145 Minutes With … Bari Weiss

A book party occasions a gathering of the moderate chic.

- Boris Kachka

Bari Weiss—editor, Times columnist, Twitter piñata, extrovert, and now author— began the launch party for her first book, How to Fight Anti- Semitism, with an introduction. Standing by the window in a private room of the Lambs Club on the night of September 10 in a yellow-on-black floral-print dress from Saks, she turned to her aunt and said, “Aunt Betty, meet Shari Redstone, queen of all media!”

“I’m so proud of her,” said Redstone, the new chair of ViacomCBS. The daisy chain that led to Redstone’s invitation exemplified the particular mix of guests who made this night different from all other nights. Redstone and Weiss met at a dinner thrown by Richard Plepler— the former HBO chief executive and patron of the arts—and his wife, Lisa. The Pleplers met Weiss, who is 35, via Times reporter Nellie Bowles, Weiss’s girlfriend.

Plepler had been mulling an HBO documentary about anti-Semitism, and Weiss—galvanized by the mass shooting at Tree of Life, her hometown Pittsburgh congregation—had rushed headlong into writing a book dissecting anti-Semitism everywhere she found it (left, right, Islamic). So the Pleplers wound up sponsoring Weiss’s first book party. “Judaism, journalists, and—what’s the third J?” asked the writer Boris Fishman, whose stories Weiss has edited at the Times and on Tablet, in an effort to describe the scene. “Oh, the third J is for ‘philanthropy.’ ” So far, so very Establishment. And yet, like Weiss, it was an Establishment that felt, at least to itself, like a class in internal exile, surrounded on all sides by Trump, Twitter, and timidity.