Jay Michaelson is a writer in the United States. He is the legal affairs columnist at The Daily Beast and an editor at 10% Happier, a meditation platform.
Legal and political writing
Since 2013, Michaelson's work at The Daily Beast has focused on law, religion, and LGBT issues. Michaelson twice won the New YorkSociety for Professional Journalists award for opinion writing, most recently in 2014. In addition to covering the Supreme Court, he has written widely on subjects including antisemitism, voter suppression, and judicial nominations. His recent work has been featured on CNN, MSNBC, and Meet the Press. In 2013, Michaelson wrote the first long-form report on the right-wing religious exemptions movement, Redefining Religious Liberty: The Covert Campaign Against Civil Rights. Michaelson's work on this issue gained prominence a year later after the Hobby LobbySupreme Court case and he has written many articles on religious liberty in Reuters, The Washington Post and other publications. From 2004 to 2017, Michaelson was a columnist and contributing editor to The Forward newspaper. In 2009, his essay entitled "How I'm Losing My Love for Israel" generated substantial controversy in the Jewish world, including responses from Daniel Gordis, and Jonathan Sarna, and prefigured the estrangement of progressive American Jews from the government of Israel. Michaelson was listed in the Forward 50 list of the most influential American Jews in 2009.
Meditation teaching
Michaelson is also a rabbi and teaches meditation in Buddhist, Jewish, and secular contexts. He is a teacher of jhana meditation in the Theravadan Buddhist lineage of Ayya Khema and Michaelson's teacher Leigh Brasington; co-leads Jewish meditation retreats at the Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center; and since 2018 has written for the 10% Happier meditation platform. Michaelson has written several books on meditation and spirituality and was ordained as a rabbi in 2013. He is a frequent contributor to .
LGBTQ Activism
Michaelson is Jewish and openly gay and was a professional religious LGBTQ activist from 2004-2013. He was the founder and executive director of Nehirim, an LGBTQ Jewish organization, from 2004 to 2013. His 2009 book God vs. Gay? The Religious Case for Equality was an Amazon bestseller and Lambda Literary Award finalist, and Michaelson spoke at over 100 places of worship during the 2009-15 debates about same-sex marriage. Michaelson was called one of the "Most Inspiring LGBT Religious Leaders" in 2011 by the Huffington Post and one of "Our Religious Allies" by the LGBT newspaper The Advocate. In 2014, Michaelson co-founded a project at The Daily Beast entitled Quorum: Global LGBT Voices, which features TED-style talks by LGBT leaders from the Global South.
Academic work
Michaelson holds a Ph.D. in Jewish Thought from Hebrew University, where he wrote his dissertation on the antinomian heretic Jacob Frank. He is an affiliated assistant professor at Chicago Theological Seminary. He previously held teaching positions at Boston University and Yale University. Michaelson graduated from Columbia College of Columbia University in 1993, and from Yale Law School in 1997. His work on Jewish philosophy and mysticism includes "Queering Martin Buber: Harry Hay's Erotic Dialogical", "Conceptualizing Jewish Antinomianism in the 'Words of the Lord' by Jacob Frank" ; "The Repersonalization of God: Monism and Theological Polymorphism in Zoharic and Hasidic Imagination" and "Queer Theology and Social Transformation Twenty Years after Jesus ACTED UP". His legal academic work includes the 1998 Stanford Environmental Law Journal article on geoengineering and climate change was described as "seminal" by Salon Magazine and he is regarded as an early advocate of the policy. Other legal academic work was published in the Yale Law Journal and Duke Law Journal.
