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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News The Attraction of Irrelevance
Is our religious consciousness enhanced when we attempt to make our sacred scriptures relevant to a contemporary mind, or when we accept and enter into their foreignness, and allow them to be “irrelevant,” ancient, and utterly new? This week’s “double portion” of Tazria/Metzora begs the question, with 59 verses about tzaraat (a skin disease similar…
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News Take Back The (Seder) Night
Pesach for the Rest of Us: Making the Passover Seder Your Own By Marge Piercy Schocken, 304 pages, $22.95. It’s well known that Passover is the most widely observed of Jewish holidays, and there’s no shortage of explanations as to why. Its themes are universally relevant — freedom is much easier to relate to than,…
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News Boston Rabbinical Program Challenges Denominational Boundaries
For better or for worse, what one first notices about the fledgling Hebrew College rabbinical program is what it is not: It’s not affiliated with a movement or committed to a single view of how Jewish law is meant to be understood. And it’s not very big or old — the first of its 45…
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Culture Where the Borscht Sounds Like the Sea
What a great idea! Most people who know of Woody Guthrie associate him with Dust Bowl ballads of economic hardship, or with the lefty patriotism of “This Land Is Your Land” (like many such songs, its political bite has been dulled by repetition). But not many know that, from 1942 until his slow decline into…
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News Spiritual Pioneers See a Different Shade Of Judaism: Green
I grew up, although I didn’t know it at the time, as an Abraham Joshua Heschel Jew. My spirituality may have been expressed in synagogues, but it wasn’t nourished there; it grew, instead, along backwoods roads, in caves and on cliffs, and along the lakeshore where I grew up in Florida. Those were the places…
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Culture The Graphic (Novel) Side of Israel
Pizzeria Kamikaze By Etgar Keret and Asaf Hanuka Translated from Hebrew by Miriam Shlesinger Alternative Comics, 100 pages, $14.95. Exit Wounds By Rutu Modan Drawn & Quarterly, 160 pages, $19.95. One of my fondest memories of the year I recently spent in Israel is of walking through the street fair on Emek Refaim, in Jerusalem’s…
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News Renewing Ecstatic Spirituality to the Beat of a Drum
“As opposed to the dense and demanding discourse of scholarship, students crave instant gratification,” complained outgoing Jewish Theological Seminary Chancellor Ismar Schorsch in his fiery farewell address last May. “The way to the heart is not through the circuitous and arduous route of the mind but the rhythmic beat of the drums.” Although framed in…
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Culture The Hidden and The Manifest
Scholars, like artists, need community — people who see the world in ways similar enough to be supportive but different enough to provoke thought, controversy and inspiration. For me, Rabbi Jill Hammer has long played all those roles. When we teach together, she always seems to “get it,” and to come up with insights or…
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