Inside the party for Bari Weiss's new book, where the embattled Establishment grumbled about Twitter mobs and cheered Weiss’s outspokenness. Borisk reports
Weiss at home before her book launch party. Photo: Victor Llorente for New York Magazine/Victor Llorente Bari Weiss — editor, Times columnist, Twitter piñata, extrovert, and now author — began the launch party for her first book, How to Fight Anti-Semitism, with an excited introduction.
As the canapés came out , the temperature rose, and the head count approached 140, guests grumbled about Twitter mobs and cheered Weiss’s outspokenness — though not all were so outspoken themselves. Mad Men creator Matt Weiner, who met Weiss through Tablet founder Alana Newhouse, wouldn’t be quoted. Times publisher A. G. Sulzberger said, “I think she brings a terrific and really brave voice to the Times. I’ll leave it at that.
Bowles, 31, who spent the evening bouncing among the guests in a highly excited state, is exhibit A in Weiss’s social eclecticism. Last year, Bowles wrote a harsh profile of the right-wing pull-your-pants-up guru Jordan Peterson just days after Weiss’s sympathetic piece on the dark web . Weiss was once married to a man, but before that, at Columbia — where she was known for leading a student campaign against anti-Zionist professors — she dated SNL comedian Kate McKinnon.
There were plenty of flak-catchers in the room. The neoconservative New York Post columnist John Podhoretz wandered around in an orange Lacoste shirt and sensible shoes. He finally quit Twitter in March, after several unsuccessful attempts, following a joke about bombing NYU. “Twitter is only good for people until they get around 75,000 followers,” he said.
In her book’s acknowledgments, Weiss writes that “no one taught me more than Bret Stephens.” But it’s harder to imagine him bridging political divides over brunch or a cocktail party. “I come from a Hasidic family, and I hang out with a lot of very left-wing media people,” said Taffy Brodesser-Akner, the novelist and Times profile writer, about whom no one has said anything negative for a solid decade. “If you look at that as the spectrum, Bari is one of the only moderates I know.
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