Unlike Jonathan Greenblatt, the former Obama aide who has turned the Anti-Defamation League into a partisan cudgel, I’m not quick to label someone antisemitic just because they say something about Jews or Israel I don’t like. Greenblatt once accused Ted Cruz — one of Israel’s most reliable allies in Congress — of trafficking in antisemitic tropes because the Texas senator, riffing on a Bloomberg puff piece about the media company’s founder, quipped on Twitter: “It’s almost as if he owns the media.”
That’s what qualified as Jew hatred in Greenblatt’s world. I’m a fan of Michael Bloomberg, and I know antisemitism when I hear it. Cruz’s wisecrack didn’t make the grade. What I found more offensive was Greenblatt trying to smear Cruz with a charge he didn’t deserve. Alan Dershowitz — who has spent a lifetime battling actual antisemitism — called Cruz his best student at Harvard Law, praise I doubt Dershowitz would bestow if he perceived Cruz as a Jew hater.
Gratuitously smearing people as antisemites undermines the charge when it’s warranted. To Greenblatt’s credit, he has rightly called out the antisemitic attacks on Jewish journalist Bari Weiss, who reportedly is close to selling her upstart publication, The Free Press, to Paramount for possibly as much as $200 million and will be named to a senior position at CBS News as part of the deal. Unfortunately, Greenblatt’s words don’t carry the gravitas they should because he’s squandered credibility with his past partisan false accusations.
Greenblatt didn’t address specifics in his tweet, but I suspect a vile attack in The Nation by Jack Mirkinson was among the examples he was referencing. Mirkinson’s diatribe drips with antisemitism and underscores the Jew hatred that increasingly permeates America’s left — a movement crowded with Jews either ashamed of who they are or oblivious to their own history. The Nation, founded by abolitionists in 1865, has drifted so far left that if the world really were flat, its journalists would have long since toppled off the edge.
Mirkinson has previously disclosed he’s Jewish, but being Jewish doesn’t inoculate anyone from perpetuating antisemitic tropes. History is full of Jews who’ve turned against their own people or aligned themselves with movements and individuals hostile to Jewish survival. Senator Bernie Sanders is Jewish, and yet he’s a magnet for some of the most rabid Jew haters and anti-Zionists in America. I won’t link to Mirkinson’s diatribe and reward The Nation with clicks, but here’s a taste of his unfiltered vitriol:
Bari Weiss has been making the world worse for a long time.
Twenty years ago, as a student at Columbia, she led a racist smear campaign against Arab professors who had the audacity to criticize Israel. As a New York Times columnist, she constantly hawked right-wing bile while posing as a liberal who was just tired of all the extremism and censorship on the left — a tedious bait-and-switch that nevertheless sent her media profile soaring. And, as founder and editor of The Free Press, she has pushed genocide denial, transphobia, and the freedom to make Nazi salutes.
If we lived in a less terrible time and place, Weiss would be dismissed as a crank and a bigot, and never heard from again. But we live in the waking nightmare that is the United States in 2025. So instead Weiss is being rewarded with a prize that even she must think is kind of wild.
That prize? CBS News.”
The Nation and the rest of the leftist media ecosystem are understandably threatened by Weiss. Five years ago, she walked out of the New York Times in a blaze of publicity, publishing a damning resignation letter about the antisemitism she endured there and the Nazi taunts she was subjected to by colleagues. In 2022 she launched The Free Press, recruited top-tier talent who hadn’t yet fled to Substack, and began mercilessly calling out corporate media bias and dishonesty — particularly at the Times.
You don’t have to like Weiss’s views but smearing her as a “grifter” says more about Mirkinson and The Nation than it does about her. The Nation limps along on reader charity and reportedly isn’t profitable; Weiss lined up some 40 heavyweight investors like Marc Andreessen and David Sacks, and they’re now seemingly poised for a handsome return. That’s not grifting — that’s successful entrepreneurship, something extremely rare in the U.S. media industry.
The Free Press exploded in readership and was valued at $100 million in a funding round just a year ago. Weiss pulled that off with a reported lean staff of 25 in Los Angeles and New York. Even if she’s quadrupled headcount since, a three-year-old journalism startup fetching a valuation of $100 million or more is extraordinary. For perspective: Jeff Bezos paid $250 million for the Washington Post in 2013. Today, the paper wouldn’t come close to commanding that price.
Mirkinson calling Weiss a “grifter” wasn’t just reaching for the nearest insult — he was recycling one of the oldest antisemitic tropes. For centuries, Jews have been smeared as cheats, swindlers, or connivers whose success must be illegitimate. And when antisemites really wanted to dehumanize, they went further. Jews became rats, lice, or parasites, creatures to be exterminated rather than human beings to be debated.
Medieval propagandists painted Jews as bloodsuckers leeching off Christian society. The Nazis industrialized that rhetoric, flooding Germany with posters and films portraying Jews as rats and cockroaches — vermin whose removal was cast as a civic duty. Once you strip away a people’s humanity, persecution becomes a public health measure. That’s the dark lineage Mirkinson tapped into when he reduced Bari Weiss to a “grifter” and declared the world would be better off without her.
Mirkinson is far from alone in smearing Weiss. Employees at CBS News are reportedly apoplectic at the prospect she might join their discredited newsroom, particularly given that she holds what the corporate media dismisses as “conservative” views and that she’s an unabashed supporter of Israel, a country she’s visited more than a dozen times and where she once worked at Haaretz, Israel’s left-leaning publication.
Some CBS News employees are threatening to quit — anonymously, of course.
“David Ellison vowed not to politicize Paramount — yet his first big move at CBS News is a major bet on Bari Weiss, one of the most polarizing figures in media,” Oliver Darcy opined in a recent newsletter. “Weiss, the stridently pro-Israel, proudly anti-‘woke’ culture warrior, has built her brand on polarizing political commentary — supposedly the type of material Ellison signaled to reporters that he wishes to run away from.”
Darcy is CNN’s former media reporter, and he and Brian Stelter, CNN’s media analyst, have long served as shills for the corporate media while dissing conservative publications and reporters. CBS News has long been politicized, from cleaning up Kamala Harris’s disastrous interview with 60 Minutes through editing that deceptively made her seem more coherent, to more recently slicing up an interview with Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem that misrepresented her comments. (Serves Noem right for talking to CBS in the first place.)
For all the apoplexy and piety of anonymous CBS News employees, they were docile about the ignoble firing of longtime national security correspondent Catherine Herridge — reportedly under the guise of budget cuts, though many believe it was driven by her relentless reporting on Hunter Biden when his father was still president. Tellingly, Herridge received little corporate media support or pickup for her on-camera interview with a State Department whistleblower alleging mind-blowing fraud, forgery, and failure within the agency.
The leftist media’s attacks on Weiss underscore their hypocrisy. For years they railed against white male patriarchy in media. Weiss is not only female, but she’s also openly bisexual, married to a woman, and raising a daughter. While the media dismisses Weiss as “conservative,” her views are more aligned with those of most Americans.
The Nation’s Mirkinson wouldn’t dare call Representatives Ilhan Omar or Ayanna Pressley grifters, despite both Squad members mysteriously parlaying a few years of “public service” into seven-figure fortunes. One might imagine he’d give Weiss credit for her media entrepreneurship, but corporate media journalists are a petty lot.
Being Jewish in the corporate media these days isn’t for the faint of heart, even if one works at a publication perceived as hostile to Israel. The New York Times has repeatedly been criticized for biased coverage of Israel, yet editor Joseph Kahn, who identifies as Jewish, recently had the entrance to his New York home defaced with red graffiti declaring: “Joe Kahn lies Gaza dies.”
Weiss isn’t being singled out because she’s uniquely offensive. She’s being singled out because to the corporate media, a successful Jew who doesn’t play by their rules is the ultimate threat — and must be vanquished.