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 Getting Serious About the Mystery
Robert Frost once wrote, “We dance round in a ring and suppose. But the Secret sits in the middle and knows.” I’d like this to be a Jewish credo. We have the first part right anyway: Jews do a lot of dancing round in rings, on holidays, at weddings. We also do a lot of…
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Opinion What ‘Dead Poets Society’ Taught Me About Living Deliberately
Robin Williams was not John Keating, the teacher he portrayed in the 1989 film Dead Poets Society. Keating was a character, made richer by Williams’ own improvisatory genius, but a character nonetheless. Williams, as we now all know, was all too human. Yet their fates, for me, are intertwined. Keating is a preacher of sensitivity….
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Culture ‘Magic in the Moonlight’ Isn’t That Bad and Neither Is Woody Allen
Back in February, my colleague Ezra Glinter said that because of the allegations of sexual misconduct lodged against Woody Allen, Ezra felt “tainted” writing about him, and warned that “when the next Woody Allen movie hits theaters,” he would not be able to separate the man from his art. Alas, Ezra’s savaging of Allen’s new…
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Opinion 8 Reasons Menachem Creditor Is Wrong To Be ‘Done Apologizing’ for Israel
We’re all exhausted by the horrors of Gaza. Whatever our political points of view, this is a trying time to care about Israel, Palestine, or the prospects for peace in the Middle East. Recently in these pages, my friend Rabbi Menachem Creditor has given eloquent voice to this frustration. He is fed up, he says…
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Culture Richard Linklater’s ‘Boyhood’ Captures the Spirit of the Time
One of the great productive tensions between Jewish tradition and contemporary spirituality is that between time and the timeless. On the one hand, the passage of time is central in Judaism. Some of this time passes in a linear fashion — we age along with life-cycle events , from birth to death — and some…
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Opinion Dan Markel’s Meaningful Life Ends in Senseless Death
There was a time, not too long ago, when what we wanted were explanations. Religion, philosophy, art – these were meant to tell us how things fit together, how they made sense. Even today, many of us — religious, secular, spiritual-but-not-religious — hold to this view. “It was meant to be.” “God works in mysterious…
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Opinion 5 Ways To Turn Down the Social Media Flame
I’d like to say that social media doesn’t matter. Israel and its Palestinian counterparts are pursuing tactics, military and otherwise, and the battle for public opinion is only one among many. Despite what nearly everyone seems to think, what happens on our Facebook and Twitter feeds probably doesn’t matter that much. Except when it does….
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Opinion What Did You Expect?
What did you expect? Did you think that terrorists wouldn’t attack three teenagers hitchhiking on a Palestinian road? Did you think that the Palestinian population isn’t angry enough to create extremist fringes like this? Did you really think that a continued occupation and no hope for independence would not breed some percentage of hard-core, terrorist…
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