Bari Weiss’s Most Loyal Soldier

On September 8, 2025, a video shot in Columbia University’s bookstore went viral on X. Over the elegant sounds of Antonio Vivaldi’s “Spring,” it cut between shots of available titles, all of them presumably assigned to students: Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks; a children’s book about the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg; Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law; Robert A. Dahl’s How Democratic Is the American Constitution?; and, among others, the Quran. The caption reads: 

Went to the Columbia University bookstore — these are some of the books students are reading this semester. 

A bookstore employee told me the Qur’an is required reading for all freshman [sic]. 

The content creator behind the video was the Free Press staff writer Olivia Reingold, one of the publication’s most prolific contributors. In her influencer-style Instagram reels, she’s made a career of defending Israel and the GOP while attacking New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, others on the Left, and anyone else who may dissent from Israel’s policy objectives.

Reingold is part of a new wave of young pro-Israel influencers and content creators who see social media as another front in the Zionist struggle. After October 7, with Israel’s massacre in Gaza and the US public’s ensuing backlash against Israel, new content creation opportunities emerged for those seeking to do hasbara. A Hebrew word that translates to “explanation,” hasbara refers to pro-Israel public relations, often with a less than complete regard for the truth. In this respect, Reingold has joined a new right-of-center cohort of American pro-Israel influencers. On her website, she refers to herself as a “truth teller” and writes that “there is nothing more valuable than integrity.”

Unlike other pro-Israel influencers, however, Reingold claims to be not a mere influencer or content creator but a journalist. But it is hard to tell where the hasbara ends and the reporting begins.

Reingold’s Journalism

Start with Reingold’s bookstore post. In the video, the Quran is the final supposedly inflammatory title we see after Fanon’s and the rest. At Columbia, the Quran is assigned to second-year students, not all freshmen, in the required Contemporary Civilization course. Here, however, the suggestion is that it’s unacceptable even as an object of study. This ignores the Quran’s place in a secular, scholarly course as one text among many major works of world literature. I took Contemporary Civilization this past academic year and found no instructor urging students to adopt radical Islam. Excerpts from the Old and New Testaments are likewise assigned across Columbia’s Core Curriculum. In fact, in the video, you can clearly see a giant stack of The New Oxford Annotated Bible just below the Quran, though Reingold zooms in only on the latter. 

Her implication that Fanon, Rothstein, and Dahl are anathema to a proper university education is just as absurd. These are serious, influential writers — whatever one may think of them — whose work clearly belongs in a university curriculum. But for Reingold, the problematic nature of these texts is self-evident and further proof that Columbia is a hell-scape of radicalism. It is a mirror image of the Right’s favorite (and sometimes true) “ultrawoke” caricature — the perpetually offended young person — but produced by a publication that markets itself as anti-identitarian and pro–free speech.

The month before the bookstore post, Reingold cowrote an exposé alleging that the photos of twelve Palestinian children featured in The New York Times as evidence of Israeli-induced starvation “lacked important context” because the children had underlying medical conditions. To pro-Israel partisans, she had debunked a story — in the Times, no less. But of course, underlying conditions do not refute the fact of starvation; children already ill are more likely to die first in a famine. Reingold provided no counterevidence to prove that the children were not starving or that the Gaza Strip was not in a humanitarian crisis. For her exposé, she reached out to Yannay Spitzer, then an economist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, whose comment she paraphrased as “Hunger in Gaza is largely declining since Israel resumed aid deliveries in late May after its nearly 80-day blockade.” And yet, to say hunger declined after Israel lifted the blockade is to concede that Gaza had been experiencing mass hunger because of it.

In an Instagram reel, Reingold treats the fact that the same children, ill “not just with malnutrition,” appeared in photographs by different people as evidence of “coordination” — the implication being that they were being paraded around by pro-Palestinian forces as part of a propaganda drive. She claims that she did “something so simple, it’s shocking no other journalist bothered to do it”: translating their names into Arabic and finding local reports, which she says discuss underlying conditions more than anglophone sources do. Some of those conditions, she concedes, The New York Times had in fact reported. Still, her work, by her own estimation, produced “a more nuanced story.”

And yet the reel’s conclusion was anything but nuanced: that Israel was not responsible for famine and that “the average Gazan does not look like that.” None other than Benjamin Netanyahu reposted it with the caption “Facts matter.”

For Reingold, the defense of Israel’s war is paramount. Her defense turns the suffering of starving children — images that would disgust any normal person — into a question of public relations. The pushback against her defense of Israel, she claims on her website, was “a global cancelation campaign.”

Reingold’s Religion

Reingold’s partisanship appears as something like a religion. But that religion is not Judaism or merely a belief in the Jewish national project; it is deference to the unflagging righteousness of a modern nation-state with a sophisticated military, nuclear weapons, a powerful American lobby, near-total control over the occupied territories, and a foreign policy that repeatedly massacres civilians.

That may be why Reingold, again using the language of wokeness, calls images of starving children across mainstream media “problematic”: they make her uncomfortable and call into question her unflinching loyalty to the Israeli state.

Interestingly, Reingold was not always this way. She writes of becoming an “October 8th Jew” (she is part Jewish, on her father’s side), saying she came to “the Arab-Israeli conflict as a nearly blank slate,” open to the claim that Israel is an apartheid state guilty of genocide. She describes the later realization that this “wasn’t a civil rights movement. . . .  This was about Jews” that moved her in the opposite direction. Now, rather than treat widespread outcry over Israel’s atrocities as a legitimate political response to a state’s actions, she recasts it as evidence of antisemitism. 

For instance, earlier this summer, Reingold insinuated that a Jewish Voice for Peace activist she interviewed was not really Jewish on the grounds that the person had not grown up Jewish. By this questionable standard, it seems Reingold herself would not qualify as Jewish either. But what she is saying is clear: a real Jew must be an avid supporter of Israel. This is an ideological loyalty test in defense of a state’s conduct, not a description of Judaism or even of Zionism.

I have no reason to doubt Reingold’s account of how she arrived here. Her earlier work — at Georgia Public Broadcasting, Yellowstone Public Radio, Politico, and Matthew Yglesias’s Bad Takes, which a LinkedIn post says she conceived and helped launch — contains no hint of the “October 8th” partisan she would become.

This is where it’s hard not to feel a bit sorry for her. She appears to believe that Mamdani’s election, declining support for Israel, and sympathy for Palestinians signal a new antisemitism. In her words, “Anti-Zionism is antisemitism.” At a time when many American Jews saw the horrors unleashed upon Gaza and began to question their support for Israel’s current regime, to the extent that a recent survey shows that Mamdani is more popular among US Jews than Netanyahu is, Reingold went in exactly the opposite direction. A report she coauthored on the Democratic Socialists of America’s 2026 New York primary victories in June ran under the scary subtitle “On Tuesday, radical House candidates won big in the city. ‘It doesn’t feel safe to be Jewish anymore.’”

Her earlier piece, “How to ‘Make Your Campus Palestinian,’” framed Jewish students’ recruitment into pro-Palestinian activism as a cynical strategy to legitimize antisemitism. It is true that student protests did sometimes veer into territory broadly alienating to many Jewish students; in rare cases, some individuals adopted downright violent rhetoric (there will always be cranks). But ultimately, the American outcry was and is directed at a foreign government’s violence, financed by the United States — not “the Jews.” In explicitly tying the protection of Jews to support for Israel, Reingold is insisting on the actions of Israel as the will of all Jews, a mirror of what antisemites often do.

Bari Weiss’s Heir

Other examples abound. In April, a Reingold piece about Senate hopeful Abdul El-Sayed ran at The Free Press under the headline “Michigan Gets Its Own Mamdani.” In it, she asks El-Sayed “whether he believes in Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state.” Reingold describes him, when he asks what she means by “Jewish state,” “narrowing his eyes” in response. In another piece about Jewish parents with Mamdani-voting children, she sides with parents horrified by their children’s choices; one hoped to supervise a daughter’s absentee ballot to make sure she would not vote for Mamdani. Meanwhile, a May “investigation” by Reingold into Mamdani’s wife, Rama Duwaji, chastises her for the contents of a Spotify playlist and for “liking” a Tucker Carlson clip on Instagram about AIPAC and its failure to register as a foreign lobby. Ironically, for a publication founded on opposition to cancel culture, here was the perfect example of it — scrutinizing minute social media activity in order to depict someone in the worst possible light.

It is easy to criticize Reingold as an internet personality with less than savory politics. But she has found a niche doing clear hasbara at The Free Press. With founder Bari Weiss increasingly occupied by her controversial role at CBS News, Reingold has arguably become the outlet’s most visible persona. In Reingold, we have a younger version of Weiss, tweeting and Instagramming in defense of a constantly war-making and increasingly unpopular state, but without Weiss’s more composed and occasionally believable journalistic posture.