Leon Wieseltier

Leon Wieseltier ( ; born June 14, 1952) is an American critic and magazine editor. From 1983 to 2014, he was the literary editor of ''The New Republic''. He was a contributing editor and critic at ''The Atlantic'' until 2017, when the magazine fired him following allegations and an admission by Wieseltier of multiple instances of sexual harassment. In 2020, he became the editor of ''Liberties'', a quarterly literary review.

Early life and education

Wieseltier was born in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Stella (Backenroth) and Mark Wieseltier, who were Holocaust survivors from Poland. He attended the Yeshiva of Flatbush, Columbia University, Oxford University, and Harvard University. He was a member of the Harvard Society of Fellows (1979–82).

Career

During his tenure as literary editor of ''The New Republic'', Wieseltier played a central role in editing its "back of the book" or literary, cultural, and arts pages. The magazine's owner, Marty Peretz, discovered Wieseltier, then working at Harvard's Society of Fellows, and installed him in charge of the section.

Wieseltier has published several fiction and nonfiction books. ''Kaddish'', a National Book Award finalist in 2000, and a National Jewish Book Award winner in the Nonfiction category in 1998, is a genre-blending meditation on the Jewish prayers of mourning. ''Against Identity'' is a collection of thoughts about the modern notion of identity.

Wieseltier also edited and introduced a volume of works by Lionel Trilling entitled ''The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent'' and wrote the foreword to Ann Weiss's ''The Last Album: Eyes from the Ashes of Auschwitz-Birkenau'', a collection of personal photographs that serves as a paean to pre-Shoah innocence.

Wieseltier's translations of the works of Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai have appeared in ''The New Republic'' and ''The New Yorker''.

Wieseltier served on the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq and was an outspoken advocate of the
George W. Bush administration's invasion of Iraq and the Iraq War. "I am in no sense a neoconservative, as many of my neoconservative adversaries will attest," Wieseltier wrote in a May 2007 letter to Judge Reggie Walton, seeking leniency for his friend Scooter Libby.

In 2013, he was the recipient of the Dan David Prize for being "a foremost writer and thinker who confronts and engages with the central issues of our times, setting the standard for serious cultural discussion in the United States".

In January 2016, it was announced that Wieseltier would be joining Laurene Powell Jobs to form a new publication devoted to exploring the effects of technology on people's lives. But on October 24, 2017, Jobs withdrew funding for the journal after Wieseltier admitted to sexual harassment and inappropriate advances with several former female employees of ''The New Republic''.

In 2020, Wieseltier launched a quarterly journal called ''Liberties'', which was described as being dedicated to "the rehabilitation of liberalism".

Sexual harassment acknowledgment (2017)

In the immediate aftermath of Harvey Weinstein allegations and the #MeToo movement, a list of " Shitty Media Men" that featured men in the media industry who were accused of sexual misconduct was widely shared on the internet. Wieseltier's name was on the list.

After it was revealed on October 24, 2017, that several former women employees of ''The New Republic'' had accused Wieseltier of sexual harassment and inappropriate advances, he admitted to "offenses against some of my colleagues in the past." In a statement he made after the allegations became public, Wieseltier said: “I am ashamed to know that I made nyone.. feel demeaned and disrespected. I assure them that I will not waste this reckoning.”

According to ''The New York Times'': "Several women... said they were humiliated when Mr. Wieseltier sloppily kissed them on the mouth, sometimes in front of other staff members. Others said he discussed his sex life, once describing the breasts of a former girlfriend in detail. Mr. Wieseltier made passes at female staffers, they said, and pressed them for details about their own sexual encounters. Mr. Wieseltier often commented on what women wore to the office... telling them that their dresses were not tight enough. One woman said he left a note on her desk thanking her for the miniskirt she wore to the office that day. She said she never wore a skirt to the office again".

Another woman who Wieseltier harassed, Sarah Wildman, a former assistant editor of the magazine, later wrote that she was fired for complaining: "In disclosing this incident to my superiors, the outcome was, in many ways, far worse than the act itself. It’s not exactly that I was disbelieved; it’s that in the end, I was dismissed," she wrote in ''Vox''.

Wildman further wrote that the sexual harassment went hand in hand with gender discrimination at the magazine during Peretz's and Wieseltier's tenure: "The women knew we had a far shallower chance of rising up the masthead than our male counterparts; all of us hoped we’d be the exception. To do so, we entered into a game in which the rules were rigged against us, sometimes pushing us well past our point of comfort in order to remain in play."

In 2014, an investigation by outside counsel retained by ''The New Republic'' substantiated allegations Wieseltier had subjected an employee of the magazine’s office building to unwanted sexual advances and harassment. "We directed Mr. Wieseltier to immediately cease any communication with her, and I made sure he knew ''The New Republic'' had a zero-tolerance policy for sexual harassment of any kind," the magazine's then owner, Christopher Hughes, said.

On October 24, 2017, Laurene Powell Jobs withdrew funding for the journal Wieseltier had been working to establish after Wieseltier admitted to sexual harassment and inappropriate advances with several former female employees.

On October 27, 2017, Wieseltier was fired by ''The Atlantic''.

He was also fired by the Brookings Institution, where he had been the Isaiah Berlin Senior Fellow in Culture and Policy.

Criticism

Wieseltier was a frequent target of the satirical monthly '' Spy'' magazine. It often derided his analyses of pop culture as comically pretentious and mocked him as "Leon Vee-ZEL-tee-AY" who "jealously guards his highbrow credentials while wearing a lowbrow heart on his sleeve".

In reference to being called a "Jew-baiter" by Wieseltier, Andrew Sullivan has said, "Wieseltier is a connoisseur and cultivator of personal hatred"—referring to a dislike based on "tedious" causes that Wieseltier allegedly has held regarding him for a long time.

Wiesltier was the subject of a 2017 essay, "The Tzaddik of the Intellectuals" written by Joseph Epstein that appeared in ''The Weekly Standard'' (November 3, 2017) and was included in '' Gallimaufry'', a collection of Epstein's essays published in 2020. See also Tzadik.

Personal life

Wieseltier and Mahnaz Ispahani married in 1985, and divorced in 1994. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg officiated at their wedding in 1985.

After a long-term relationship with choreographer Twyla Tharp, he married his second wife, Jennifer Bradley, who worked on urban-development issues at the Brookings Institution. ''The Washington Post'' reported that Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg would also officiate at their October 2000 wedding. As of 2020, the couple was in the midst of a divorce.

Wieseltier is a fluent Hebrew speaker, and when interviewed in Israel, he said "I feel perfectly at home here."

In popular culture

Wieseltier appeared in one episode of the fifth season of ''The Sopranos'', playing Stewart Silverman, a character whom Wieseltier described as "a derangingly materialistic co-religionist who dreams frantically of 'Wedding of the Week' and waits a whole year for some stupid car in which he can idle for endless hours in traffic east of Quogue every weekend of every summer, the vulgar Zegna-swaddled brother of a Goldman Sachs mandarin whose son's '' siman tov u' mazel tov'' is provided by a pulchritudinous and racially diverse bunch of shellfish-eating chicks in tight off-the-shoulder gowns".

References

External links

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{{DEFAULTSORT:Wieseltier, Leon
1952 births
Living people
20th-century American Jews
20th-century American journalists
20th-century American male writers
20th-century American non-fiction writers
21st-century American Jews
21st-century American journalists
21st-century American male writers
21st-century American non-fiction writers
Alumni of Balliol College, Oxford
American literary critics
American magazine editors
American male journalists
American male non-fiction writers
American people of Polish-Jewish descent
Brookings Institution people
Columbia College (New York) alumni
Harvard Fellows
Harvard University alumni
Jewish American journalists
Jewish American non-fiction writers
Journalists from New York City
The New Republic people
People from Flatbush, Brooklyn
Sexual harassment in the United States
Writers from Brooklyn
Yeshivah of Flatbush alumni