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 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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Opinion Bad Night for the Jewish Echo Chamber
American liberals are deservingly jubilant. Our standard-bearer has been reelected, liberal heroes such as Tammy Baldwin and Elizabeth Warren have won their elections, and marriage equality triumphed in all four states where it was on the ballot. And while Congress remains divided much as it was in the previous term, important trend lines show the…
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Opinion Jewish Romney Voters Are Fig Leaf for Christian Right
As William F. Buckley once reminded us, classical conservatives tended to be anti-Semitic. They looked down on Jews, blacks and immigrants, and had chauvinist ideas about women. It’s part of what being a conservative meant. That began to change 50 years ago, when neoconservatism — that is, Jewish conservatism — began to take hold. Neoconservatism…
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Opinion Obama Won by Talking Like a Republican
This late in the campaign, everything is about swing states – and the foreign policy debate was largely about Florida, where moderate Jews could well decide who gets the state’s 29 electoral votes. On those grounds, on the basis of issues important to Florida Jews, President Obama won this debate, but in a bizarre, looking-glass…
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Culture The Way I Was
As a Jewish gay man, I know that Barbra Streisand should be a double icon. A strong woman with a knack for musicals, she’s in the gay pantheon right next to Audrey Hepburn and, l’havdil, Madonna. And for Jews, of course, she’s the one who made it big, and did it her way: no name…
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