A list of ways to help Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.
This week’s zoom call will be at our regular time, Friday at 1 PM. Our guest will be Philip Gordon, a scholar at the Brookings Institution and former National Security Advisor to Vice President Kamala Harris. We’ll talk about the Biden-Harris administration’s actions regarding Israel and Gaza, Kamala Harris’s statements about Gaza during the campaign, how she might have governed as president and what policies Democrats should pursue toward Israel-Palestine in the future.
Cited in Today’s Video
Bari Weiss pulls a 60 Minutes report on Trump administration deportations to El Salvador.
Donald Trump has reportedly said he expects better treatment by CBS now that David Ellenson and Weiss are in charge.
Weiss’ Free Press co-hosted a Trump administration inauguration party with Elon Musk’s X.
Weiss’ resignation letter from The New York Times.
The ACLU denounced Weiss’ efforts to punish pro-Palestinian professors when she was a student at Columbia.
The Trump administration leaked the news that it was withholding funds from Columbia to Weiss’ Free Press.
Weiss’ support for Israel is reportedly one of the reasons Ellison hired her at CBS.
Things to Read
(Maybe this should be obvious, but I link to articles and videos I find provocative and significant, not necessarily ones I entirely agree with.)
In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), Alex Kane talks to immigration expert Samah Sisay about how Trump’s new travel ban targets Palestinians.
Tareq Baconi on how the genocide in Gaza radicalized the world.
On January 6, I’ll be speaking on a panel at B’nai Jeshurun synagogue in Manhattan.
Reader Response
Benjamin Langer responded to last week’s video about banning the phrase “globalize the intifada.” He writes:
The word in the phrase that troubles me is not “intifada,” but “globalize.” If, as you say, “intifada” can mean a call for either violent or non-violent uprising, then globalizing the intifada could mean bringing civil disobedience and political pressure to international spaces, or could mean bringing violence to international Israel-associated targets. It’s not a stretch for many people to consider a synagogue with a JNF billboard outside, or a demonstration like Toronto’s 50,000-strong (roughly 1/4 of Toronto’s Jews) Walk For Israel as Israel-associated enough. To your Ukraine example, if people were using a phrase in Ukrainian solidarity protests that left open for interpretation that Russian-Canadian or Russian-American people or political and cultural institutions, were legitimate targets for violence, I think there would also be significant concern.
I don’t think that “globalize the intifada” should be banned, and I think that people saying it contributes a vanishingly small fraction of the added risk to Jews compared to the now innumerable and extensively documented Israeli war crimes paired with overwhelming diaspora Jewish institutional support for their necessity. The phrase is the voice of the rage, not its source! But I wonder how the movement could do better to be more surgical in its approach. A phrase that opens it up to culpability for those who take violence into their own hands provides easy ammunition for the well-organized forces of censure and suppression.
A Holiday Giveaway
Over the years I’ve had some requests to make certain interviews to be free and shareable for all in their entirety. So, I’m going to permanently remove the paywall for 8 posts from 2025. The first is my recent conversation with Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove as there have already been many requests for that one. For the rest, we’ll go with your most popular choices in the comments to this post. (Please look at other comments and if your preference has already been nominated, you can have your vote counted by just tapping like on that comment.)
See you on Friday,
Peter
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
There’s been a lot of discussion recently about CBS News, which is now under the control of Bari Weiss, and in particular about this segment that was done by 60 Minutes, which is the kind of flagship CBS News program about people who were deported by the Trump administration to El Salvador—Venezuelans who were deported and then who were treated really, really terribly there. And that this was all ready to go, this segment, and Bari Weiss stepped in, and, reportedly, she said that they shouldn’t air it unless they had an interview with Stephen Miller.
And it produced a big furor, I think in part because it’s one of a number of series of things that have happened since this guy, David Ellison, who runs Paramount Skydance became the owner of CBS, and then brought in Bari Weiss as head of CBS News, which suggests that—although CBS isn’t full-on Fox, in the sense that it’s just doing pure propaganda sycophancy for Trump—it is really trying not to offend the Trump administration in various different ways. In fact, it has been reported that Trump has privately said that he believed David Ellison and his father, Larry Ellison, would make CBS more sympathetic to him, and that he thought under Bari Weiss, that CBS would be more sympathetic. CBS announced after the Homeland Secretary, Kristi Noem, complained that they would now not kind of cut interviews with administration officials, but air them in full.
And this is also part of a larger dynamic we’ve seen among Bari Weiss, even before she took over CBS News, when she was still just running The Free Press, this outlet she created, of kind of moving into someone who’s kind of, I would say, having a cozier relationship with the Trump administration and the people around Trump. So, for instance, The Free Press actually co-hosted an inauguration party for Trump’s second inaugural that was co-hosted with Elon Musk’s X.
And there is, on its face, something really deeply ironic about this, right? You have Bari Weiss running CBS News as CBS News is becoming kind of part of this authoritarian oligarchy that Donald Trump is trying to create, of kind of sympathetic oligarchs who will control media enterprises in ways that will basically to a large degree, do his bidding. And Bari Weiss seems to be playing a role in that.
And yet, Bari Weiss, in an earlier part of her career, kind of really made her name as someone who spoke out very, very forcibly about free speech, and about not being cowed, journalists not being cowed from taking unpopular opinions. She kind of famously, or infamously, depending on how you looked at it, kind of resigned from the New York Times. And when she left the New York Times, she wrote that it was no longer upholding ‘the centrality of the free exchange of ideas to a democratic society’; that ‘self-censorship has become the norm’; and that ‘stories are chosen and told in a way to satisfy the narrowest of audiences.’
And so, now you have this very ironic situation, right, where CBS News seems to be really choosing stories to satisfy the most narrow—and most dangerously narrow—of audiences in an authoritarian president, right, to make him not upset because the Ellison family still has these business interests that they want Donald Trump to be taking care of.
It seems to me that one way of understanding what’s happened over the arc of Bari Weiss’s career is that Bari Weiss always made an exception on the question of free speech for the question of Palestinian rights. She was really a kind of almost a paradigmatic case of what people would call the kind of Palestine exception, of people who speak very, very vocally about the need to have a wide range of opinions, to not be cowed by powerful interests when it comes to voicing controversial views, but—when it comes to Palestinian rights—take a very, very different view.
And, it seems to me, the lesson that we’ve seen, that we can trace with the arc of Bari Weiss’s career is that this Palestine exception doesn’t remain with Palestine. That when you make that exception to the principles, to beliefs about free speech and censorship, ultimately what you end up doing is becoming actually a supporter of a much broader form of censorship and an assault on free speech. And I think we can see that in the arc of Bari Weiss’s career.
So, Bari Weiss, when Bari Weiss was literally just a student, she was involved in this effort that was funded by this pro-Israel group called the David Project to essentially try to get pro-Palestinian professors disciplined or fired. So, it was a kind of early indication of the kind of much larger assault on pro-Palestinian speech on campus that we’ve now seen in such dramatic ways in the last couple of years. And Bari Weiss was literally, and her efforts were denounced by the American Civil Liberties Union as a threat to free speech.
And it seems to me that one of the legacies of this, if you look at her career, is that her whole way of thinking about what threatens free speech has been very influenced by this experience of making an exception for Israel, which is that Bari Weiss has very generally tended to describe threats to free speech as coming from below and not from above. That her career has been involved in suggesting that the threats from free speech come not from powerful corporations and government, but from the kind of the woke mob, right?
And I think that’s partly her orientation, is that way because, in fact, the places that you find the most pro-Palestinian sentiment have been coming from below, right, from activist organizations on university campuses in general. And you have more support from Israel in kind of positions of greater power in American society. So, Weiss’s entire, I think, orientation around the question of free speech, which is to be much more concerned about the way in which free speech is menaced by campus activists or people who are beholden to woke ‘mobs’ rather than being concerned about the way free speech is menaced by the government or by large corporations, is precisely because, actually, she has such a blind spot on the question of Palestinian free speech that she’s been much more attuned to the way in which free speech can be threatened from below than from above.
And I think this has been exacerbated in recent years because the days in which, I think, if you’re a very, very zealous supporter of Israel—as she is—that you could believe that you were going to win the argument for Israel in the marketplace of ideas, I think that’s become much harder to sustain in the last few years. As we’ve seen, American public opinion has moved quite sharply in both parties, among the masses of both parties, in an anti-Israel direction.
And so, if your primary focus is—and Bari Weiss has been very open about this is one of the defining elements of her career—is maintaining American support for Israel. If that’s your primary focus, in a situation in which American public opinion is moving sharply away from Israel, essentially, the only way that you’re going to be able to maintain this unconditional support, to do that work, is to move closer into relationship with oligarchic power, corporate leaders like the Ellisons, who themselves have been very, very explicit about how they’re motivated by their support for Israel. Larry Ellison, David Ellison’s father, gave the largest donation ever to the Friends of the IDF. It was reported that that was one of the reasons he chose Bari Weiss to head CBS News, was precisely because of her support for Israel. And, of course, to be now in alliance with the Trump administration itself, which has used these really extraordinarily repressive tactics to try to shut down pro-Palestinian speech.
So, the point that I’m making is that this Palestine exception—I think we can see in Bari Weiss’s career a really good illustration of how the pro-Palestine exception doesn’t remain just in Palestine. Because when you make an exception for the free speech of people who care about Palestinian rights, and your desire is to keep them from gaining a foothold in American politics, especially in this moment, you end up thinking about free speech, and you end up cultivating a set of alliances with people who are interested in shutting down free speech—not only on the question of Palestinian freedom, but interested in shutting it down much more generally because they are part of an authoritarian effort.
And so, now you see Bari Weiss essentially in a kind of de facto alliance or coalition with the Trump administration in its efforts not only to stifle pro-Palestinian protests, but to stifle criticism of the Trump administration in general. And I think we can see a clear line of how you get from this exception made for Palestinian free speech to a larger opposition to free speech in general, and someone who used to speak very, very, you know, boldly about freedom of speech, about a liberal society, about heterodox views, now at this point in her career, essentially becoming part of this oligarchic, authoritarian media system.
