Jay Michaelson
@jaymichaelson.bsky.social
Writer, journalist (Rolling Stone, Forward, CNN), rabbi, professor (Emory Center for Psychedelics & Spirituality, Harvard Law School [2025]). Former lawyer & LGBTQ+ activist jaymichaelson.substack.com
Honored to be quoted here, where @jaymichaelson.bsky.social is totally on point re: the unacceptable silence of Jewish orgs wrt Epstein + war.
Epstein and Iran are an antisemitism mega-crisis. Here's what Jewish organizations should do about it.
Nothing will make antisemitism go away, but we can work together to mitigate its severity.
forward.com
"First of all, I don’t answer to you, and I don’t answer to you." There's always a tweet. Scott Jennings gets his finger in the face of Michael Eric Dyson @michaelericdyson.bsky.social & Jay Michaelson @jaymichaelson.bsky.social 🔗 via @acyn.bsky.social on 8 Oct 2024 t.ly/Geebk
George Conway ⚖️🇺🇸@gtconway.bsky.social · 3mo agoI'm old enough to remember me getting shadow-banned from CNN for a while after calling Jennings a liar and asking on live air why CNN was paying Jennings to lie to its viewers …
@jaymichaelson.bsky.social - July 2018 Leonard Leo “figured out twenty years ago that conservatives had lost the culture war. Abortion, gay rights, contraception—conservatives didn’t have a chance if public opinion prevailed. So they needed to stack the courts,” said Tom Carter archive.ph/6ow1B
The Secretive Puppetmaster Behind Trump’s Supreme Court Pick
A Catholic fundamentalist who controls a network of right-wing groups funded by dark money has put three justices on the court. He’s about to get a fourth.
thedailybeast.com
After the Epstein Files release and the Iran war, there has been a huge spike in antisemitism. But the institutions who focus on these things seem completely oblivious, or silent, or both. In @jdforward , I analyze this crisis and what might be done to respond to it. forward.com/opinion/8188...
Epstein and Iran are an antisemitism mega-crisis. Here's what Jewish organizations should do about it.
Nothing will make antisemitism go away, but we can work together to mitigate its severity.
forward.com
Excellent article by @jaymichaelson.bsky.social about the terms genocide and blood libel that resonates with a lot of what i’ve been thinking over the past two and a half years. forward.com/opinion/8056...
Tragically, 'genocide' has become a meaningless word
In calling accusations of genocide 'blood libel,' a new pro-Israel petition mirrors the Left in draining an important term of its meaning.
forward.com
Nihilism is abundant in online culture, politics, celebrity culture, and perhaps above all, in the high rates of hopelessness reported by Gen-Z Americans -- often for very good reasons. Conservatives have an answer to it. But do progressives? jaymichaelson.substack.com/p/maybe-nihi...
Maybe Nihilism is the Real Enemy?
And if so, what non-oppressive things can be done about it? (Trigger warning: somewhat uplifting ending.)
jaymichaelson.substack.com
The Good shooting and the threatened Greenland operation are mirror images of one another. Both invite us to disregard what is obviously true — the president is mad, the mom was innocent — and somehow believe the preposterous instead. open.substack.com/pub/jaymicha...
The Nakedness of the King
We have entered a new phase of madness and cognitive dissonance.
open.substack.com
"Once you strip away the false claims of criminality or violence or the stealing of American jobs, what you’re left with is the truth: that some mostly-white people don’t like the way the country is changing." jaymichaelson.substack.com/p/the-real-a...
The Real America is Not About Blood and Soil
Ethnonationalist Garbage vs. Six Flags Great Adventure
jaymichaelson.substack.com
The Trump admin has vowed to go after organizations it vaguely (and falsely) claims support violence. The list includes several Jewish groups. Despite their insistence and smokescreen tactics, Trump and his allies do not care about Jews — only crushing dissent. from @jaymichaelson.bsky.social
The Trump administration is targeting Jewish organizations — what are we prepared to do?
Even if you're not a fan of organizations like Jewish Voice for Peace or IfNotNow, you need to stand with them nonetheless.
forward.com
To understand Charlie Kirk's political legacy, one must understand his religious beliefs. open.substack.com/pub/jaymicha...
The Faith of Charlie Kirk: A Guide
To understand Charlie Kirk's political legacy, one must understand his religious beliefs.
open.substack.com
It's not just that the administration never cared about antisemitism, rather, they used us for their own authoritarian goals. And that, that's antisemitic 😡 From Rabbi Dr. @jaymichaelson.bsky.social: "It is now obvious that antisemitism was never the real reason..." forward.com/opinion/7564...
American Jews were played — now what?
Antisemitism was never the reason for the Trump administration’s attacks on universities. What can we learn from this great exploitation?
forward.com
What do MAGA nationalists see when they look at the Statue of Liberty? jaymichaelson.substack.com/p/what-to-th...
What, to the Nationalist, is the Statue of Liberty?
Right and Left live in different nomic countries.
jaymichaelson.substack.com
I'll be on #CNN tonight from 10p-11p ET talking about... all of this.
I usually look to @jaymichaelson.bsky.social for his brilliant application of Jewish insight to current politics. This piece in the Forward 2 days ago comes close... forward.com/opinion/7110... We need something like the Declaration of Independence in listing the crimes of despotisim we're facing.
Stephen Miller's cavalier cruelty misses the whole point of Passover
With his cavalier cruelty, Miller, the White House Deputy Chief of Staff, seems to have forgotten that we, too, were once strangers in Egypt.
forward.com
The deep truth of Jesse Watters' conception of fragile masculinity: open.substack.com/pub/jaymicha...
Opportunism, Madness, Nihilism, & Terror
Jesse Watters is really, really worried about men spontaneously turning into women.
open.substack.com
Honored to be part of this amazing anthology.
Kittredge Cherry@kittredgecherry.bsky.social · last yr.New book: Queer understanding of theology and scripture are explored in “Mapping New Terrain in Queer Religious Scholarship: Essays in Honor of John Eastburn Boswell” by Bernie Schlager (editor) of Center for LGBTQ and Gender Studies in Religion (CLGS). #FaithfullyLGBT www.amazon.com/dp/B0D6GY783...
Letting go of anxiety and embracing grief -- a reflection on the last few months, entitled The Glass is Already Broken open.substack.com/pub/jaymicha...
The Glass is Already Broken
What happens when you accept that the worst might happen?
open.substack.com
Right-wing YouTuber Tim Pool has made it to the White House pool — someone from his “Timcast” channel will be part of today’s pool duty covering the president. Last year, DOJ revealed Pool was receiving millions of dollars from the Russian gov. Pool says he didn’t know where it was coming from.
What does the future hold for gay marriage in the US and what would Rabbi @jaymichaelson.bsky.social say to the MAGA gays? "We will lose most of the rights which we worked hard to get, even if we retain marriage in some form or fashion," Rabbi Dr. Michaelson predicts.
Here's a vaguely optimistic perspective — as long as “optimism” includes economic devastation, massive human rights abuses, and clear violations of the constitution. I call it “Waiting for Midnight.” jaymichaelson.substack.com/p/waiting-fo...
Waiting for Midnight: A Quasi-Optimistic Take
Things are yet not as bad as they need to be. But we're getting there.
jaymichaelson.substack.com
Rabbi Dr. @jaymichaelson.bsky.social returns to The State of Belief this week for a deep dive into the rule of law and the chaos of MAGA, including the weaponization of antisemitism accusations and the rise of the "woke right."
The Rule of Law and the Chaos of MAGA: Jay Michaelson
The State of Belief Host Rev. Paul Brandeis Raushenbush is joined by Rabbi Dr. Jay Michaelson to discuss the role of the courts as a check on the powers claimed by the executive, tools for resilience,...
stateofbelief.com
Trump admin official admits there's no due process. No due process at all. They "determined" these people were terrorists and deported them without trial of any kind. www.instagram.com/reel/DHjg9G0...
New, from @pamherd.bsky.social at Can We Still Govern: NIH grants are being screened for forbidden words. Breakthrough techniques (like mRNA) are now off the table. Do you want scientific funding awards to be determined by political appointees or scientists? donmoynihan.substack.com/p/politicizi...
Politicizing Science: The National Institutes for Health
A merit-based and competitive process will be politicized - or eliminated
donmoynihan.substack.com
A Letter to a Trump-Supporting Technologist friend: open.substack.com/pub/jaymicha...
Letter to a Trump-Supporting Technologist
Why the costs of Trump outweigh the benefits
open.substack.com
"A new bill filed in the Texas House would prevent students from behaving like anything other than a human being at schools in the state." Well there go the theater and band programs www.kvue.com/article/news...
FURRIES Act filed by Texas lawmakers targets non-human student behavior in schools
The bill aims to ban students from non-human behavior with exceptions for days designated for costumes like Halloween.
kvue.com
"The symposium was called Psychedelics and Monotheistic Religions: Sacramental Practice and Legal Recognition, and responded to the dramatic increase, in recent years, of psychedelic use in Christian, Jewish, and Muslim communities...." Read more at jaymichaelson.substack.com
