“Mondoweiss” is a hate site (UPDATED) [View all]

Back in 2008, I wrote the following:

I find anti-Israel blogger Philip Weiss morbidly interesting, and I occasionally happen upon his blog. Weiss finds his own Jewish background alternately suffocating and infuriating, and yet can’t seem to stop talking about it, and about how he’s trying to overcome it. [Recent example: “My experience of Jewish life is that it’s elite-oriented. We cared deeply about prestige (yiches, in Yiddish) and excellence in my family, and I came to find those values suffocating…. The contempt for peasants is something I always found concerning in my own cultural background, that I seek to reform in my own Jewish experience.”] If a Woody Allen character ever became an anti-Zionist polemicist, he would be a lot like Philip Weiss.

I’ve made an occasional reference to Weiss or the blog he founded, Mondoweiss, since then. Mondweiss is basically one-stop shopping for anti-Israel news. Anything bad that goes on in Israel will be publicized and exaggerated at Mondoweiss. If you want to know the far-left anti-Israel party line on any recent event, Mondoweiss is the place to go.

So in a sense it’s understandable that people with an interest in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict read Mondoweiss, especially if they share the blog’s anti-Israel politics. I keep up sporadically with Mondoweiss largely because its posts sometimes find their way into my Facebook feed from some of my more left-wing friends.

I hope my Facebook friends and others recognize, however, that whatever Mondoweiss’ value as a news aggregator, it is also a hate site.

Mondoweiss tries to preserve a fine line between hostility to Jews and hostility to Israel, but every once in a while, Weiss reminds us that the blog’s entire existence owes to the fact that he can’t maintain that separation.




http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2015/05/04/mondoweiss-is-a-hate-site/