people voted for Trump and a third of people didn't vote.

What does that mean? It means that a newsroom that is trying to reflect. The world as it actually is, reflects the country as it actually is. And we're incredibly proud of that. And I would say in a moment where everyone's getting more and more balkanized and in like these tiny little narrow niches where everyone agrees with them, we're trying to do something that didn't used to be radical in this country, which is showing that you can disagree with people.

And still like them, showing that you can actually hear the strongest perspective from someone you don't agree with, but come away more educated because you heard the strongest version of the argument.

NELLIE BOWLES I was terrified when, when we did that poll.

I thought it was gonna be entirely RFK write-ins. I was like, these freaks. It's gonna be, this is Maha. This is a Maha scene.

RABBI AMMI HIRSCH I wanna ask you about turning to Nellie.

I, when we spoke last week, I told you that I. I personally as a rabbi, I never mentioned to people who have converted to Judaism that they converted to Judaism because that's the insistence of Jewish tradition, that you never remind somebody that they weren't born Jewish. But you said, well, I write about it all the time and I have something to add.

So I said. You know, the, the only distinction that a convert can't do that a born Jew can do is be a high priest or a king, neither of which you really want to do.

NELLIE BOWLES When I found out about the cohans, I was,

BARI WEISS she was disgusted that she married just a normal Israelite.

Well, I

NELLIE BOWLES said, well, I, I said, bear, do you have any of these, uh,

any, you know, whatever, whatever. And bear was like, no, I'm an Israelite. And I was like,

RABBI AMMI HIRSCH anyway, Nellie.

So since you insisted that I ask you about. Your conversion. You actually have written about it very eloquently. So could you, could you just share a little bit of that story?

NELLIE BOWLES Yeah, I, um, I kept a blog chosen by choice

during my conversion journey. I think I, I wanted you to bring it up only because I think, I think it's really cool. Like, I, I am really proud of having converted and I'm really, I think thank you and, and there's sort of a way in which it's like, I know it's out of respect to not bring it up and all that.

But in American Jewish life, in non-Orthodox American Jewish life, something like 80% of people marry non-Jews. So if there is a desire for continuity, then there needs to be a conversation about conversion and about opening up Judaism to these families. And, and it's not even to argue that it should be an easier process or anything like that, or that it should be somehow very fast or anything.

And I actually think having it be slow and and hard is. Good. It's just that it should be talked about and like celebrated as a conversation that it's an okay conversation to bring up and, and then it should maybe be a little more transparent about how to do it and how it works. But anyways, I just always think it's really interesting to talk about and bring up, but it kind of makes people a little uncomfortable too, which I try at dinners to say things like.

Have you thought about converting your wife and, and people look at me like I just said something really inappropriate. Which, which is, which is why I like to keep bringing it up.

BARI WEISS Ne Nellie's business after the free press, if there

ever will be one she told me is to become like an Evangelical Jew. And I actually think it's a very good business idea. I mean, I will say like our entire orientation as parents is toward that. That like everything we do is about, and they're very, very young. But everything is about how do we give them a positive experience of what it is to be a Jew?

How do we make them proud to be Jews? How do we, you know, end the day with the sheam? Begin it with mo de like in everything we do, we're thinking about it. And like Judaism is not an easy thing to transfer. Like the transmission of Judaism is very intentional and requires a lot of investment, like of time, of money.

I mean, that's a whole nother thing. We could talk about the i, the, the, the, the No really the, the idea that the al

NELLIE BOWLES tuition, yeah.

BARI WEISS The idea that Jewish Day School costs what it does in a community

like ours where there's so much capital. I do believe it's like one of the great scandals, don't get

NELLIE BOWLES me started our road tuition,

BARI WEISS but, but I, but I think that, um.

Wow. Mom's

NELLIE BOWLES here.

No, the motive is, guys, it's out of control.

BARI WEISS But I, but I think that like, it's not a guarantee that your

children are going to just like Judaism. It's not like oxygen. It's countercultural in very profound ways, and not just because we live in a world that is increasingly hostile toward us.

RABBI AMMI HIRSCH What do you mean?

Could give us a couple of examples of what do you, so you're gonna choose

BARI WEISS Judaism.

You're not gonna choose something that's hard on its own.

RABBI AMMI HIRSCH Give us one or two examples of what

you mean by counter-cultural.

BARI WEISS Judaism resists, I would say political extremes at its best.

Judaism is based on a kind of like dialectical ongoing questioning and conversation In that way, I think it is very counter-cultural in this moment. I think Judaism is based, I mean a belief in. Chosenness feels very countercultural, whatever that means. Um, a belief both in the supreme importance and dignity of the individual, but also in a kind of communitarianism, is very countercultural.

The idea that, you know, you don't need to be born a Jew, that Judaism is not a race or an ethnicity, it is a peoplehood. That is a category that in its. Very essence is counter-cultural in this moment, and I think at its best, Judaism resists a lot of the idolatry, if I can say that, of worshiping, whether it's prestige or money or any other thing that is very normalized in this moment, and I think that a lot of that's lost.

You know, people think that Judaism is kind of like whatever they want it to be. Like it's Judaism is just tikun Olam, or it's just social justice. Those things are great, but that's just one piece of what Judaism is. And I do think that if looked at in a whole way, Judaism can really offer the most like, effective, wise, profound tools for how to be in a moment where.

You know, all of those other things are happening.

RABBI AMMI HIRSCH So are we doing a good job in transmitting

that to younger generations? And what should we be doing that we're not doing?

BARI WEISS This is just me, and maybe this is just a, you know, I'm 41.

This might just be the way, what was happening in college, et cetera, when I was growing up. But I think that there was an attempt. A sincere and well-intentioned attempt on the part of a lot of Jewish leaders to make Judaism just progressive politics with a little bit of Hebrew slapped onto it, or to make Judaism just like easy for people, as if that was the thing that was going to work and attract young people.

And it's like, why would I choose a sin? Like if I can go to Burning Man and it's like amazing. And this spiritual experience, why would I. Choose like Judaism over that, or if I can go to a climate change. To

NELLIE BOWLES be clear, bear has never been to Burning Man, but

BARI WEISS she has, and I know she loved it.

I'm like the straightest person though. I've never done a drug. But my point is only like there's better versions of that. There's better versions of environmental justice. There's better versions of Pro-Choice, there's better versions of Burning Man. There's better versions of all of that stuff. And if Judaism is just a watered down version of a thing that already exists in the world.

Why is that ever gonna attract people? How do we attract people? It's very counterintuitive. It's to be more authentically Jewish. That's actually the, to me, the secret because that is like, that's the thing that has lasted for thousands of years. And I find, and, and this is like one of the like green shoots of this moment, that when people encounter that thing.

Young people. They're profoundly drawn to it. And we know more and more people that are coming back to Jewish life right now. And they're coming back to as a result of traditional Jewish or now do you think it's 'cause of October 7th? They're a bigger thing than that?

NELLIE BOWLES I think it's both.

I think October 7th for sure, but I think also you see it in the, like the, you know. Appeal of Catholicism right now to the young people. There's a, there's return to religion as a practice, not like spiritual, like I think the era of like spirituality and. Like I'm, I'm spiritual, but not religious.

Now more and more young people are religious, less spiritual, but, but I think October 7th is what tipped it, I think October 7th for a lot of our friends.

BARI WEISS Yeah, for a lot of our friends.

But I think also having kids, and like my dad always says this, he's like, we've got a great program, like Judaism is a great way to mark time and to have a meaning in your family and to structure your family life and. You know, I, I just find that that is very, very, very true. And the deeper we get into Judaism and Jewish community, the more into it I would say that we are.

RABBI AMMI HIRSCH I wanna ask you about some of the challenges

in the American Jewish community. Uh. Uh, Bari, you grew up in the tree of life, uh, synagogue in Pittsburgh, and I heard you speak very eloquently about the pain that you experienced, and both of you and Nellie, you're a graduate of Columbia University and Bari also. So kind of you have these two focal points of the last, call it seven years or so that really affected the American Jewish community and our relationship with the non-Jewish community.

What's happening with respect to American society and American Jews? The, uh, challenges that the American Jewish community is facing now are, I think, unprecedented, at least since, uh, the end of World War ii. Do you think it's more dramatic, it's more intense that anti-Jewish animosities are deeper than they were say, 10, 20 years ago?

Or is it just our sensitivity to it?

BARI WEISS I think the fact that we feel that it's unprecedented tells

us that we were living in a bubble. The post-war sort of holiday from history moment, that holiday is over. It was over before October 7th, but anyone that still believed that it wasn't. Over has now been disabused of that reality. And I think what's happening is that we are returning to the mean of Jewish history in a way.

And we are having to have the tiniest, tiniest, tiniest taste of what our ancestors. Took as normal. Um, there's some comfort in that, in that when you look at the sweep of Jewish history, what we're experiencing isn't so bad. I think we literally have a Jewish kids book that gets called. It could always be worse.

And I think when Nellie opened that, she was like, what have I gotten myself into?

NELLIE BOWLES Um, I, I was reading it and I was like, oh, wow.

It's just about how it could always be worse,

BARI WEISS right?

It's like the guy has a coat and then it becomes a vest, and then in the end it's like a single button and then he loses the button. And that's the end of the book. And then the book is over. It's a very Jewish story. Um, I say that only because it's always important to laugh about. Uh, the terrible state of things, but also because it could always be worse.

I think what's also happening, and, and this is something that has been I would say much, much more painful for my parents' generation than for me, although it's been very painful for me too, was I was truly raised with this idea that America was, and I still believe this, okay, but like immune to antisemitism and when things happened.

Even Tree of Life, by the way. Um, but when, like, you know, kids told me like, pick up pennies or where's your, you know, like things that happen to kids. My, the reaction of my parents was like, they should be so embarrassed. Do they not know what country this is? Like that is antithetical to what it is to be American.

I grew up in that myth, like it was almost like a two faith household in the sense that it was completely Jewish and completely American. And it was like a belief in Americanism and in a belief in, you know, the all, we grew up with all of it like that Benjamin Franklin wanted the image on the Great Seal to be Moses crossing the sea and the letter from George Washington to the congregation in Newport.

And like that was all as much of a part of our family's ethos as like. The Hagar and the Parsha of the week, and I think that one of the adjustments of this moment is to understand that America's only exceptional if our leaders and if our culture continues to believe in those ideals. And that any culture, any country, any administration is only human beings making a choice.

And I think that there has been a profound sense of, frankly, a loss. Like we used to take that for granted. We can no longer take that for granted. Okay, that's our new reality and what are we gonna do to claw it back? What are we gonna do to rebuild those guardrails? How can we each do it in our own way?

And I think that's, I'll speak for me and Nellie, that that's a thing that we are talking about. Constantly in our life, in our professional life and in our personal life,

RABBI AMMI HIRSCH when you were at Columbia, did, and I,

I I say Columbia because it's a mile from, uh, the synagogue and you know, it's a New York City. It could be symbolic or representative of a lot of elite higher educational institutions. October 7th in a sense, didn't necessarily create this kind of new hostility. It uncovered, it gave license to this hostility.

Did you, when you were there, did you see any of that? Did you sense any of that? Did you consider that to be a barometer of the health of the United States?

NELLIE BOWLES It's funny 'cause I, I, I was.

I think in the water of it, but kind of blind to it. So I, I know I didn't see it, but, but Bear was also there and had a really different experience. So I know it was there. I'm not gonna pretend it wasn't, but I wasn't so involved in politics, to be honest. Bear says this the most eloquently, I cannot add anything that's as good as what, how she'll know.

Um, I, the only thing I add is that I find it sometimes frustrating the conversation whenever it comes to antisemitism right now. Is becomes kind of a debate between whether it's worse on the right or worse on the left. Like the conversation gets bogged down into that dichotomy. Just like, which is it this, or is it this, is it this or this?

And it's sort of like, it doesn't matter, like it's, the point is it's bad on both sides right now. Bad things are happening certainly on the right, certainly on Twitter. But also the left winging antisemitism matters enormously and like your kid is probably more likely to encounter it when they're trying to get a job at a gallery, which is more likely than they're trying to move to Louisiana and work in evangelical Christian spaces.

And yeah, I think the conversation, it's just, it's frustrating that that's where it goes instead of just like a, like a more productive place sometimes.

RABBI AMMI HIRSCH I, I want to just expand on, uh, what you just

mentioned, both of you about. anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism. What in your view is the nexus between the two? Is anti-Zionism almost always, or always by definition, anti-Semitism. And where is it all coming from? It does seem much more intense as a result of October 7th. This is the thing that I keep thinking about all the time.

You know, the worst day in the history of the Jewish people since the Holocaust. The most people murdered. On one day and within 48 hours there were protests around the world against the Jews. Where, where did that come from? Was that preexisting? Is this animosity against Israel? Really? Does it harbor and betray an animosity towards Jews?

Part of that age, old centuries old hostility against our people? Or is there something new here?

BARI WEISS It came, well, this new version of it.

The anti-Zionism came from the Soviet, it was like the Soviets won a posthumous victory. People don't think of it that way, but when a young 19-year-old at Columbia right now, and there are many of them I'm sure shouts that Zionism is racism. Does she know that she is shouting the slogan of the Evil empire that was destroyed long ago?

Of course not. But that's what happened. And I, I write about this in my book, but to make a very long story short. A set of ideas that insisted that truth was relative, that morality was relative, that you couldn't make a judgment and say that one culture was better than another culture, and that to do so was racist.

They couldn't really know truth at all, and that everything was sort of based on your lived experience. This set of viewpoints, whether you call it post-colonialism, post-structuralism, post nationalism, there's a lot of posts that stew of ideas. That at one time in the late 1960s, let's say, I think we could trace it all the way back to then, seemed like it was just a feature of a few weird, you know, outposts at places like Columbia and Harvard and Yale.

It's like in the way that the coronavirus escaped the lab in Wuhan. Those extraordinarily toxic, extraordinarily lethal ideas. Not just came to subsume the entire university structure, pretty much it came to subsume. The culture and everything is sort of downstream of that. And so when you go and you ask the average young person that's screaming with a kafi, they don't think they're doing it because they hate Jews.

If they're shouting from the river to the sea, they have no idea which river and what sea they are doing it because it has become successfully. A plank of a kind of politically progressive worldview in which there's any number of points of the orthodoxy and being opposed to Israel is just one of those things.

So like, I wanna be very clear about how successful this has become when people try and make a distinction between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. Okay. For like the 10 anarchists that wanna get rid of nation states that live in Brooklyn. Fine. That's your exception to the rule. And if so, I would ask you like, why are you starting with Israel?

Like maybe start with China, India, Pakistan. It's never okay, but fine. That would be like your one intellectually honest out. But I would say that any sense that there was a distinction between those two things, I think is absolutely foolish. I think any Jews that spend any time trying to make Talmudic distinctions between those two things have their heads up their ass.

Uh, bluntly. I, we're not in the synagogue itself, so I can say that. Um, but I, I would just say like wake up when people say, no, Zionists allowed. They mean Jews. They mean Jews. They just mean Jews that are honorable and proud enough to say what pretty much every Jew believes, which is of course we believe in the right to our political sovereignty.

Like we believe in that for every other people. Period. End of story. And I mean, we've heard, we've, Nellie and I have been at all kinds of dinner party conversations where people have all these different strategies, right? We were at one where someone suggested we should just get rid of the word Zionist.

Like that'll do it, you know? 'cause we gotta get rid of the word because Israel exists and Zionism was the desire to return to living of Israel. And it exists so we can let go of it. It's like they're gonna come up with another word. They're gonna come up with another word, and I just feel that the most fundamental and important thing to do in this moment is to be absolutely unashamed and proud about who we are, about our Judaism, about our Zionism, and make absolutely no apology.

For either of those things and anyone that wants to suggest that, that means that we agree with everything the Netanyahu government does, or it's as absurd as saying, I'm proud to be an American. That means I agree with everything the Trump administration does. Are you insane? So I just feel that it needs to be without caveat, just.

Pride, courage, modeling that for each other, modeling that for our kids, like to me that is the absolute table stakes for any attempt at trying to not just roll back the antisemitism that's here, but transmission. Like if, if the answer of like, why be Jewish is. You know, to fight the people that hate us, or if the answer to why be Jewish is, you know, any of these sort of defensive answers in the negative, that's not gonna work.

It's gotta come from a much more positive. And a place of pride. And I know Ammi, that that's what you're doing all of the time.

RABBI AMMI HIRSCH All the time at Stephen Wise all the time.

I, I, I heard you, Nellie, I think you mentioned you were worried about the glorification of violence that has increased in American society and these slogans globalize the anti and. Glory to our martyrs and Oh God.

NELLIE BOWLES Yeah.

RABBI AMMI HIRSCH Who isn't worried about that?

Could, could you, could you elaborate on that? What, what exactly you mean by that?

NELLIE BOWLES Yeah, I mean, I think we're all seeing it.

You have students at American universities chanting glory to our martyrs. It, it's, it's shocking, like it's beyond imagination. I, I have friends who are basically defending the United Healthcare assassination, not just basically, I mean, I think I definitely have a friend who's a fan of it. Um. There has just been such a shift in, in the Overton window with what's acceptable.

And for me, I feel like there's an air of possibility now and I mean like possibility of danger that I've never felt before. And, and I definitely feel it now. I mean, like we moved into a doorman building 'cause we were getting a little scared being in a. Cottage on the street in LA and um, that felt weird and not good.

But then I realized like, wow, if someone did something like you, you look at the response to United Healthcare killing and it's like, oh, that would be the response. Like, where

RABBI AMMI HIRSCH do you think that's coming from?

What is it? Because humans are animals. Like I don't,

NELLIE BOWLES we, our base instincts are bad and they have to

be beaten into some, but is that

RABBI AMMI HIRSCH new?

I mean, we were al we always had those base instincts.

NELLIE BOWLES I think the guardrails are cracking.

I was really excited about Elon Musk buying Twitter, and there was a lot in the old regime that I really, really didn't like a lot of Censorious. That really scared me too, but I think I was a little bit wrong about being excited about that because seeing now the. Death threats, the threats of violence, the, the way in which that's now allowed to explode.

It is really scary and I think it is new and I think that, yeah, the, these have always been part of human nature, but the ability to distribute those threats and distribute the glee, let's say in the United Healthcare, killing the ability to distribute that glee is new. And really scary, and I think we don't know what that's gonna look like as it gets bigger.

We don't know what that's gonna look like as you layer on AI and you all of a sudden have it in more and more of your life.

BARI WEISS But this is always why identity politics, whether it came

from the right or the left, was so dangerous because any politics, any worldview that says some people are more deserving fundamentally of privilege, but, or, or of life than other people. Is a politics that will end in violence against certain groups, and that is a politics that is antithetical to what America at its best is all about.

And I think you see that taking hold in so many places. Why is violence against Jews on college campuses? Basically kind of permissible where it would never be against any other group. It's very simple. It's because in classrooms and in the culture on campus, there is a view that Jews are just, or white people that believe and support a white colonialist, violent outpost in the Middle East.

Ergo, why should they, why should we even think of them in the same category as black people or Hispanic people or gay people? That's literally the logic. And so if you just expand that outward, it becomes somehow permissible or even heroic to go and murder someone. That's the CEO of a healthcare company, and I think that we really cannot overstate how significant, I mean, the, the, the positive way of spinning this is that ideas really matter and the ideas that you encounter at those most formative years of your life.

Truly make a difference right now, we're seeing that in the negative way, and it's up to us over the course of the rest of our lives to make sure that it comes out in the positive direction.

RABBI AMMI HIRSCH So my last question to both of you, to finish on a, uh, more

positive note, what do we have to look forward to in America in the next five and 10 years and in the Jewish community? What optimistic thoughts do you have for us?

NELLIE BOWLES I think actually American Jewish life is gonna get AMA amazing

in this because I think that there's gonna be a lot of people who are sending their kids now to, sorry, I'm thinking in terms of kids in schools, but there, there's gonna be a lot of people who are sending their kids now to, to Dalton, who start to rethink that. And, and, and people who, no offense to anyone that goes to that school in this room, offense to every

BARI WEISS Dalton

RABBI AMMI HIRSCH parent here.

We, we have a lot of those, uh, kind of people here. I'm

NELLIE BOWLES looking

BARI WEISS at each of, you have no idea what Dalton is and neither

do I just know it's a fancy one. They're new. They

RABBI AMMI HIRSCH came from California.

What did they know? I've seen Gossip Girl.

NELLIE BOWLES But, but, um,

no, and it's, it's the positivity of, of our friends getting more into Jewish life. And it's the.

BARI WEISS I mean positive things.

There's so many. How can you be a Jew in 2025 and not be an optimist? I mean, for real. We are alive during the third Jewish Commonwealth. We are alive during the Jewish return to political sovereignty in the land of Israel. We can get on a plane right now, Houthis aside, and go to Jerusalem or Tel Aviv right now.

That's unbelievable. That's in our lives. So I think like that is like baseline. We should be optimistic. The second thing is that we are a, people that has like by every law of history, should have been completely erased from the world, probably like 1900 years ago, and yet we are here. I view that as something like a miracle, if not a miracle.

And. So that is when that is your frame for things. So many other things feel possible and I would just encourage everyone, maybe just take a day and think that way a little bit because there's so many things to feel negative about. And when you get into that headspace, the idea of, to go back to the beginning of this conversation, Ammi, of starting new things, of building new worlds of, you know, bringing.

Lots of Jewish kids into this world right now, which a lot of people we know are nervous about that. All of those things just become much more possible. America's celebrating. Its 250th next year, as I'm sure everyone here knows, and we're thinking a lot about coverage for that. And also just the youngness of both America and Israel.

There's so many things to be built. I feel very worried about many things happening in this administration. But I feel like the possibility of normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia could happen in the next, like few months of our lives. That's incredible that that could be happening. And I think, you know, that's, that's another thing to be excited for.

I feel maybe more optimistic than I realized I did. I don't know if that's the answer you were looking for.

RABBI AMMI HIRSCH That's a good way to end the Light of Freedom Award.

Bari Wise, Nellie Bowles. Welcome to New York. Welcome to the synagogue.

Bari Weiss and Nellie Bowles

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