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 How Did Donald Trump Happen?
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…
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Opinion Your Ambivalence Toward Hillary Clinton Says More About You Than Her
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…
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Opinion Hey, Curt Schilling, Let Me Tell You About American Jews
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…
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Opinion Blaming ‘the Media’ Boosts Anti-Semitism — and Donald Trump’s Not the Only Culprit
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…
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Opinion Who Are the Donald Trumps in Our Midst? (Hint: You Meet Them Every Day)
Like the scapegoat sent to the wilderness on Yom Kippur, so Donald Trump is now, at last, being disowned and disavowed by conservatives and Republicans of all stripes. It’s all a little too convenient. How many more Trumps are out there? How many men who brag about sexually assaulting women, who are serially investigated for…
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Culture When Fox News Went From Chinatown to Boro Park in Search of More Stereotypes
After Jesse Watters’s triumphant trip to New York’s Chinatown, he headed south to Boro Park. Having spent time with people vaguely represented in the foreign policy discussion of the Vice Presidential candidates, he wanted to meet the Jews who have been the subjects of so many tweets by Donald Trump’s supporters. The segment hasn’t yet…
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Opinion The Orthodox Case for Hillary Clinton — and Against Donald Trump
The American Jewish Committee released the first national poll of Jewish voters earlier in September, and the news is good for Hillary Clinton: Jewish voters prefer her to Donald Trump by a 3–1 margin. But who are those Trump supporters? In Florida, a crucial swing state where the Jewish vote could actually tip the state…
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Opinion The Conclusions We Jump to After the New York Explosion
Maybe it was nothing. Maybe we’re over-anxious now, like the travelers who fled JFK when it was all a false alarm. Probably not, but maybe. Maybe it was pranksters, or low-level wannabes. The devices were crude, the locations almost random. Whoever did this, maybe they read about terrorism and wanted to take part themselves. Luckily…
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