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 Philip Glass Is Getting Older — for Better or Worse
In the iconic painting by Chuck Close, composer Philip Glass seems to radiate a casual youthfulness. His gaze, slightly askew, possibly slightly stoned, seems at once to confront and look past the viewer. When the painting was made, Glass was a young, avant garde minimalist composer, with most of his great successes yet ahead. He…
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Opinion There’s a Good Reason for ‘Singling Out’ Israel
In a recent letter to university officials, Hillel President Eric Fingerhut and Israel on Campus Coalition Executive Director Jacob Baime decried “efforts to hold Israel to a different standard than any other nation.” Is that true? Is Israel being held to a different standard than other nations? Here, I will argue first that the different…
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Opinion Are Social Conservatives Finally Growing Up?
Sex, drugs, and rock & roll. Before I was born, these were the frontiers of the social revolutions sweeping America. The favorite moments of the Boomer generation — Woodstock, the Summer of Love — combined all three. And while the political revolution the Beatles sang about never quite came to pass, the Sixties’ changes in…
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Opinion Judging Menachem Stark’s Jewish Life — Not Just His Death
A man was murdered last week. By many news accounts, he was a crook. He also happened to be a Haredi Jew. Does the last fact matter? Yes, according to the politicians who have fallen over themselves to condemn the New York Post’s typically tasteless coverage of the death, which included the headline — based…
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The Schmooze David Cooper, Father of BuJu
For nearly 20 years, Rabbi David Cooper has been among the pioneers of Jewish meditation. Through his bestselling books and popular retreats, Cooper and his wife Shoshana have helped to create the hybrid of Buddhist and Jewish meditation practices that is now commonplace at synagogues across the country. Love it or hate it, the “BuJu”…
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Opinion Have We Reached the End of Traditional Religion?
Maybe the Christian Right is right. For almost 40 years now, they’ve been warning us that we’ve entered the wilderness, that traditional religion is being eroded. Did 2013 prove them right? Item One: the Rise of the Nones. This phenomenon — nearly 20% of Americans listing “none” as their religious affiliation — was first documented…
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Opinion Obamacare ‘Pajama Boy’ Controversy Wrapped in Anti-Semitism
Surely the silliest kerfluffle of a political year that contained much silliness was the recent conservative hand-wringing over “Pajama Boy.” Pajama Boy, you will be forgiven for not knowing, was the star of a recent ad — one among many — by “Organizing for Action” (formerly Obama for America) designed to get people to register…
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Opinion Holiday Season Underlines Shifts in Judaism as Self-Definition Fades
‘Tis the season once again — the season of the December Dilemma. In its original form, the alliterative allusion is to the challenge of raising Jewish kids in a non-Jewish society. Everyone loves Christmas, right? So how come we don’t celebrate it? But the December Dilemma is dated. A majority of non-Orthodox Jewish marriages are…
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