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