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 Rabbis on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown
Those of us who knew, or thought we knew, Rabbi Barry Freundel — recently arrested for spying on women in the mikveh, with a mountain of evidence suggesting his guilt — are still in shock. As much as I disagreed with many of his halachic positions, I always thought he was one of the good…
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Opinion How ‘Klinghoffer’ Stereotypes Both Sides
“The Death of Klinghoffer” is among the most anti-Israel works of art I’ve experienced in recent years. And yet, it’s so intent on crafting a Cowboys-and-Indians story that it reduces its Palestinians to offensive, Orientalist caricatures. That’s right: This opera isn’t anti-Jewish. It’s anti-Palestinian. Far too much ink has already been spilled on the question…
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Opinion Why AIPAC Is Anti-Israel
American Jews who support Israel have been fighting one another in an asymmetrical way: Hawks routinely accuse doves of being anti-Israel, but doves do not accuse the hawks. I’m not sure how this pattern has come about — maybe it just feels ironic for pro-peace people to pick a fight — but it needs to…
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Culture Live-Blogging The Rapture and the Demise of Nicolas Cage
Why am I here? The question arises on many levels. On the surface, clearly, I’m here to review “Left Behind,” based on the second-best-selling series of books of all time (“Harry Potter” is the first). In theory, LB should be the biggest of a run of terrible Christian movies, including “Heaven is for Real” and…
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Opinion Same-Sex Marriage Wins at SCOTUS
The Supreme Court decision not to hear any of the seven pending cases on state same-sex marriage bans is being hailed as a watershed moment for LGBT equality. While some of these claims are overly enthusiastic — this is only a decision not to decide, and the Court will surely take up the issue at…
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Opinion We Are All Pamela Geller
Well, now we know what it takes to stop Pamela Geller’s crusade against terrorism: an actual victim of it. Condemned by such noted liberals as the ADL, Dinesh D’Souza, and the Daily News, banned by the Great Neck Synagogue (but embraced by Chabad), Geller is the anti-Muslim wacko who takes ads on buses and subways…
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Opinion Let’s Make Climate Change the New ‘Third Rail’ of American Politics
Will 2014 be the year in which climate change becomes a “third rail”? Never before has there been an issue of such moral clarity. We have known for 25 years that the earth is warming more rapidly now than at any other time in history. We have begun to see the effects, in the form…
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Opinion As Gaza Recedes in the Rear View Mirror
Americans have a habit of moving on once the guns stop firing. We did it in Afghanistan in the 1980s, tried to do it in Iraq in the 2000s — and now we’re doing it in Gaza. Yet as past experience has shown, now is the moment for more engagement, not less. As Operation Protective…
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