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 Magen Tzedek: Model of the Jewish Future or Show Without an Audience?
The problem seems not to have changed. Back when I was at college, the egalitarian services couldn’t get a minyan, and so, while I didn’t like Orthodox liturgy, and didn’t approve of the mechitza (prayer barrier), I still schlepped up the extra flight of stairs to the traditional minyan, week after week. Whatever my personal…
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Culture Religion Is Actually Spirituality
Religion vs. spirituality. We hear the opposition all the time. “I’m not religious, I’m spiritual,” increasing numbers of Americans say every year. Conversely, many Jews insist that they follow Halacha, Jewish law, not out of any subjective spiritual motive, but because it is commanded by God. I, too, have often claimed that spiritual practice is…
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Opinion Love Is Not Blindness
Since the publication of “How I’m Losing My Love for Israel,” a personal essay describing my fatigue as a liberal Zionist, the most disturbing responses have not been the vitriolic e-mails or online comments, nor the thoughtful and well-reasoned replies from the likes of Daniel Gordis and Jonathan Sarna. Rather, I have been most troubled…
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Culture How I’m Losing My Love For Israel
To paraphrase a recent Jewish organizational tagline, I’ve “hugged and wrestled with Israel” for 20 years now. At first, it was all embrace: Zionist songs and culture nourished me like mother’s milk, and on my first trip to Israel I kissed the tarmac at Ben Gurion, as did the other USY (United Synagogue Youth) kids….
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Culture Eprhyme — Engaged and Diverse Hip Hop Jew
Here’s what it’s not about: cute Yiddish puns, bar mitzvah kitsch, Manischewitz cocktails, or the novelty of a Jewish “insert unexpected form” (rap, reggae, whatever) star. Here’s what it does seem to be about: post-sacred-cow radical pluralism, pantheism, religious consciousness fused with social action, and an uncompromising and unimpressed blend of urban forms and neo-Hasidic…
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Culture A ‘New Jew’ Goes to Auschwitz
I am not a Holocaust Jew. Though Auschwitz loomed large in my Jewish education, and though as a child I was duly traumatized and outraged by what my teachers described as the inexplicable and unprecedented evil perpetrated against us, it plays only a small role in my current Jewish identity and practice. This is by…
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Life Madonna at Auschwitz
The Jewish blogosphere is abuzz with reports that Madonna has plans to take her children, Lourdes (12) and Rocco (9) to Auschwitz, when the singer visits Poland as part of an upcoming tour. According to a report initially published in the British Daily Mirror, but circulated widely in the Jewish community by Ynetnews, a source…
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Opinion A Missing Culprit, but Culpability All Around
Here is how it happens. First, demagogues use incendiary rhetoric to inflame passions against a group or individual. Next, a “lone gunman” attacks the target(s) of that rhetoric. Then, the same demagogues who fanned the flames in the first place condemn the attack, express shock — shock! — that such a thing could ever have…
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