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 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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News Shrine of False Messiah in Turkey May Be Razed
Far away from the eyes of the Jewish mainstream, in modern-day Turkey there live hundreds, if not thousands, of crypto-Jews — and today, one of their most sacred shrines is in danger. This is the hidden, fascinating tale of the doenmeh, descendants of the faithful followers of the 17th-century false messiah Sabbetai Tzvi, who converted…
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Culture Judaism and the Culture of Outburst
It feels like we’re “Falling Down” again. Fourteen years ago, Michael Douglas’s badly coiffed Everyman captured a cultural moment of impotent white rage: Furious at downsizing, outsourcing and the increasing falseness of American life, but powerless to stop any of it, Douglas’s character finally snaps — and we watched, mostly sympathetically. That year, 1993, came…
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Opinion No Crystals Needed
What is meditation, and why is it continuing to appear in more and more synagogues long after the Kabbalah craze and other spiritual fads have faded? As someone who has practiced meditation for many years and has now begun to teach it in Jewish settings, I’ve found it useful to start with what meditation isn’t….
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Culture The Other Disappeared
The architecture of Jewish memory has undergone explosive growth in recent years: Holocaust memorials and museums, plaques, donor walls — and works of literature, like “The Ministry of Special Cases,” Nathan Englander’s new novel about Argentina’s “disappeared,” the thousands of students, dissidents and labor leaders tortured and killed during seven years of military dictatorship. Between…
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Culture Leonard Cohen: Poet of the Holy Sinners
Book of Longing By Leonard Cohen Ecco Press, 240 pages, $24.95. Leonard Cohen has long been a poet of the sacred and profane. Like his fellow Jewish pop troubadours, Bob Dylan and Allen Ginsberg, Cohen has, for 50 years now, written and sung about love, God, temptation and sex — though arguably to greater extremes…
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Fast Forward Cuomo says key factor in his primary loss was Mamdani’s support from young, Jewish, and pro-Palestinian voters
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Fast Forward Elon Musk wants your kids to use his chatbot. The same one that praised Hitler.
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Fast Forward Nation’s largest teachers union rejects move to cut ties with ADL
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Culture In this Holocaust story, there are few words, no swastikas, no yellow stars — just movement, passion and empathy
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