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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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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News An Awakened Soul
Is spiritual development really as important as intellectual development? Today, one often finds in Jewish culture a mutual suspicion between those who value intellectual education (and its likely material consequences) and the “spiritual” types who like to chant, meditate and “explore their feelings.” On the one side, many well-schooled Jewish adults regard today’s would-be mystics…
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Culture A Theory of Everything
Franz Rosenzweig is one of the most mentioned and least read of the Jewish philosophers. Everyone with an interest in modern Jewish philosophy includes him in its highest circle, along with Hermann Cohen, Martin Buber, Emanuel Levinas and, if religious philosophers are included, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Rav Kook and Joseph Soloveitchik. But while even laypeople…
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