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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Opinion Censorship at the 14th Street Y!
As reported in these pages last week, the 14th Street Y pulled the plug on a controversial Shavuot event sponsored by the left-wing advocacy group Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP). The Y did so at the eleventh hour, and on the pretext that the Y was concerned about large crowds of attendees and media. Which…
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Culture Bible Codes a Lie That Won’t Die
Recently, I had the pleasure of teaching at Limmud FSU (Former Soviet Union), the version of the wildly successful international learning conference geared toward Russian-speaking Jews. Held at a hotel outside Princeton University, the conference’s theme was science, with an emphasis on Albert Einstein, and the cultural and political sessions reflected the generally rational, secular…
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Opinion Three Reasons Obama’s Right on Gay Marriage
President Obama’s announcement on same-sex marriage is good for the Jews. Why? Here are three reasons. First is the “who.” Obama’s support of same-sex marriage signals that he’s not going to let a noisy religious minority dictate public policy. This is important for all religious minorities, including the Jewish one, because that same group of…
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Culture Man in Search of God
Man Seeks God: My Flirtations With the Divine By Eric Weiner Twelve, 368 pages, $26.99 I’ll be honest: I normally hate books like this — memoirs of spiritual tourism, jauntily retold by trustworthy but neurotic narrators who are careful never to be more knowledgeable than the reader. I have read about two dozen of these…
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News An Anthem for LGBT Youth
A New Jersey jury recently convicted 20-year-old Dharun Ravi of hate crimes for using a webcam to watch as his college roommate kissed another man. Days after the incident, the subject of the video stream, Tyler Clementi, jumped off the George Washington Bridge. Clementi’s tragic death was one of a recent spate of lesbian, gay,…
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Culture Why Are American Jews So Liberal?
Why are Jews so liberal? Every few years, the question gets asked, often with the unspoken follow-up “… and what can we do to change that?” This year, Republican super PACs are drooling with anticipation. If you think the attacks on Mitt Romney by Sheldon Adelson — I mean Gingrich — I mean a Super-PAC…
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Opinion J Street’s Blind Spot Is Class
I’m not one for political conventions. Good policy is subtle, but effective politics is broad — and I, for one, prefer the former. When friends of mine returned from the AIPAC conference in early March, inspired by (in the words of one of them) “thousands of Jews all united by a love of Israel,” I…
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Culture ‘Tis the Season for New Haggadot
New American Haggadah Edited by Jonathan Safran Foer Translated by Nathan Englander Little, Brown. 160 pages, $29.99 Wellsprings of Freedom: The Renew Our Days Haggadah By Rabbi Ronald Aigen Emet Press, 148 pages, $23 The Koren Ethiopian Haggada: Journey to Freedom Edited by Rabbi Menachem Waldman Translated by Binyamin Shalom Koren Publishers Jerusalem, 200 pages,…
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Culture Why saying ‘L’shana Tova’ on Rosh Hashanah may not be the correct phrase
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Culture A Jewish prophet of the 1980s would be horrified to see that we didn’t heed his warnings
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Opinion This is the most disorienting Rosh Hashanah in memory
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Fast Forward Meet Lev Kreitman, who brought down Tel Aviv shooter and survived Nova music festival on Oct. 7
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Fast Forward Nova survivor reveals she witnessed rape on Oct. 7 at Tel Aviv memorial ceremony interrupted by rocket sirens
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Fast Forward In NYC, Jews gather together — and apart — for prayer and protest to mark one year since Oct. 7
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Fast Forward Trump visits gravesite of Lubavitcher Rebbe to mark Oct. 7 anniversary
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Fast Forward Kamala Harris and Doug Emhoff plant a pomegranate tree for Oct. 7 victims
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