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 233 Reasons Why Bob Dylan Is Right To Detest His Fans
The Dylanologists: Adventures in the Land of Bob By David Kinney Simon & Schuster, 256 pages, $25 ‘The Dylanologists” is a truly maddening book. Ostensibly, it is the story of the obsessive, sometimes paranoid fans who pore over every Bob Dylan lyric and concert, who worship, scrutinize, stalk, analyze and clearly annoy the man himself….
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Culture Why Do Jews Meditate? It’s All in the Worrying!
Dan Harris already had a lot going for him: He’s co-anchor of ABC News’ “Nightline” and “Good Morning America,” and a respected journalist. Now he’s also a best-selling author, with his recent memoir-cum-report on meditation, “10% Happier.” The book, subtitled “How I Tamed the Voice in My Head, Reduced Stress Without Losing My Edge, And…
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Opinion I Am 1 Billionth ‘Anti-Semite’
Why is anyone taking the Anti-Defamation League’s survey on global anti-Semitism seriously? Like catnip to a calico tabby, the ADL’s recent “findings” that one-quarter of the world is anti-Semitic has indeed thrown much of the Jewish press into a feeding frenzy. As if confirming what some — read, conservative — Jews have been telling us…
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Opinion Embracing the Irrationality of Circumcision and Kashrut
Judaism has long had an uncomfortable relationship with rationality. On the one hand, our talmudic sages, classically influenced philosophers, and secular scientists and doctors have all taken rational reasoning to great, sometimes dizzying heights. Ours is a tradition of law, education and logic. Yet on the other hand, many aspects of Judaism – like most…
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Culture Reb Zalman’s December Song
● The December Project By Sara Davidson HarperCollins Publishers, 208 pages, $25.99 Founded in the aftermath of the Sabbatean heresy, early Hasidism was a paragon of paradox. Its early 19th-century adherents, particularly those of the philosophically rigorous movement Chabad, were uniters of opposites — heaven and earth, being and nothingness, concealment and revelation. The greatest…
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Opinion When Jesus Died at Auschwitz
YouTube The most tasteless YouTube video ever has just been released – by our friends at Jews for Jesus. Entitled “That Jew Died for You,” it is – I am not making any of this up – a three-minute video showing Jesus Christ among a group of Jews arriving at Auschwitz. And you thought the…
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Opinion 4 Lessons for Jews From the Overland Park Rampage
The tragic shootings in Overland Park, Kansas, seemed, to many of us, like a throwback to a bygone era. It’s no coincidence that the shooter was at least 73 years old. His ideology seems ancient as well: the Ku Klux Klan, Jewish banking conspiracies, hatred of miscegenation. Anti-Semitism is still with us, but usually not…
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Culture Lars Von Trier’s ‘Nymph()maniac’ Is Uncomfortable But Thought-Provoking
For those still brooding over the Woody Allen scandal, consider those of us who are fans of Lars von Trier. Von Trier is not a 78-year-old comic with a single crime, alleged to have taken place twenty years ago, never proven, and dismissed by law enforcement. He is a complicated, depressed, brilliant, misunderstood, controversial filmmaker…
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