Rabbi Jay Michaelson is a contributing columnist for the Forward and for Rolling Stone. He is the author of 10 books, and won the 2023 New York Society for Professional Journalists award for opinion writing.
Jay MichaelsonContributing Columnist
By Jay Michaelson
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Opinion Trump’s ‘Religious Liberty’ Executive Order Should Scare The Bejesus Out Of Jews
Be careful what you wish for. For years, the Christian Right, abetted by some Orthodox Jewish allies, has claimed that there’s a war on religion in America. Sometimes it’s the “War on Christmas,” sometimes it’s alleged persecution of Christians for practicing their faith, and sometimes it’s hard to articulate at all. Well, today, the president…
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Opinion Sean Spicer Is Dangerous — Whether He’s Malevolent Or Incompentent
Jews emerged from the Passover holiday to learn that Sean Spicer, the malaprop-spouting, reporter-bashing White House press secretary, had managed to outdo himself with a barrage of Holocaust ignorance (to put it charitably). Should we care? Yes. Though Spicer has apologized, and some of his apologists have insisted it was simply a “gaffe,” in fact…
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Opinion Brian Williams’ Other Leonard Cohen Temptations
“We see these beautiful pictures at night from the decks of these two U.S. Navy vessels in the eastern Mediterranean,” Brian Williams said. “I am tempted to quote the great Leonard Cohen: ‘I am guided by the beauty of our weapons.’” “We see the arc of my career these days,” Williams said. “I am tempted…
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Culture Why You’ll Need A New Haggadah For Trump’s America
Why is this year different from all other years? On all other years, we celebrate new Haggadot together, Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and progressives. We disagree about many things, and we argue about them at the Seder. But this year, as we watch a minority-elected president attack the press, the courts, immigrants and allies around…
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Opinion Following The JCC Arrest, Can We Be Smarter About Anti-Semitism?
There’s not much we know about the 19-year-old Jewish Israeli-American who is allegedly responsible for the bomb threats phoned into more than 100 JCCs in the last month. But that hasn’t stopped opportunists from rushing in with simplistic opinions. For example, hard-rightist Mort Klein, who leads a small organization heavily funded by a few Jewish…
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Opinion The Art Of The Steal: How Trump’s Plot To Destroy The NEA Robs America
George Will writes that the public should not fund art. The Torah begs to differ. In Exodus 35:4, Moses informs the Israelites that God has commanded them to give of their own possessions to build and decorate the tabernacle. That’s a commandment – not a suggested donation. The artisans Bezalel and Oholiab are commissioned to…
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Opinion Why It’s Moral To Defy Trump’s Immoral Crackdown On Immigrants
“An unjust law is not a law,” the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote from his Birmingham, Alabama, jail cell. The letter is well known – less so the fact that King was writing to fellow church leaders who disapproved of his breaking the law in the name of civil rights. I was saddened to…
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Opinion Why Anti-Semitic Attacks Are Good For Donald Trump
More than 200 headstones overturned. Eighty-nine bomb threats and counting. We are living through a paroxysm of anti-Semitic violence not seen in the United States in two generations. But there are at least three crucial questions to which we do not know the answer. First, and most narrowly, we don’t yet know who is committing…
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Opinion What a remarkable Torah rescued from Iran — then LA’s fire — can teach about community amid devastation
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Fast Forward Israel’s judicial overhaul is back. So are the protests.
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Opinion After 15 months of war, Israelis are all scaffolding, helping hold each other up
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Fast Forward Their Pacific Palisades synagogue is standing, but all three rabbis lost their homes
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