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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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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Culture How Ruth Calderon Transforms Israeli Politics — and Talmud
● A Bride For One Night: Talmud Tales By Ruth Calderon, translated by Ilana Kurshan The Jewish Publication Society, 184 pages, $21.95 If Ruth Calderon did not exist, it would be necessary to dream of someone like her. For almost half a century, American expatriates and a small group of native Israelis have creatively and…
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Opinion Judging Ray Rice Instead of Ourselves
Ray Rice / Getty Images “Justice, justice, shall you pursue,” we are taught — and what could be more just than punishing a man shown, on video, punching and knocking out his wife in what seems like a brutal, cruel attack? Thus have we seen, in the last 72 hours, a cascade of condemnations of…
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Opinion The Very Jewish Reasons Why Gay Men Loved Joan Rivers
Getty Images Can we talk? Gay men have always loved our outsized female heroes, and Joan Rivers was right up there with the best of them. It’s no coincidence that a disproportionate number of these divas are Jewish (Rivers, Barbra Streisand) even though many (Judy Garland, Madonna) are not. In fact, gay men love strong…
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Fast Forward Why neo-Nazis marched in Ohio this weekend, and almost every weekend in the US
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Opinion The group behind Project 2025 has a plan to protect Jews. It will do the opposite.
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Opinion Just about every interpretation of Trump’s narrow election victory is wrong
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News Texas schools want to add Queen Esther to the curriculum. Here’s why Jews (and many Christians) are opposed.
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Fast Forward Three arrested in murder of rabbi in United Arab Emirates; Israel denounces ‘despicable antisemitic act’
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Fast Forward Rep. Ritchie Torres, outspoken pro-Israel advocate, is dropping hints that he could run for NY governor
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Fast Forward Ursula Haverbeck, infamous German Holocaust denier known as ‘Nazi grandma,’ dies at 96
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