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 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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Opinion Why Abbas Was Right to Blink
The Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity. Right? That’s the joke anyway — has been for the last fifty years. And it’s what I thought when I first heard that the Abbas government picked now, of all moments, to apply for membership in fifteen UN organizations. Couldn’t they have waited a month,…
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Opinion The Year of Magical Thinking
“That’s the good thing about science: It’s true whether or not you believe in it. That’s why it works.” So said Neil deGrasse Tyson, joining Bill Nye as players in a strange cultural moment: the resurgence of magical thinking. Magical thinking, you’ll recall, refers to the misattribution of causality: The black cat meowed, and then…
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Culture All The 2014 Haggadah Info You’ll Ever Need
Remember 2011? Back then, I breathlessly wrote in these pages about a new Haggadah that was online. And then, last year, a Haggadah app for your ipad. Remember when that was new? This year, for the first time, the majority of new Passover Haggadot are no longer on paper. And yet, oddly enough, I found…
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Culture Why Evangelical Christians Are Right To Be Angry About ‘Noah’
When the Biblical Noah listened to that voice in his head (God?) and built a huge ark to survive a flood, he was taking an expensive risk. Paramount Pictures has taken an equally expensive risk — $125 million, give or take — entrusting auteur Darren Aronofsky to somehow bring together epic and indie styles, Biblical…
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Opinion For a Keystone XL Pipeline Grand Bargain
It’s time for a grand bargain on the Keystone XL pipeline. For years, President Obama has been stuck in between a rock and a tar sand. Environmentalists have made the pipeline, which would connect tar sands in Canada with refineries in the United States, a cause célèbre. To them, it is a defining moment for…
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Opinion Bernie Madoff, Our Convenient Scapegoat
You couldn’t dream up a better villain. Bernie Madoff, the man we all love to hate, is back in the news, opining from his jail cell on matters political, ethical and financial, this time in an interview with Politico magazine. Madoff won’t win many friends with this new interview, and may even gain a few…
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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’
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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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