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 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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Opinion Watching as Israel’s Election Approaches
Having finally come to the end of a grueling election season in the United States, American Jews — certainly this one included — could be forgiven for wanting to take a long break from electoral politics. Yet those of us invested in the Israeli future, with friends and family living in cities recently targeted by…
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Opinion Michaelson Answers Dershowitz
Here’s a thought: When you start asking lots of rhetorical questions, chances are you’re failing to understand that such questions often have answers. In Alan Dershowitz’s criticism of B’nai Jeshurun’s recent endorsement of the UN Palestine (non-member) statehood vote, he asks nine such questions. Here are some answers to them. Q: Did the rabbis realize…
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Culture When He Was Good
There’s no consensus about when writers should put down their pens. Some, like J.D. Salinger or E.M. Forster, stop very early. Others, like Philip Roth until his recent announcement, keep publishing brilliant work well into their later years. There’s no conventional wisdom here, no right answer. Yet when such a decision is reached, IT’s time…
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Culture In Praise of New Age Judaism
New Age Judaism gets a bad rap. It’s namby-pamby, critics say — indulgent, narcissistic. Maybe it’s not even Jewish. Never mind the fact that the Havurah movement, Jewish Renewal and Neo-Hasidism have significantly shaped mainstream Jewish prayer life (chances are, your mainline synagogue’s Friday night tunes were first sung by a hippie in Birkenstocks) as…
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