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 The Path Of the Just: Is Mussar the ‘New Kabbalah’?
Everyday Holiness: The Jewish Spiritual Path of Mussar By Alan Morinis Trumpeter, 335 pages, $24.95 A Responsible Life: The Spiritual Path of Mussar By Ira Stone Aviv Press, 320 pages, $17.95. How do you become a better person? A simple question, it would seem, but there are no easy answers — and no agreement as…
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Culture People Of the Chapbook: Jewish Poets as Jewish Teachers
Not many people know it, but Jewish poetry is alive and well. The neglect is surprising, really, since we are, after all, the People of the Book, and we allegedly cherish our poets, from the ancients to Amichai. But perhaps it’s not so surprising, given our contemporary culture, which (poets laureate notwithstanding) relegates poetry to…
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Culture Thinking Green: It’s Not Just a Virtue — It’s Your Jewish Duty
The rhetoric of Jewish environmentalism has long been kind and gentle. Like much of American environmentalist talk, it accentuates the positive: what we can do, how you can help. This is Left-Wing Activism 101: Fight despair, and don’t alienate anyone. And it’s abetted, in both secular and Jewish contexts, by the propensity of tree-hugging liberals…
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Culture How I Finally Learned To Stop Worrying and Love (Okay, Like) Christmas
It’s hard to be a Jew on Christmas My friends won’t let me join in any games. And I can’t sing Christmas songs Or decorate a Christmas tree Or leave water out for Rudolph ’cause there’s something wrong with me! I’m a Jew, a lonely Jew, on Christmas. — Kyle Broflovski, “South Park” Like many…
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Culture As Winter Falls, a Time To Learn From the Orthodox
As daylight-saving time ends and the winter approaches in earnest, Shabbat begins to be inconvenient again. In the northeastern United States, it now begins at four, even three in the afternoon Friday, early enough to encroach on the workday, and render the day a little bit useless. For families with children, the Sabbath now starts…
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Culture Memo to Michael Steinhardt: ‘Duh.’
This past summer, philanthropist Michael Steinhardt rocked the Jewish institutional world when he announced that he sort of regretted the $125 million he had spent on Jewish causes. “Is the Jewish world any better today than it was 13 years ago? Have things really improved? Are we reaching more people?” Steinhardt asked. “I don’t have…
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Culture The New Atheism: What’s a Liberal, Spiritual Jew To Do?
For the past four years, Jay Michaelson has offered Forward readers a panoply of diverse contributions — news pieces about “emerging Jewish spiritualities” and reviews of works from Franz Rosenzweig to “Meshugga Beach Party”; essays on paganism and sensuality, politics and homosexuality; expositions on Hanukkah, Purim and several Torah parshiot, and several pointed (and sometimes…
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News Yom Kippur: A Personal Journey
Yom Kippur is a day different from all others. It, alone in the Jewish calendar, is a “Day of Death,” a time when all the normal teachings about honoring the body are, for one day, reversed. On this day, the sanctification of ordinary life and the celebration of the body and the world are undone,…
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