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 Confusing Israel’s Doves and Hawks
Doves and hawks. Idealists and realists. We’re used to these dichotomies in politics, and eventually most of us choose one side or the other. Trouble is, when it comes to Israel, the dichotomy is not so straightforward. Israel’s security hawks — the defense establishment, former generals and the former heads of the Shin Bet —…
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The Schmooze Was Justin Bieber Right About Anne Frank?
To paraphrase internet celebrity Chris Crocker, Leave Justin Alone. Let’s start with two things we don’t know. First, we don’t really know anything about Justin Bieber. All of our opinions about him are mediated by publicists, reporters, bloggers, and lots and lots of spin. Second, we don’t know that much about Anne Frank. We do…
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Opinion The Movement To Rebrand Discrimination as ‘Religious Freedom’
‘Religious liberty” is the new “family values.” That’s the conclusion of a new, exhaustive, 30,000-word report just released by the think-tank Political Research Associates and prepared by this writer. There is a covert, well-coordinated, heavily financed campaign to reframe questions of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender equality, as well as reproductive rights, into claims that…
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Culture Making Sense of the Holiday Season’s Onslaught of New Haggadahs
● The Bronfman Haggadah By Edgar Bronfman Illustrated by Jan Aronson Rizzoli, 128 pages, $29.95 ● The Artist’s Haggadah By Jane Kessler Petitjean Self-published, 48 pages, $20 ● The Haggadah App David Kraemer, et al Melcher Media, $4.99 on iTunes ● Hakol Baseder By Mitch Heifetz and Michael Toben Gefen Books, 110 pages, $7.95 (Haggadah),…
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Opinion The Wrong Way To Fight BDS
Is censoring disagreeable speech ever a good idea? A porn star and an aging Jewish icon seem to think so. Both men, Michael Lucas and Abraham Foxman, have recently opined that speech in favor of “BDS” — boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel — is hate speech and should be banned from Jewish, LGBT, and…
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Food Kosher Pop Up Is Manna From Heaven
It was a blustery winter night, and we were walking in Long Island City — only a bridge away from the Upper East Side, but it felt like another world… a cold and windy world, and an unlikely location for an upscale kosher dinner of whiskey-glazed spare ribs and coconut-caramel pears. But that’s what we…
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Culture Get Ready for Jewish iSpirituality
Remember how you used to buy music in the old days? You would go to a store and purchase a plastic disk that an expert had recorded, sequenced and curated for you. Its style, and thus, secondarily, yours, was carefully thought out by an array of musicians, producers, art directors and marketing men (generally, men)….
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Opinion Build on Gay Marriage Victories
It’s looking like 2013 will be the year of same-sex marriage. The Supreme Court will decide on the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act (it’s up to Justice Kennedy) and California’s Proposition 8, both of which try to criminalize marriage that is not between a man and a woman. The Obama administration, already not…
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