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 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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Culture Who’s Your Daddy?
l Jacob’s Wound: Homoerotic Narrative in the Literature of Ancient Israel By Theodore W. Jennings Jr. Continuum, 288 pages, $26.95. For most people, what the Bible says about homosexuality begins and ends with two verses in Leviticus. What those verses mean is subject to interpretation, of course. Some people see them as a blanket prohibition…
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Culture Portrait of the Artist As a Nice Jewish Boy
The Book of Martyrdom and Artifice: First Journals and Poems 1937-1952 By Allen Ginsberg Edited by Juanita Lieberman-Plimpton and Bill Morgan Da Capo Press, 416 pages, $27.50. Somewhere along the line, Allen Ginsberg changed American poetry — even American culture. Conventional wisdom says it happened the night of October 7, 1955, when Ginsberg performed his…
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Culture The People’s Bible
Joseph’s Bones: Understanding the Struggle Between God and Mankind in the Bible By Jerome M. Segal Riverhead Books, 308 pages, $24.95. ‘Let us make mankind in our image”: God’s pluralis majestatis declaration at the beginning of Genesis surely stands as one of the great historical inversions of human literature. Since the dawn of time, human…
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