Philip Weiss - Biography

Philip Weiss (1955 - ) is an American journalist who co-edits Mondoweiss, which he describes as a "news website devoted to covering American foreign policy in the Middle East, chiefly from a progressive Jewish perspective," with Adam Horowitz. Weiss and Horowitz 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." Weiss describes himself as an anti-Zionist and rejects the label "post-Zionist."

Background and writing career

Weiss was born in Boston in 1955 and raised in Baltimore. He received his undergraduate degree from Harvard College. After college, Weiss began his career writing for newspapers in Minnesota and for the Philadelphia Daily News. Later during the 1980s, he wrote articles for Harper's, Spy Magazine, Esquire, and The New York Times Magazine. He also wrote a column for the New York Observer for nearly a decade.

Mondoweiss (2006 to present)

Weiss currently co-edits the news website, Mondoweiss with Adam Horowitz. It originally began in 2006 as a blog for The New York Observer and was located at <mondoweiss.observer.com>. After leaving The New York Observer, Weiss moved the blog first to <philipweiss.org/mondoweiss> and then later to its current location at <mondoweiss.net>. In a March 2010 interview with The Link, the magazine published by Americans for Middle East Understanding, Weiss describes 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.

Criticism

Michelle Goldberg writing in Tablet Magazine calls Mondoweiss "fulsomely, intensely anti-Israel."

Books

• 2011: The Goldstone Report: The Legacy of the Landmark Investigation of the Gaza Conflict, by Adam Horowitz, Lizzy Ratner, Philip Weiss, Naomi Klein, et al.
• 2004: American Taboo: A Murder In The Peace Corps
• 1996: Cock-a-Doodle-Doo

Further reading

• Adas, Jane. "Mondoweiss: The Blog," The Link, Vol. 43, Issue 1, Americans for Middle East Understanding, March 2010.
• PBS. "Extended Interviews: American Jews and Israel - Philip Weiss, writer and blogger," PBS, June 12, 2009.

External links

• Official Website
• The Goldstone Report: The Legacy of the Landmark Investigation of the Gaza Conflict at Amazon
• Philip Weiss: A Jewish Argument around the Arab Revolt at Radio Open Source
• Philip Weiss at The New York Times
• Philip Weiss at Huffington Post
• Philip Weiss at New York Magazine