Top 94 Quotes & Sayings by Bari Weiss

In practice, intersectionality functions as kind of caste system, in which people are judged according to how much their particular caste has suffered throughout history.

Organized religion may be anathema on the political Left, but the need for the things religion provides - moral fervor, meaning, a sense of community - are not.

While there are perfectly legitimate criticisms that one can make of Israel or the actions of its government - and I have never been shy about making them - those criticisms cross the line into anti-Semitism when they ascribe evil, almost supernatural powers to Israel in a manner that replicates classic anti-Semitic slanders.

Reasonable people can debate whether or not social experiments like a Day of Absence are enlightening.

If the standard for art is the decency of its creators, we're going to have a lot of empty museums.

In Israel, there is no civil marriage. All elements of religious life - from the kosher certification of food to conversion to marriages and burials - are controlled by the rabbinate. In Israel, then, the official religion is not just Judaism. It's Orthodoxy.

The Women's March moved me.

The best movie theater in the world is in a dingy basement on Manhattan's Upper West Side. The worn seats are painful. There are probably bigger screens in half the apartments in the complex above the theater. And forget Fandango; the theater barely has a website. You want to buy a ticket? Get in line.

I no longer believe that I'm going to be struck down by a punishing God.

If you crave an anti-new year New Year, consider adopting Rosh Hashana as your own.

Outrage is something Donald Trump typically has in no short supply.

The leaders of the Women's March, arguably the most prominent feminists in the country, have some chilling ideas and associations. Far from erecting the big tent so many had hoped for, the movement they lead has embraced decidedly illiberal causes and cultivated a radical tenor that seems determined to alienate all but the most woke.

I haven't watched MTV's annual Video Music Awards since Bill Clinton was president. I was wearing a plastic choker, and Alanis Morissette won for 'Ironic.'

The Jewish state has so much to teach diaspora Jews about resilience, innovation, energy, and optimism.

When Kendrick Lamar blasts Mr. Trump, he is preaching to the choir. When Eminem does it, there's a good chance Trump voters are actually listening.

Few of us doubt that stealing is wrong, especially from the poor. But the accusation of 'cultural appropriation' is overwhelmingly being used as an objection to syncretism - the mixing of different thoughts, religions, cultures, and ethnicities that often ends up creating entirely new ones.

Culture should be shared, not hoarded.

I hate New Year's Eve.

I think 'Les Demoiselles D'Avignon' is one of the most transfixing paintings of all time. And it was made by a monster of a man.

For reasons historic, aesthetic, and political, we Jews are most attuned to the anti-Semitism of the far Right - and we find the most sympathy among our progressive allies when these are our attackers.

Mr. Trump had campaigned on attacking the weakest and most vulnerable in our society.

I believe that facts serve feminists far better than faith. That due process is better than mob rule.

Liberals shouldn't cede the responsibility to defend free speech on college campuses to conservatives. After all, without free speech, what's liberalism about?

Victimhood, in the intersectional way of seeing the world, is akin to sainthood; power and privilege are profane.

To many American Jews, it is a truism that Barack Obama was the anti-Israel president. It was Mr. Obama who signed the Iran deal, which Israel portrayed as a mortal danger. It was Mr. Obama whose most contentious relationship with a foreign leader was with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Anti-Semitism is the hatred that never dies. Violence that begins with the Jews never ends with them. All of this is true. What's also true is that anti-Semitism is the oldest hatred in the world because individual people have sustained it in every generation. It cannot be defeated until we look these people and their ideologies in the face.

Has there ever been a crisper expression of the consequences of 'intersectionality' than a ban on Jewish lesbians from a Dyke March?

Our culture hasn't stopped objectifying women. We - men and women both - are just getting better at pretending it's not happening.

While racists see themselves as proudly punching down, anti-Semites perceive themselves as punching up.

Ever since Eve gave Adam that forbidden fruit, demonizing and disbelieving women has been the planet-wide policy. You don't need to reach back to the Pleistocene to see the truth of that.

There's no question that I am biased toward the Hebrew calendar over the Gregorian one.

I don't trade on my sexual identity in that way for political points. I think that's lame, and it's not my style.

Britain beat us to the abolition of slavery; the Isle of Man, New Zealand, and Finland all decided to give women the vote well before the United States. Eventually, we got smart and borrowed these egalitarian innovations.

Tel Aviv was established in 1909 by a group of secular Jewish families; Judaism's origin story is about 2,000 years older.

Literally everything good about this culture comes from mixing.

'Annie Hall' and 'The Graduate' are incredible films. Why should we be deprived of watching them because some of the men that made them are bad?

China may brutalize Buddhists in Tibet and Muslims in Xinjiang while denying basic rights to the rest of its 1.3 billion citizens, but 'woke' activists pushing intersectionality keep mum on all that.

Since Britain handed over jurisdiction of its former colony to China 20 years ago, the city has operated under the notion of 'one country, two systems.' That increasingly appears to be an empty slogan.

Eminem isn't the first entertainer to part ways with his conservative fans.

I believe the Earth is warming.

Israel's highest aspiration may be to be a light among the nations, but it is also a normal nation, where regular people want to go about their business without a religious authority having a say.

I believe that the 'believe all women' vision of feminism unintentionally fetishizes women. Women are no longer human and flawed. They are Truth personified. They are above reproach.

I'd venture a bet that no American hates 'Prairie Home Companion' more than I do.

I've been in love with both men and women. I've been ghosted by both men and women.

The conspiracy theory of the Jew as the hypnotic conspirator, the duplicitous manipulator, the sinister puppeteer is one with ancient roots and a bloody history.

Conservatives are often fond of La Rochefoucauld's famous aphorism that 'Hypocrisy is a tribute that vice pays to virtue,' and so tend to downplay hypocrisy as a sin. But in the marketplace of ideas they champion, hypocrisy may yet turn out to be the deadliest - or costliest - of sins.

Shutting down conservatives has become de rigueur. But now anti-free-speech activists are increasingly turning their ire on free-thinking progressives.

There's no question that Ben Shapiro loves to provoke college students.

Think tanks are chiefly supposed to provide independent expertise to policymakers. But they also seek to be politically relevant.

Dwayne Betts is the kind of man who should be receiving awards from the Connecticut bar. Instead, he hasn't been admitted.

At the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a hawkish, nonpartisan research group, at least two people left over the way the think tank responded to Mr. Trump's election.

I believe that babies should be vaccinated pretty much as soon as they exit the womb.

Donald Trump's election was a watershed moment. Even those like me, who had previously pulled levers for candidates of both parties, felt that Mr. Trump had not only violated all sense of common decency, but, alarmingly, that he seemed to have no idea that there even existed such an unspoken code of civility and dignity.

Who wants to live in a world where you can only stay in the lane of your birth?

The Heritage Foundation, by far the most influential think tank of the Trump era, is widely seen as a redoubt of Trumpism in large part because of the tremendous influence of the Mercers, who are major donors.

Women are hypocrites. Women are opportunists. Women are liars. They are abusers and bullies and manipulators. They are capable of cruelty, callousness, and evil. Just like men.

One of my favorite things on YouTube is the famous 1965 debate between James Baldwin and William F. Buckley at Cambridge University.

One area where American Jews have something to teach Israel is religious pluralism, something that living in a democracy with a separation between church and state has helped us fine-tune.

Many older people I know are focused on the past. When they talk about the future, they are, quite understandably, preoccupied with the hassles and obstacles of their increasing age.

Eminem knows that Republicans buy songs - his songs - too. His message to them is to stop buying.