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 Jewish Paganism: Oxymoron or Innovation?
I was skinny-dipping in the mud springs on the shores of the Dead Sea with Rabbi Ohad Ezrahi, a longhaired renegade kabbalist who runs a commune in the Judean Desert. We were enveloped by the softest, silkiest mud I’ve ever felt — it was like moving through thick cream. Then the rabbi told me to…
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Opinion Disabuse Community of Intolerance
The resignation last week of Rabbi David Kaye from the educational program Panim, after revelations that he had solicited a 13-year-old boy online for sex, elicited the usual expressions of shock from the Jewish community. Of course, we all should be outraged when such immoral conduct is brought to light, but those who follow the…
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Culture Fragments of a Lost Jewish World
Young Turk By Moris Farhi Arcade Publishing, 392 pages, $25. * * *| Toward the end of Moris Farhi’s elegiac, ambitious novel, a professor of literature who is the voice of Turkish conscience in the book tells a budding Turkish Jewish writer: “One thing, young Turk: Don’t lose the young Jew. Cherish everybody’s difference. If…
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News Sukkot: From Humble to Inspired
My father spent his career building houses in New York’s Levittown, Long Island, condos in Sarasota, Fla. — and sukkot for our family. They weren’t elaborate affairs — just your basic frame construction of two-by-fours covered in translucent plastic. But as a child I always was proud of our home-designed and home-built sukkah, which rested…
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Culture A Little off the Top: The Controversy About Circumcision
Marked in Your Flesh: Circumcision From Ancient Judea to Modern America By Leonard B. Glick Oxford University Press, 384 pages, $30. * * *| To put it mildly, circumcision is a delicate subject. It’s almost impossible to discuss the matter without cracking a joke, probably because the ritual makes at least 49% of the population…
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Culture Standing Again With Lilith; The Long and Winding Roads of Jewish Feminism
These days, everyone is post-something: postmodern, post-Zionist — and, in many quarters, post-feminist. Like other “revolutionary” ideologies, feminism has come to mean different — indeed, diametrically opposed — things to different people. To some, it is the simple belief that women should be treated as equal to men: for example, that they should not be…
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Culture Male and Female Created He Them
Hating Women: America’s Hostile Campaign Against the Fairer Sex By Shmuley Boteach Regan Books, 326 pages, $24.95. * * *| Sex and Character: An Investigation of Fundamental Principles By Otto Weininger, translated from German by Ladislaus Löb and edited by Daniel Steuer with Laura Marcus Indiana University Press, 440 pages, $75. * * *| ‘The…
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Culture Judaism, Meditation and The B-Word
Mindful Jewish Living: Compassionate Practice By Jonathan P. Slater Aviv Press, 300 pages, $24.95. * * *| Meditation and Judaism: Exploring the Jewish Meditative Paths By DovBer Pinson Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 304 pages, $35. * * *| Beside Still Waters: Jews, Christians, and the Way of the Buddha Edited by Harold Kasimow, John…
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