Jay Michaelson

Jay Michaelson is founding editor and interim executive editor of Zeek.

Jay is also the author of four books and two hundred articles on the intersections of religion, spirituality, sexuality, and law. Associate editor of Religion Dispatches magazine, contributing editor to the Forward, founding editor of Zeek: A Jewish Journal of Thought and Culture, Jay is also a frequent contributor to the Huffington Post and Tikkun. His books are God vs. Gay? The Religious Case for Equality (Beacon, 2010 – recently the #1 bestseller in gay/lesbian nonfiction on Amazon.com) as well as God in Your Body: Kabbalah, Mindfulness, and Embodied Spiritual Practice (2006), Another Word for Sky: Poems (2007), and Everything is God: The Radical Path of Nondual Judaism (2009). In 2009, he was included on the “Forward 50” list of the fifty most influential American Jews, and in 2011, he won the Society for Professional Journalists’ ‘Deadline Club’ award for feature writing.

Jay will soon hold a Ph.D. in Jewish Thought from Hebrew University (2012), a J.D. from Yale Law School, an MFA in Writing from Sarah Lawrence, and a B.A. magna cum laude from Columbia University. His academic work has been published in anthologies including Queer Religion (2011) and Jews and Sex (2008), and journals including the Duke Law Review and Michigan Journal of Gender and Law. He has held teaching positions at Boston University Law School, City College of New York, and Yale University, and has been scholar in residence at dozens of synagogues, churches, and universities around the country. His website is www.jaymichaelson.net.

Alex Hommel

Faith and Practice

Why It’s Good for Jews to Meditate: Convergences, Divergences

By Jay Michaelson

Many Jews meditate, and most meditate in ways developed in the Buddhist tradition. That this is so, is undeniable; why this is so, is a subject for the sociologists. But what does it mean for the practitioner? What are the benefits of meditation for a Jewish spiritual path, and what are the benefits of a Jewish path for serious dharma practice?

Faith and Practice

Jewish Enlightenment : Neo-Hasidism and Vedanta Hinduism

By Jay Michaelson

Jewish mystics face a problem Hindus don’t have: if there are no distinctions in the absolute, then the religion of the relative, with its rules and prohibitions, suddenly becomes incoherent. If nothing else, Judaism is a religion of distinctions and lines, and if Ein Sof erases lines, it erases normative Judaism.

Faith and Practice

The Non-Duality Dialogues

By Jay Michaelson and Adam Ring

Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Schelling and Maimonides jostle with the Big Dipper and earthquakes, in an effort to decipher what it really means for us to say God is One.

Life and Action

Impermanence

By Jay Michaelson

When sadness, loneliness, or other ‘shadow emotions’ arise, they often carry with them an illusory weight of permanence. The transitory experience of loneliness is not, in itself, unpleasant – but the thought that it will never pass is.

Faith and Practice

Beyond Oneness

By Jay Michaelson

What does it mean to say God is one? In his new book, Jay Michaelson reframes oneness as nonduality, a Hegelian and Kabbalistic synthesis of ayin/absence and “in the now” presence.