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 Secrets of the Rebbetzin
I first met Rebbetzin Hadassah Gross, the ageless widow of six Hasidic rabbis, at the fashionable loft of two well-known Brooklyn artists, one of whom was photographing the rebbetzin for an upcoming gallery show in Boston. Hadassah was radiant, an elegant creature in Italian shoes and tailored clothes (“I only wear couture,” she told me…
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News It’s All in the Mix
‘Every day brings something new,” says DJ Handler, the impresario behind Modular Moods, an independent record label whose first releases hit the stores this past April. The 24-year-old Handler — ne Erez Shudnow — lives this credo. In addition to running his own record label, he is a DJ who spins at art installations and…
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News PSALM 151
As Passover recently reminded us, Elijah never dies in the imagination. Because in the Torah, Elijah the prophet ascends full body “in a whirlwind to heaven,” he is able to return in the dreams of Jewish mystics, where he offers special instruction, as well as in folklore and legend, where he appears sometimes as a…
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News It Is Not Good for Man To Be Alone
Wrestling with God and Men: Homosexuality in the Jewish Tradition By Steven Greenberg University of Wisconsin Press, 264 pages, $35. * * *| Queer Theory and the Jewish Question Edited by Daniel Boyarin, Daniel Itzkovitz and Ann Pellegrini Columbia University Press, 464 pages, $24.50 * * *| Imagine learning that, because of how you were…
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News Practicing What He Preaches, Reggae Singer Reveals His Soul
Midway through Matisyahu’s set, I realized I was witnessing something new. The show, last Christmas Eve, was packed; it was part of the “Jewltide” festival sponsored by Heeb Magazine and Matisyahu’s label, JDub Records, and, indeed, the Heebsters came out in droves. As the crowd bounced along to reggae, dancehall and ska rhythms, Matisyahu pulled…
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News Revealing Ourselves Through Our Masks
There’s a passage in the Shaarei Zedek, a 14th-century mystical tract, in which the anonymous author recounts a literal ecstasy, an exiting of the soul from the body. What is inside becomes outside, and through the medium of language, the process of the world’s unfolding is re-envisioned beautifully as God looking in the mirror. The…
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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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