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 Why This Hasid Was Right To Flip the Bird to Kapparot Protester
As Forward readers know, I have, on several occasions, criticized ultra-Orthodox/fundamentalist Jewish leaders for abuses of power, toleration of bigotry, failures to protect or educate their own communities, and selective manipulation of secular law to arrogate power to themselves and squelch the rights of others. So, when a photo circulated this week of a Hasidic…
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Opinion What Is a Jewish Response to Virginia On-Air Gun Killings?
Every time a senseless shooting happens, as it did yet again this week in Roanoke, Virginia, liberals ask the question Bob Dylan posed more than 50 years ago: “How many deaths will it take till he knows/That too many people have died?” The answer, however, to preventing attacks like the one that killed reporter Alison…
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Opinion Progressive Judaism Won’t Win in My Lifetime. And That’s OK.
In 70 C.E., according to the Talmud, Rabbi Yohanan Ben Zakkai had himself smuggled out of Jerusalem, and petitioned the Roman authorities to establish a center of learning in Yavneh, a small rural village by the coast. At the time, it must have seemed a defeatist move. Jerusalem had not yet been destroyed, though it…
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Opinion Jared Fogle Facing Prison Rape? That’s Not Jewish Justice.
Jared Fogle, Subway pitchman turned child sex offender, will now be heading to jail for five to twelve years. It’s conventional wisdom that he, like other sex offenders, will be sexually assaulted while he’s there – and many people are happy to think so. A New York Post’s front page headline, for example, taunted him…
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Israel News Jerusalem Pride Organizer: ‘It Was Horrible’
“I felt like he was looking right at me. I could see his eyes. It was horrible.” That’s what Tom Canning, Director of Development at the Jerusalem Open House and one of the organizers of the Jerusalem Pride March, saw last Thursday on King George Street in Jerusalem. “He” was Yishai Schlissel, who stabbed seven…
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Opinion Why We Should Ignore the Nuts on Both Sides of Iran Deal Debate
Insiders say that mainstream American Jewish organizations are coalescing around opposition to the P5+1 Iran nuclear deal and will work hard to get 13 Democratic senators to give Republicans a veto-proof majority to reject it. Ultimately this would be a self-defeating strategy. But however one feels about the agreement, there are ways to have a…
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Opinion The Ultra-Orthodox Hatred Behind the Stabbing at Jerusalem Gay Pride
If a community’s respected religious leaders preach, over and over again, that gay people deserve to be killed, isn’t it inevitable that someone will try to kill them? That’s one of the lessons from today’s stabbing of six people at the Jerusalem Pride Parade. Of course, it was also the lesson ten years ago at…
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Opinion Why U. of California Should Dump ‘Three D’ Definition of Anti-Semitism
Pity the University of California. The UC system is the latest (and perhaps largest) organization being pulled in different directions by competing supporters of Israeli and/or Palestinian causes. At issue? Whether the UC system — which in the past few years has seen outrageous instances of anti-Semitism and (separately) contentious anti-Israel activities and resolutions —…
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Fast Forward NYC Mayor Adams pushes controversial antisemitism definition as issue dominates mayoral election
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