Rabbi Jay Michaelson is a contributing columnist for the Forward and the writer of Both/And with Jay Michaelson. 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 Grassroots Spirituality: As Jews in the Woods Grows, It Weighs Whether to Open Its Doors
Jews in the Woods is not one of the lost tribes camping out in Appalachia. It doesn’t even take place in the woods. It is, however, a remarkable grass-roots, ever-changing community of college students and immediate post-college graduates who come together twice a year for a “full and uncompromising embrace of Shabbat,” in the words…
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Culture You Are, Therefore I Am
Origins of the Other: Emmanuel Levinas Between Revelation and Ethics By Samuel Moyn Cornell University Press, 268 pages, $29.95. Humanism of the Other By Emmanuel Levinas, translated by Nidra Poller University of Illinois Press, 136 pages, $18. The belief in the human soul is perhaps the most enduring remnant of traditional religion. Even those who…
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Opinion Exploring the New Jewish Spiritualities
What is spirituality? For some, the word connotes the fantasies of the New Age, from harmless notions like astrology to dangerous ones like apocalyptic messianism. For others, the word means precisely the opposite: not seeing the imaginary, but seeing the real more clearly, from the stirrings of the heart to the infinitesimal miracles of everyday…
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Culture The Jewish Goddess, Past and Present
‘The Da Vinci Code,” soon to be a major motion picture, is an old tale in new clothing: It is the story of the goddess, sometimes referred to as the “Divine Feminine,” the female aspect of — or counterpart to — the familiar male God of the Hebrew and Christian Bibles. In Dan Brown’s phenomenal…
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News Book of Esther Gets Novel Makeover
Megillat Esther By J.T. Waldman Jewish Publication Society of America, 204 pages, $18. Testament (new Vertigo series) By Douglas Rushkoff, Art and cover by Liam Sharp DC Comics. 32 pages, $2.99 each. * * *| It’s well known that Jews invented the comics. From the glory days of Mad magazine’s Max Gaines; Superman’s creators, Jerry…
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Culture A Jew and a Lawyer Are Sitting in a Bar…
Watching “The Wire,” HBO’s serial drama about the gritty underbelly of the Baltimore streets, one sometimes gets the impression of honest men and women trapped in a hopeless machine of corruption, violence and despair. Many of the show’s most likable characters are killed off, while those who remain have a world-weary look in their eyes….
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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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