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 In Search of Religious Rationality, Dalai Lama Visits … the Mideast
JERUSALEM –– The Dalai Lama, Nobel Peace Prize laureate and exiled leader of the Tibetan people, paid his fourth visit to Israel last week. The self-styled “simple Buddhist monk” sold out speaking engagements, sparked a small controversy within the Israeli government and, just as a Hamas-led parliament was about to be sworn in, met with…
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News Rabbi Was a Master of Practical Kabbalah
An estimated 300,000 people marched through the streets of Jerusalem on Sunday — not to protest the Palestinian elections or to celebrate the Betar Jerusalem soccer team, but to join in the funeral procession for a famed Kabbalist, Rabbi Yitzhak Kadouri. Kadouri died last week, somewhere between the ages of 104 and 114 (no one…
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Culture The Unity of Opposites
Learning From the Tanya: Volume Two in the Definitive Commentary On the Moral and Mystical Teachings Of a Classic Work of Kabbalah By Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz Jossey-Bass, 384 pages, $24.95. * * *| We Jews: Why Are We and What Should We Do? By Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz Jossey-Bass, 224 pages, $24.95. * * *| Why…
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News Jewish Legislators Build International Network
JERUSALEM — “I’ve been coming to Israel every year since 1983,” said Rep. Gary Ackerman, a New York Democrat, “and every time, people say, ‘You’ve come at an interesting time.’” That was never truer than this year. Ackerman came here last week to take part in the International Council of Jewish Parliamentarians, a loose association…
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News Israel’s ‘Mystical City’ Opens Its Doors to Outsiders
The bus ride from Jerusalem to Tsfat takes three hours… but it can be a long three hours. On my most recent trip to the mystical city — a former backwater that, in the 16th century, became the most important center for Kabbalah in the world — I was stuck in the back of the…
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News Jewish Legislators Build International Network
JERUSALEM — “I’ve been coming to Israel every year since 1983,” said Rep. Gary Ackerman, a New York Democrat, “and every time, people say, ‘You’ve come at an interesting time.’” That was never truer than this year. Ackerman came here last week to take part in the International Council of Jewish Parliamentarians, a loose association…
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News Israel’s ‘Mystical City’ Opens Its Doors to Outsiders
The bus ride from Jerusalem to Tsfat takes three hours… but it can be a long three hours. On my most recent trip to the mystical city — a former backwater that, in the 16th century, became the most important center for Kabbalah in the world — I was stuck in the back of the…
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Culture Holy Feast, Holy Fast
Mystical Bodies, Mystical Meals: Eating and Embodiment in Medieval Kabbalah By Joel Hecker Wayne State University Press, 296 pages, $44.95. * * *| Holy Men and Hunger Artists: Fasting and Asceticism in Rabbinic Culture By Eliezer Diamond Oxford University Press, 240 pages, $49.95. * * *| To put it mildly, Jews have a complicated relationship…
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