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 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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Opinion In Jerusalem, Fundamentalism on the March
‘Good morning, Iran/the loudspeaker calls/How we feared/that this day would come.” So sang Israeli pop star Aviv Geffen eight years ago, reacting to the growing strength of the ultra-Orthodox parties in Israel, and fearing that, demographics being what they are, things would only get worse. Well, they have. Today, Jewish moderates in Israel and America…
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Culture Two Lawyers, Three Opinions
Lawyers: Are they good for the Jews? It doesn’t take a statistician to observe that there are a lot of Jews in the legal profession, and even more in the legal academy. But why are there so many Jews in the American legal world, and what significance, if any, do the numbers have? To address…
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News Old Labels Feel Stiff for ‘Flexidox’
When I was growing up, in the Conservative movement, Jews were defined by the synagogues they attended, and the movements to which they belonged. We were all Jews, to be sure, but that bond was less strong than the loyalties of denomination. We were the USY team; they were the NFTY team. (I grew up…
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