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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Culture For John Zorn, It’s Jewish Music as Bitches Brew
Is there a more vital Jewish composer than John Zorn right now? If there is, I don’t know who. Zorn’s amazing, postmodern, rockin’-swingin’-classical-noisy Masada Marathon, held March 30 at New York City Opera, was yet another stamp of mainstream approval for this 30-year fixture of the downtown New York music scene, who performed in his…
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Culture ‘Why Is Your Haggadah Different From Others?’
Reporting on the new Haggadot of the year is among my favorite roles here at the Forward. Each year, a new trove appears. And each year, we learn something new about the American Jewish experience. It’s no surprise, then, that the most exciting new Haggadah of the year isn’t a book at all, but an…
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Culture Not for the Sake of Heaven
Passover is coming, and with it, the season of questions. We Jews have long prided ourselves on asking good questions — even more than on providing adequate answers. We prize debates that go on forever. And, of course, we answer questions with still more questions. Inquiry, discourse, communication: These are some of the core values…
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Culture Gay and Orthodox: And Cleaving Strongly to Both
In January, I went to a shabbaton with 140 lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Orthodox Jews. Yes, Virginia, there are gay Orthodox Jews. There always have been. And while I have been working in the LGBT Jewish community for many years, I saw more courage, endurance and strength that weekend than I ever have before….
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Culture The Problem of Spiritual Experience
I was at a Seder a few years ago, and told my host I’d just been on a six-week silent meditation retreat. Before I could finish my sentence, he announced, “You’re deluding yourself.” A bit quick to judge, perhaps, but if you ask most skeptics, I think they’d say the same thing about spiritual experiences….
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Culture Don’t Trust Your Gut
One of the functions of religion, we are told, is to provide comfort in an uncomfortable world. We all know we will die, but religion comforts us with tales of the afterlife. We all know that life is unpredictable, but religion comforts us with stories of a guiding light, ordering the universe. In this way,…
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Culture Rethinking Egalitarianism
Recently I met up with a Jewish academic from New York who had relocated to a midsize Jewish community in the South. In New York, he and his family had attended B’nai Jeshurun, the huge, well-known liberal congregation on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. But in his new home, the options were less attractive: He described…
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Culture More Than Words
If Passover is the holiday of questions and answers, Yom Kippur is often the holiday of confusion and befuddlement. Why? On Passover, symbols rich in texture and history are explicitly explained within the Seder ritual; indeed, explaining is part of the point. Yet on Yom Kippur, ostensibly the holiest of days, suddenly we’re left to…
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