
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.
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.
Rabbi Nathan Diament’s response to my column about Betsy DeVos perfectly reflects the short-sightedness of the Orthodox Union’s approach to this issue. The column in question was roughly 1,200 words long. Only 64 of those words addressed Orthodox organizations. Yet from Rabbi Diament’s response, you’d think the whole piece was an attack on them. In…
For generations of American Jews, public education has been the gateway to American life. It was certainly true for my parents, the children of immigrants; public school taught them not just facts and figures, but alao how to be American — and how to be proud of being American. Which is why the nomination of…
Before Sabra was a brand of hummus, it was a nickname for Israelis, who were said to be like the Sabra cactus: tough outside, but tender inside. In the age of Donald Trump, all progressives must learn to be Sabras. We, like a generation of Israelis who lived with perpetual war, must learn to be…
“When they go low, we go high,” said Michelle Obama. Look how well that turned out. For the next four years, progressives must take a lesson from conservatives: When they go low, we must go lower, fiercer, harder, smarter. We must fight unrelentingly to save the country (and planet) we once knew. The same zeal,…
How could this happen? What do I tell my kids? Fair questions. It’s fair to feel anything right now, especially fear. But, if it helps, consider that the Trump victory isn’t entirely surprising. America has changed very quickly in the last 20 years or so. We’ve become much more multicultural — and have officially said…
Hillary Clinton voters, it’s time to switch teams. I don’t mean to Team Bernie or, God forbid, Team Trump. I mean that it’s time to take a good hard look at the reasons many of us are still on Team Reluctant, Team Lesser of Two Evils, or Team This Has Been a Nasty Election All…
In a recent interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper, Curt Schilling, the baseball star turned Donald Trump surrogate and possible senatorial candidate, turned the tables on Tapper and said: I would like to ask something as a person who is practicing the Jewish faith and have since you were young, I don’t understand — and this…
Whether your friends are progressive, conservative, or anywhere in between, I bet they hate “the media.” In the last week alone, I’ve had lefty friends blame “the media” for ignoring protests at a pipeline in North Dakota, right-wing friends blame “the media” for ignoring the emails that WikiLeaks obtained from the Russian despotic regime, and…
100% of profits support our journalism