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 Call It Sochifreude
Call it Sochifreude. For the past two years, human rights activists have decried the conditions of the Sochi Olympic games, which wrap up this week, often to deaf ears. They’ve reported accounts of migrant workers being abused, environmental laws being trashed, billions of dollars being embezzled, and, of course, the ban on gay “propaganda” which…
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Opinion Why Woody Allen’s Thing for Younger Women Doesn’t Make Him a Pedophile
Hopefully, Woody Allen Fatigue has now settled in. Every major newspaper in the country has run op-eds on this horrible situation, some by family members themselves. This publication has published four: one demanding that we “stand up for Dylan Farrow,” one likening the pursuit of Allen to a “lynch mob,” and two professing ambivalence about…
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Opinion Why Climate Change Denial Is Biggest Conservative Lie of All
Are conservatives ever right? They were wrong about slavery, wrong about women’s suffrage, wrong about segregation, wrong about gay rights. They were wrong about trickle down economics – it’s never worked and never will, as the ballooning wealth gap proves once again. They were wrong about Iraq (where are those WMD’s, anyway?) and wrong about…
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Culture What’s More American Than Bob Dylan — and Super Bowl Car Ad?
“Oh, how the mighty have fallen,” people who don’t know much about Bob Dylan have said, in response to his surprising, patriotic Super Bowl commercial for Chrysler. To them, Dylan is still someone he never was: a Sixties icon, a protest singer who would never sell out. “Sad, sad, sad,” moaned one of my Facebook…
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Opinion Why Jews Should Tune In to the Mindfulness Revolution
The current cover of Time magazine features a blissed-out and beautiful blonde, captioned with the text “The Mindful Revolution.” The images are cliché, but the Time cover story is but the latest in a long line of significant — possibly historic — changes in how Americans regard contemplative practice. It recounts the fascinating evolution of…
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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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