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 For This Scholar, the Body Is the Window to the Soul
These are busy times for Sander Gilman, a scholar who has long studied Western cultural constructions of health and disease. Though American life expectancy is at an all-time high, our public discourse seems more crowded than ever by anxieties about our physical well-being. New Yorkers and Californians have stopped smoking in bars, 40% of Americans…
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News A Watershed Year for Gays of Faith
Last week, more than 200 Jews gathered in downtown Manhattan for New York’s annual gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender (GLBT) community Chanukah party, pausing to look back at a watershed year and looking ahead to the challenges of the next. Although the party was at the same place and time as last year’s, there was…
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News A Festival of Rebellion Reminds Us What Matters Most
The undeserved prominence of Chanukah, due to coincidences of the calendar, has long served to obscure its revolutionary meanings. It has become a holiday of unintended ironies: that a group of religious anti-aesthetic zealots is now celebrated by consumerism; that those zealots, who were almost fundamentalist in their beliefs, are now heroes of religious freedom;…
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News A Prayer Group of Their Own
‘People are tired of the lack of intimacy that’s found in a lot of shuls,” said Shir Yaakov Feinstein-Feit. It’s a common complaint these days in Jewish communal circles, but Feinstein-Feit, 25, and his friends did something about it: They founded their own minyan, or prayer group. That minyan is Kol Zimrah (Hebrew for “Voice…
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News From Aleph to Tough
The Lowercase Jew By Rodger Kamenetz TriQuarterly Books, 76 pages, $12.95 * * *| Poets and Jewish spiritual seekers alike have reason to be curious about Rodger Kamenetz’s new work. His life is like the chasidic tale of the man who travels to a distant country to find the treasure buried in his home. A…
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News High Holy Days
‘Meditation practice,” said Rabbi Rachel Cowan, outgoing director of the Jewish Life Program at the New York-based Nathan Cummings Foundation, “is a daily practice of teshuva. Literally, physically, you are coming back to your breath. But you are also coming back to who you are.” This journey to one’s true self has animated Cowan throughout…
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News You Keep on Knockin’ But You Can’t Come In
Knocking on Heaven’s Door: American Religion in the Age of Counterculture By Mark Oppenheimer Yale University Press, 304 pages, $30. * * *| Two years ago, my friends and I were driving back from the Burning Man festival, which takes place late summer every year in Black Rock City, Nev. We were tired, hung over…
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News An Orthodox Poet Takes on God –– and Sex
When Matthue Roth takes the stage at a poetry slam, the audience knows right away that they’re seeing something new. For some it’s his peyes, or sidelocks; for others its the poetry about phylacteries (“my tefillin nature/leather wrapped around me like I’m/all tied up/in you. I know the secret of S+M, why/white men pay for…
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