A while back I was contacted by a journalist who was writing a profile of Bari Weiss. I was surprised! I’ve been publicly critical of BW, but only incidentally, a handful of tweets over the years. Why was I (a food writer, not super well known, kinda random) asked for comment?

The journalist explained that “one of Bari’s friends” had identified me as someone who had made anti-Semitic attacks on Bari and caused her great personal fear. (For the record: I‘m Jewish.) (It’s also probably relevant that I’m married to a Palestinian.)

With some prodding, the journalist told me that the “anti-Semitic attack” was a jokey tweet I’d sent that mentioned the idea of Bari having a gold-plate necklace of her Hebrew name — if you had a conservadox bat mitzvah in the 90s, like Bari and I did, you probably also have one!

Anyway it was clear to me this profile was gonna be fluff — not a clear-eyed reckoning with Bari’s hypocrisies, or an accounting of the politics of influence, or anything like that. It was going to be Bari The Cruelly Misunderstood Truth-Teller, Who People Online Are Mean To

I asked the journalist (also Jewish) if they thought my tweet had been antisemitic. They admitted that they thought it was a stretch to say so. “But you must admit you’ve been very critical of her,” they added.

I asked them what they wanted from me. Why did this story need a quote from a random food writer rather than any of the other thousands of people who express incredulous criticism of Bari’s columns and public statements? “Well,” said the journalist.

“Well, I’ve spoken to a few other people who have criticized her,” they said. I asked what these people had told them. “They took this as an opportunity to apologize to Bari on the record,” said the journalist.

I think — at least, in my memory of this conversation — I bark-laughed into the phone and said “are you fucking serious?”

And that’s how I ended up being the only un-hedged critical quote about Bari Weiss in that credulous Vanity Fair profile! The end.