Mondoweiss

Mondoweiss

Type	Blog/News website
Format	Online
Editor-in-chief	Philip Weiss Adam Horowitz (Co-Editors)
Associate editor	Allison Deger (Assistant Editor)
Staff writers	Alex Kane (Staff Reporter) Annie Robbins (Writer-At-Large)
Founded	2006
Language	English
Headquarters	United States
Website	Official Site

Mondoweiss (2006-Present) is a blog that is co-edited by journalists Philip Weiss and Adam Horowitz. Other contributors include Allison Deger (Assistant Editor), Alex Kane (Staff Reporter), and Annie Robbins (Writer-At-Large). The editors describe Mondoweiss as "a news website devoted to covering American foreign policy in the Middle East, chiefly from a progressive Jewish perspective." They also state that they "maintain this blog because of 9/11, Iraq, Gaza, the Nakba, the struggling people of Israel and Palestine, and our Jewish background."

Background

In a 2010 interview with The Link, the magazine published by Americans for Middle East Understanding, Philip Weiss described the evolution of Mondoweiss:

In March 2006 I began writing a daily blog on The New York Observer website. My editor, Peter Kaplan, encouraged me to write what was on my mind and it was his idea to call it Mondoweiss. Increasingly what was on my mind were "Jewish issues": the Iraq disaster and my Jewishness, Zionism, neo-conservatism, Israel, Palestine. For many reasons that I detail in "Blogging about Israel and Jewish identity raises Observer hackles" (The American Conservative, June 4 2007), in the spring of 2007 I re-launched my own blog on my own website. It became a collaborative effort a year ago when Adam Horowitz joined Mondoweiss.

On July 16, 2012, the online magazine Salon announced that it will be featuring content from Mondoweiss.

Response

In March 2007, Gary Kamiya of Salon.com argued that Mondoweiss offered " informed and passionate discussions" of what Weiss states are "delicate and controversial matters surrounding American Jewish identity and Israel." Kamiya also states that Weiss, "routinely skewers attempts by mainstream Jewish organizations and pundits to lay down the law on what is acceptable discourse." A few years later in 2009, Michael Massing, in an article titled "The News About the Internet" for The New York Review of Books, noted that "Weiss is one of several friends I’ve seen flourish online after enduring years of frustration writing for magazines. With its unrelenting criticism of Israel, his site [Mondoweiss] has angered even some of his fellow doves, but it has given voice to a strain of opinion that in the past had few chances of being heard." By February 2010, The Christian Science Monitor described Mondoweiss as a "popular" website. " In September 2010, James Wolcott of Vanity Fair argued that Mondoweiss "is one of the most invaluable sites in the blogosphere, a blast of sanity and moral suasion against the prevailing demonization of anything and anyone perceived as anti-Israel."

Criticism

On July 21, 2010, journalist Lee Smith in Tablet Magazine suggested that Phil Weiss, Stephen Walt, Glenn Greenwald, and Andrew Sullivan were part of an "anti-Israel blogosphere" and are "obsessed with Israel and the machinations of the U.S. Israel lobby." He also called them "Jew-baiter[s]." Weiss responded to Smith by stating that "yesterday Tablet smeared me and several other bloggers as Jew-baiters." Walt questioned the article's premise by stating that "the first thing to observe about Smith's screed is that even though he accuses me and my fellow bloggers of being anti-Semites and 'Jew-baiters,' his article contains not a scintilla of evidence that Sullivan, Greenwald, Weiss, or I have written or said anything that is remotely anti-Semitic, much less that involves "Jew-baiting." There's an obvious reason for this omission: None of us has ever written or said anything that supports Smith's outrageous charges." Journalist Max Blumenthal negated Smith's argument, commenting that he "read the piece twice and could not find any instances of 'Jew baiting' by Smith’s targets. Smith couldn’t either, so he instead highlighted a few screeds by semi-literate and mostly anonymous comment trolls."

On July 14, 2012 Armin Rosen, a Media Fellow with The Atlantic, criticized Peter Beinart's blog, Open Zion (which appears in The Daily Beast) for publishing an article by Alex Kane because he is Mondoweiss's Staff Reporter. Rosen argued that, "it's impossible to peer into the hearts and minds of the people who edit the site, but Mondoweiss often gives the appearance of an anti-Semitic enterprise." He also suggested that, "publicly, [Kane] does not challenge the site's lunacy. And Open Zion, in carrying a byline from Mondoweiss, incorporates not just Kane but the Mondoweiss reputation and all of its sordid baggage into its larger conversation." On July 15 Robert Wright, a Senior Editor at The Atlantic, responded by stating, "Rosen doesn't adduce a shred of evidence that Kane--the man whose reputation he's trying to besmirch and whose career he's trying to damage--is anti-Semitic [….] This tarring of Kane by virtue of his association with Mondoweiss would be lamentable even if Rosen produced a convincing indictment of Mondoweiss, showing that it indeed evinces anti-Semitism. Does he do so? All I can say is that I clicked on the links to Mondoweiss that Rosen provided and--though I didn't read every single post with utmost care--I did reach a point where I could safely conclude that Rosen has a looser definition of anti-Semitism than I do." He concluded by stating that, "maybe my connection to the Atlantic at least entitles me to offer an apology to Alex Kane. He certainly deserves one." On July 16, Alex Kane, Adam Horowitz, and Philip Weiss responded in Mondoweiss by arguing that Rosen's article, "is about nothing more than policing the discourse on Israel." On July 17 James Fallows, a national correspondent for The Atlantic concurred with Wright's response to Rosen.