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 New Atheism: What’s a Liberal, Spiritual Jew To Do?
For the past four years, Jay Michaelson has offered Forward readers a panoply of diverse contributions — news pieces about “emerging Jewish spiritualities” and reviews of works from Franz Rosenzweig to “Meshugga Beach Party”; essays on paganism and sensuality, politics and homosexuality; expositions on Hanukkah, Purim and several Torah parshiot, and several pointed (and sometimes…
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News Yom Kippur: A Personal Journey
Yom Kippur is a day different from all others. It, alone in the Jewish calendar, is a “Day of Death,” a time when all the normal teachings about honoring the body are, for one day, reversed. On this day, the sanctification of ordinary life and the celebration of the body and the world are undone,…
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Culture Who’s Your Daddy?
l Jacob’s Wound: Homoerotic Narrative in the Literature of Ancient Israel By Theodore W. Jennings Jr. Continuum, 288 pages, $26.95. For most people, what the Bible says about homosexuality begins and ends with two verses in Leviticus. What those verses mean is subject to interpretation, of course. Some people see them as a blanket prohibition…
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Culture Portrait of the Artist As a Nice Jewish Boy
The Book of Martyrdom and Artifice: First Journals and Poems 1937-1952 By Allen Ginsberg Edited by Juanita Lieberman-Plimpton and Bill Morgan Da Capo Press, 416 pages, $27.50. Somewhere along the line, Allen Ginsberg changed American poetry — even American culture. Conventional wisdom says it happened the night of October 7, 1955, when Ginsberg performed his…
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Culture The People’s Bible
Joseph’s Bones: Understanding the Struggle Between God and Mankind in the Bible By Jerome M. Segal Riverhead Books, 308 pages, $24.95. ‘Let us make mankind in our image”: God’s pluralis majestatis declaration at the beginning of Genesis surely stands as one of the great historical inversions of human literature. Since the dawn of time, human…
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News Shrine of False Messiah in Turkey May Be Razed
Far away from the eyes of the Jewish mainstream, in modern-day Turkey there live hundreds, if not thousands, of crypto-Jews — and today, one of their most sacred shrines is in danger. This is the hidden, fascinating tale of the doenmeh, descendants of the faithful followers of the 17th-century false messiah Sabbetai Tzvi, who converted…
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Culture Judaism and the Culture of Outburst
It feels like we’re “Falling Down” again. Fourteen years ago, Michael Douglas’s badly coiffed Everyman captured a cultural moment of impotent white rage: Furious at downsizing, outsourcing and the increasing falseness of American life, but powerless to stop any of it, Douglas’s character finally snaps — and we watched, mostly sympathetically. That year, 1993, came…
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Opinion No Crystals Needed
What is meditation, and why is it continuing to appear in more and more synagogues long after the Kabbalah craze and other spiritual fads have faded? As someone who has practiced meditation for many years and has now begun to teach it in Jewish settings, I’ve found it useful to start with what meditation isn’t….
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Culture Why saying ‘L’shana Tova’ on Rosh Hashanah may not be the correct phrase
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Culture How my odious cousin Roy Cohn was responsible for creating Donald Trump — and me
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Opinion This is the most disorienting Rosh Hashanah in memory
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Fast Forward Was the viral Ta-Nehisi Coates interview a hit piece or fair play? A journalism ethics expert weighs in.
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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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