Jay Michaelson

Rabbi Dr. Jay Michaelson holds a Ph.D. in Jewish Thought from Hebrew University, a J.D. from Yale Law School, and nondenominational rabbinic ordination. He is a field scholar at the Emory Center for Psychedelics and Spirituality, having previously held positions at Chicago Theological Seminary, the Center for LGBTQ Studies in Religion, Brown University, and Boston University Law School.

Dr. Michaelson is the author of ten books, including God vs. Gay? The Religious Case for Equality; a Lambda Literary Award finalist; and The Heresy of Jacob Frank: From Jewish Messianism to Esoteric Myth (Oxford University Press), which won the National Jewish Book Award for scholarship.

Dr. Michaelson’s scholarly work focuses on the intersections of law, ethics, and religion in a range of substantive areas including religious liberty and LGBTQ equality, queer theology, environmental regulation, Jewish law and heresy, Christian Nationalism, and contemplative practices including mysticism, meditation, and psychedelics. His work on psychedelics includes the seminal 2008 article “Ayahuasca and Kabbalah,” participation in the first Jewish Psychedelic Summit, and a recent Harvard Divinity School panel on “Are Psychedelics Theologically Significant for Judaism?” He is also well-known in the Jewish world as a teacher of meditation and spirituality, and is also authorized to teach in a Theravadan Buddhist lineage.

Outside the academic world, Dr. Michaelson has worked for twenty years as a journalist, primarily writing on law, religion, and politics. He was the Supreme Court columnist for the Daily Beast for six years, and is today a frequent commentator on CNN and a contributor to Rolling Stone and The Forward. Dr. Michaelson broke the story of Leonard Leo’s influence on American politics in 2018, and in 2013, he wrote the first long-form report on the expansion of religious freedom jurisprudence to enable discrimination against women and LGBTQ people. More recently, his article “Yes, There Are a Lot of Jews in Hollywood – Let a Rabbi Explain Why” won the 2023 New York Society for Professional Journalists Award for opinion writing. Previously, Dr. Michaelson clerked for Judge Merrick Garland on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, and worked for ten years as a professional LGBTQ activist.