There is not a secret underground lair where Bari Weiss and the ghost of Jeffrey Epstein plot Zionist world takeover.
Every demographic must contend with the existence of individuals who embody unfair stereotypes about the group. As a woman, I live with the knowledge that former Filipino first lady Imelda Marcos owned over a thousand pairs of shoes. And as a Jew, I must accept that fellow Jew Jeffrey Epstein, the late financier and sex criminal, was a financier and sex criminal. According to antisemites, Jews are behind all wheelings and dealings, as well as all sexual exploitation. So what a field day for haters of Jews that the rich and manipulative creep at the centre of a seemingly endless news cycle was one of ours. He out-Madoff’d Bernie Madoff.
It does not help matters that Epstein was more than incidentally Jewish. JTA reports that he “deploy[ed] Jewish phrases like ‘goyim’ in a disparaging manner,” and that the files “include revelations that various Jewish nonprofits had courted Epstein for donations even after his conviction, evidence of Epstein’s financial ties with several Orthodox yeshivas, and new details about his well-known relationship with former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak.”
And then there’s the stuff with Woody Allen, whose child he helped gain admission to a private college, and whom he birthday-gifted, reports The New York Times, “31 Sea Island cotton boxer shorts and 31 Sea Island cotton shirts… totaling $9,858.” None of this implicates Allen in anything sex-crimes-with-minors-wise, but it’s suggestive of bad judgment on the part of a man who has spent decades maintaining that accusations against him in that realm had no basis. Legendary journalist Tina Brown rejected an invitation to have dinner at Epstein’s house with other men including Allen, recalling that her reaction was to exclaim, “‘What the hell is this — the Predator’s Ball?'” It’s a heck of a quip, and one that cements, in the public imagination, justly or not, the idea of Allen as a monster.
***
There’s another demographic to which Epstein notably belonged: men. That is arguably more salient than his having been Jewish. He was, as British journalist Tanya Gold correctly notes, “Epstein was an ordinary abuser of women and girls,” only rich, so he did more of it, and on private islands and such. Ah, you might say, but most men are not abusers. And you’d be right!
While there will always be a subset of feminism that’s about blaming men generally for the crimes of the few, there are simply too many men for there to be wild conspiracy theories about all-the-men, as there are about Jews. Everyone knows men in their day-to-day lives, and is therefore aware that not all of them have private islands or the impulse (or wherewithal) to run sex-trafficking rings. Not everyone has even met a Jew, so we can be imagined to be up to absolutely anything.
An article in The New York Times doesn’t endorse, nor condemn, the possibility that Epstein was “a puppet master calling the shots for a cabal of elites.” With the release of the dramatically named Epstein Files (it’s emails), the story has shifted away from one about a wealthy man who was gross in a not-un-Trump-like way and the extent of his connections to top-level politicians including Donald Trump himself. It is now a quest to purge society of everybody with the faintest tinge of “Epstein.” Even if it’s a different, unrelated Epstein: a professional skateboarder had to shut down Epstein-ties rumours when people dug up that his wedding photographer was a Mark Epstein. Can’t be too careful.
What is an Epstein tie, even, is a question I never thought I’d be asking myself, because it seemed self-evident. It’s gross if not criminal to associate with a powerful (though no, not omnipotent) man convicted of sex crimes involving underage girls, all the more to do so in ways that involve colluding with him in the objectification of women in professional contexts. I am, let us remember, following this story as a Jew and as a woman.
But the Epstein-ties story reads as a hard-to-decipher mish-mash of some people quietly approving of exploitation, others one-upping him in vile banter, and still others simply not declaring a man socially or professionally taboo on account of (past, they may have assumed, maybe self-servingly, maybe in earnest) misdeeds.
One arrives at a warped #MeToo 2.0, where instead of sniffing out men who are or might be sexual abusers, it’s about finding everyone, not just men, who had any connection — however tenuous, exaggerated, or invented — to one despicable man. It’s worth asking what that project serves. Who gets roped in unfairly, but also who this approach spares. Most abusers, even in Manhattan, are not in the Epstein Files.
***
Despite growing up in a Manhattan apartment near what I now know was the Epstein manse, I am not in the Files. I would not have expected I would be, but out of journalistic due diligence, I searched to confirm. I didn’t grow up vulnerable enough to be exploitation fodder nor posh enough to be at parties with “elites.” We would have had nothing to offer each other.
I do, however, make appearances in the unofficial Bari Weiss files that live rent-free in the minds of many onlookers. Bari Weiss, editor in chief of CBS and founder of The Free Press, is not Jeffrey Epstein. This feels almost too silly to need to spell out, but I do, both because I am choosing to mention them in the same op-ed, and because of why it is necessary to do so. It’s partly that Weiss co-occupies this strange sort of main character status, wherein her name has come to stand for something larger than any one person could be. One sees this in, for example, her recent cancellation, at the behest of over 10,000 petitioners, as giver of the annual Daniel Pearl Memorial Lecture at the University of California, Los Angeles. (For further examples, google “Bari Weiss derangement syndrome,” or pop her name in as a search term on Bluesky.) It is also, specifically, the way some of Weiss’s detractors are grasping at ways to link the two.
In 2020, Weiss and I both signed the Harper’s letter, a fact that would be more meaningful if the signatories had known who one another were ahead of time. (At least, I only got a few names, hers not among them.) I freelanced twice for Weiss’s publication, in 2022 and 2023, though she was not my editor. I wrote about Weiss’s book (an ambivalent review) for JTA and her wife Nellie Bowles’s book (which I enjoyed) for The CJN. But my biggest connection to Bluesky’s top bogeywoman is that my friend and Feminine Chaos co-host, Kat Rosenfield, is a columnist for The Free Press. I have been in a room with people who have been in a room with Bari Weiss. If you wanted to do one of those Always Sunny in Philadelphia memes drawing strings on a board, you could.
I’d be well positioned either to deny all Bari Weiss connections or to drop the name Bari Weiss, famous person, as a not-quite-connection, if I wanted. I don’t want to do either of these things. I simply want to convey what’s what.
My principle interest in Weiss isn’t about her at all. Rather, it’s that strangers on the internet who are mad at Weiss, but realize she’s an unreachable famous person, have the habit of coming at me instead, as though I were a kind of store-brand Bari Weiss substitute. They’ll be saying something about ‘the Harper’s letter crowd’ and I try to tease them out on what they mean, and then it becomes clear that the beef they have is not with some nebulous grouping but rather with one woman specifically and the woman is not me. They will point to some choice Weiss has made and demand I justify it. And I do the only thing I can do and tap the sign: I am not Bari Weiss.
I wonder what quality, other than having both (along with rather a lot of people, Jews and gentiles, left and right) criticized cancel culture back in the day, Weiss and I could possibly have in common? This couldn’t possibly be about… could it?
***
Here is where I tie the loose threads together. Where I am some kind of bonkers avatar for Bari Weiss, Weiss herself is, in turn, serving a similar function in the collective imaginary when it comes to Jeffrey Epstein. Some have grievances against Bari Weiss related to her being a pro-Israel, possibly-conservative, definitively anti-woke Jewish media figure. And it is just too delicious for them to believe that she’s in some kind of posthumous cahoots with Epstein to let facts interrupt the fun. Some of this is random posts, but it’s also, more substantively, things like a thread from prominent Canadian journalist Jeet Heer that begins, “The new batch of Epstein documents helps illuminate one contemporary controversy: What is Bari Weiss up to at CBS? I think the answer is she is trying to rehabilate [sic] the Epstein network as a bulwark of reactionary centrism. Let me explain.”
And try to explain he does. Exhibit A is that “Weiss’ partner and ideological collaborator Nelli [sic] Bowles” — side note, funny way to describe someone running a business with her wife but OK — “was on very familiar terms with Epstein.”
Heer was not alone in these insinuations: Marlow Stern, who teaches journalism at Columbia University, did what he presented as a gotcha thread about Bowles’s alleged Epstein ties.
The flaw in this hint-hint implication is that, as Bowles has repeatedly addressed, she was in touch with him in her capacities as a New York Times journalist, in order to write about him, and wound up abandoning the project because he unnerved her. How an Ivy League journalism professor concluded that he’d dug up evidence that a journalist corresponding with a source constituted them being friends is beyond me, but I suppose everyone, even the well-credentialed, is capable of finding what they’re looking for.
The punch line to the Heer episode comes when another Bluesky user swoops in to accuse him himself of guilt by association: “Did you ever apologize for signing the Harper’s Letter, the key text of 2020s reactionary centrism, alongside Bari Weiss and most of her fellow travelers?” By way of context, for those who remember 2003ish, ‘reactionary centrists’ are the new ‘neoconservatives,’ a political descriptor that is also a euphemism.
So no, there is not a secret underground lair where Weiss and the ghost of Epstein plot Zionist world takeover, at least not one that’s issued me an invitation. There is however a more mundane truth being picked up on by those who have noticed common ground, which is that Epstein was, and Weiss is, as I am, a Jew.
A lot of what’s now being ‘unearthed’ as this nefarious network is just… American Jewish culture of the latter part of the 20 century. I listened with interest to Weiss’s interviews with Jerry Seinfeld and Woody Allen — Heer also presents the Allen interview as damning Epstein-wise in that epic thread — not because she and I are chums, but because this is my culture too. That this is a cultural statement rather than a political one should be obvious the fact that Morris Katz, the 26-year-old media strategist behind New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani’s victory, not only has the most old-New-York-Jewish-man-coded name of any young person, but is described in the Times as having been “a Woody Allen-watching, Philip Roth-reading” teenager.
I never know what I make of the claims, constant for the past decade, that we are living in times of rising antisemitism. But we do seem to be living in boon times for antisemitic conspiracy theorizing. My point here is simply this: before joining in gleefully in the righteous wave of the moment, whatever it may be, keep that background noise in mind.
Read more on The Canadian Jewish News
