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 The Virtues of the Unaffiliated
It’s all about the unaffiliated. Ask anyone who runs a Jewish not-for-profit, and she’ll tell you: Success is measured in terms of how many “unaffiliated” Jews you get to “affiliate” — whether with Jewishness, Judaism or, at the very least, the latest program, trend or synagogue-outreach initiative. Organizations that don’t focus on the unaffiliated have…
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News Anti-Folk Hits The Right Note: Kimya Dawson Breaks Through With ‘Juno’
Kimya Dawson is the top-selling artist in America! I admit I didn’t see it coming. The last band I knew before it was famous (you know… when it was really cool) was the White Stripes, which my friend Adam saw perform on his college campus. I’d forgotten what this feels like — this sense that…
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Culture The Path Of the Just: Is Mussar the ‘New Kabbalah’?
Everyday Holiness: The Jewish Spiritual Path of Mussar By Alan Morinis Trumpeter, 335 pages, $24.95 A Responsible Life: The Spiritual Path of Mussar By Ira Stone Aviv Press, 320 pages, $17.95. How do you become a better person? A simple question, it would seem, but there are no easy answers — and no agreement as…
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Culture People Of the Chapbook: Jewish Poets as Jewish Teachers
Not many people know it, but Jewish poetry is alive and well. The neglect is surprising, really, since we are, after all, the People of the Book, and we allegedly cherish our poets, from the ancients to Amichai. But perhaps it’s not so surprising, given our contemporary culture, which (poets laureate notwithstanding) relegates poetry to…
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Culture Thinking Green: It’s Not Just a Virtue — It’s Your Jewish Duty
The rhetoric of Jewish environmentalism has long been kind and gentle. Like much of American environmentalist talk, it accentuates the positive: what we can do, how you can help. This is Left-Wing Activism 101: Fight despair, and don’t alienate anyone. And it’s abetted, in both secular and Jewish contexts, by the propensity of tree-hugging liberals…
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Culture How I Finally Learned To Stop Worrying and Love (Okay, Like) Christmas
It’s hard to be a Jew on Christmas My friends won’t let me join in any games. And I can’t sing Christmas songs Or decorate a Christmas tree Or leave water out for Rudolph ’cause there’s something wrong with me! I’m a Jew, a lonely Jew, on Christmas. — Kyle Broflovski, “South Park” Like many…
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Culture As Winter Falls, a Time To Learn From the Orthodox
As daylight-saving time ends and the winter approaches in earnest, Shabbat begins to be inconvenient again. In the northeastern United States, it now begins at four, even three in the afternoon Friday, early enough to encroach on the workday, and render the day a little bit useless. For families with children, the Sabbath now starts…
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Culture Memo to Michael Steinhardt: ‘Duh.’
This past summer, philanthropist Michael Steinhardt rocked the Jewish institutional world when he announced that he sort of regretted the $125 million he had spent on Jewish causes. “Is the Jewish world any better today than it was 13 years ago? Have things really improved? Are we reaching more people?” Steinhardt asked. “I don’t have…
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Yiddish ווי האָבן ייִדן געהיט די ייִדיש־קולטור אױף יענער זײַט „אײַזערנעם פֿאָרהאַנג“?How did Jews maintain their Yiddish culture behind the Iron Curtain?
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Fast Forward All the Jewish NHL players to watch in the 2024-2025 season
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