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 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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Opinion What Judaism Can Learn From Burning Man
And now, three items from the world of celebrity — two of which you’ve probably heard about, one which you likely have not. First, yet another arrest of former cherub Justin Bieber, this time for “dangerous driving” and assault. Let’s not rush to judge the Biebs here — he was trying to elude paparazzi, who…
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Opinion How Do We Avenge Steven Sotloff’s Death?
Shiite Muslim fighters take part in a last combat training before joining the government forces to fight Islamic State jihadists / Getty Images And so another beheading of another American journalist — this time “one of us,” as today’s Forward editorial has reminded us. “One of us” meaning an American Jew, and one whose family…
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Opinion Jewish Emphasis on Life Makes Death Rituals a Gift to World
It’s sometimes said that religion originated out of the fear of death. We all face the abyss, and we all grieve when our loved ones pass away. From this utter meaninglessness, the theory goes, myths of meaning arise. A review of Biblical literature, however, calls this theory into question. Unlike many indigenous and shamanic traditions,…
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Books How Yiddish authors made a new world writing for children
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Yiddish „זאָלן מיר גיין אויף דעם דאָזיקן וועג, אויף דעם ווײַסן וועג“‘Let us go on this path, on the white path’
דער טאַטע פֿון אַוואַד דאַראַושע, וועמען כאַמאַס האָט דערהרגעט דעם 7טן אָקטאָבער, רעדט וועגן זײַן זון
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Opinion The hostages are home. The fight for their future is far from over
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Fast Forward Israelis are comparing Trump to Cyrus the Great – again
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