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 Perplexed by the Guides?
I’m not one for magical thinking, but the way Kabbalah — the ancient tradition of Jewish mystical and esoteric wisdom — has evolved in our time does make me wonder. For centuries, Kabbalah was kept secret by a small elite of Jewish men. Its innovative theology and mind-scrambling puzzles were deemed too destabilizing for the…
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Culture Peoplehood Vs Israel
Peoplehood and support of Israel are two major values of the American Jewish community. But they are in direct conflict, both in principle and in practice. In principle, the values of peoplehood and Israel are on a natural collision course. Peoplehood — the notion that we are all united purely by dint of being members…
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Culture Religion Within the Bounds of Reason… and Love
Radical Judaism: Rethinking God and Tradition By Arthur Green Yale University Press, 208 pages, $26 ‘I don’t believe in the same God you don’t believe in,” Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, the founder of Jewish Renewal, wrote many years ago. Reb Zalman was responding to an imagined atheist, or perhaps an alienated Jew — someone with a…
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Culture Memento Mori: Jewish Spirituality and the Sanctification of the World
Earth’s crammed with Heaven And every common bush afire with God — Elizabeth Barrett Browning Western religion can, at times, devalue the world. With eyes turned toward heaven, or the afterlife, it can ignore or denigrate the manifest world, criticizing those who love it too much as “pagan” or, in our time, “humanist.” This is…
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Culture What Religious Arguments Are Really About
‘All of a sudden, there was hope in my heart I’d see my father again.” Thus wrote one of America’s most influential religious leaders of the moment when he became religious. It was at his father’s funeral, and the presiding minister had just said that death is not the end, that there is an afterlife….
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Books Why Is This Night Different? Who’s Asking?
Open-Eyed Heart-Wide Haggadah By Debra Jill Mazer, edited by Shira Leba Batalion, designed by Margo Jennifer Akroyd Double Gemini Press, 62 pages, $32.95 In Every Generation: The JDC Haggadah Commentary by Ari L. Goldman, Foreword by Rabbi Joseph Telushkin Devora Publishing, 96 pages., $24.95 The Kabbalah Haggadah: Pesach Decoded By Yehuda Berg The Kabbalah Centre…
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Culture It’s Complicated
Can you have déjà vu for something you don’t remember? Watching the news about Iran these days, I feel as if it’s 1967 all over again. Once again, a leader of a large Middle Eastern country, a man with ambitions to be the leader of the region, threatens Israel with annihilation. Once again, evidence appears…
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Culture Un-Righteous Indignation
For a columnist, there’s no such thing as a bad reaction. Agreement feels good, of course, but disagreement is better than apathy, and bitter disagreement means, at the very least, that one’s managed to say something. Thus, over the past few months, I’ve relished the opportunity to engage with smart critiques of my opinions on…
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