The Award-Winning ‘How to Fight Anti-Semitism’ by Bari Weiss

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The Award-Winning ‘How to Fight…

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Bari Weiss, 36, is an opinion editor at The New York Times and author of the 2019 book How to Fight Antisemitism, which garnered a National Jewish Book Award. The 2018 mass murder at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh — the very same congregation where her bat mitzvah was held -– was a major impetus for Weiss to write the book.

Quote: “A wise teacher once suggested to me that all of Jewish history -– first set forth in the book of Exodus and then hammered home again after Hitler’s genocide — teaches two lessons to the Jewish people. The first lesson is to survive. The second lesson is to never allow others to become slaves, because we know the bitterness of slavery, ancient and modern.”

Sources: Wikipedia, How to Fight Anti-Semitism

Learn more about Bari Weiss on Wikipedia. >>

Read the book review “Anti-Semitism: The Fight That Never Ends” by Brian Stewart. >>

Watch “Bari Weiss on Anti-Semitism in America” [6:14]. >>

Photo: National Review

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“[T]he foundations for extremism usually are held in check by various restraints. Societies are not liberal, moderate, progressive, and free because almost all their citizens – let alone their politicians — are liberal, moderate, progressive or committed to the freedoms of others.

“But societies consistently avoid extremism when the infrastructures of freedom are strong: when key institutions and norms encourage a more decent, rights-respective, lawful politics; when powerful social movements and independent media hold leaders to account, expose rather than reinforce political fantasies, and champion the rights of the vulnerable; and when information is produced and scrutinized by scholars, civil servants, and non-governmental organizations devoid of either government repression or vested interests.

“Yet no infrastructure is rigidly immovable, and once key components are eroded and weakened, once sections of the political and cultural elite attempt to mobilize the foundations of extremism, the system of restraints can swiftly collapse.

“While genocide on the scale of the Holocaust is historically exceptional, its central lesson is that the broader danger of extreme atrocities is not. In the words of the great historian Ian Kershaw, the Holocaust ‘lit a warning beacon that still burns brightly: it showed how a modern, advanced, cultured society can so rapidly sink into barbarity… It showed what we are capable of.’ Only by rejecting false narratives of conflict and polarization, and maintaining systems of rights and freedoms for all, can we hope to prevent that capability from once more becoming a reality.”

— Jonathan Leader Maynard in his incisive article “Could It Happen Here?: The Holocaust and Atrocities in the 21st Century” To read the entire article, click here.