I Am Prayer: An Embodied Yom Kippur Companion (2026)

Yom Kippur has always held more than guilt, obligation, and passive atonement. I Am Prayer: An Embodied Yom Kippur Companion engages this holiest of days as a portal into embodied practice, ecstatic awareness, and prophetic action.

The voices in this collection approach Yom Kippur as poets, practitioners, organizers, and artists. Editor Eden Pearlstein opens with the Kabbalistic teaching that prayer isn’t something you do, but something you are. Marcia Meislin offers a somatic liturgy of the body, while Rabbi Jay Michaelson reflects on fasting as an ancestral technology of altered consciousness. Rabbi Jill Hammer guides readers into the Holy of Holies through immersive visualization, and Rabbi Nate DeGroot takes Isaiah’s call to feed the hungry out of the prayerbook and into the street.

Together, the essays, rituals, and artwork in I Am Prayer invite readers to enter Yom Kippur through the body—approaching the Day of Atonement as a celebration of the sacred through the full scope of human experience.

Mapping New Terrain in Queer Religious Scholarship builds upon the work and legacy of Professor John Boswell, bringing together contributions that were delivered at the annual CLGS Boswell Lecture Series at Pacific School of Religion.  The chapters address a variety of relevant topics in theology, scripture, queer studies, ethics, and social justice. Dr. Michaelson’s contribution is “Queer Theology and Social Transformation: Points of Contact, Points of Conflict.”

This significant volume takes up central aspects of sexuality in Judaism and provides a comprehensive insight on topics such as Rabbinic regulations and the history of sexuality in Judaism; how ultra-Orthodox women deal with the strict regulations relating to intimacy; sexuality in films and art; and the experience of a Jewish couple and sexual therapist. Accompanied by eighty images, this interdisciplinary overview informs and offers surprises.  Includes Dr. Michaelson’s essay, “The Eruption of Eros in Jewish Messianic Heresies.”

First published over ten years ago, The Queer Bible Commentary brings together the work of several scholars and pastors known for their interest in the areas of gender, sexuality and Biblical studies. Contributors draw on feminist, queer, deconstructionist, utopian theories, the social sciences and historical-critical discourses. The focus is both how reading from lesbian, gay, bisexual and/or transgender perspectives affect the reading and interpretation of biblical texts and how biblical texts have and do affect LGBTQ+ communities. This revised 2nd edition includes updated bibliographies and chapters taking into account the latest literature relating to queer interpretation of scripture. Includes Rabbi Dr. Michaelson’s commentary on the Book of Exodus.

Beside Still Waters: A Journey of Comfort and Renewal is a book for mourners, for those who will someday become mourners, and for those anticipating their own journey out of this life.  It offers Jewish liturgy both classical and contemporary for different stages along the mourner’s path.

This anthology engages with the growing complexity of what it means to be at once Jewish and to participate in secular legal systems as lawyers, judges, legal thinkers, civil rights advocates, and teachers. Includes Dr. Michaelson’s essay “Hating the Law for Christian Reasons: The Religious Roots of American Antinomianism.”

This collection of essays is a heartfelt tribute to Michael Bernard Kelly’s work and solidifies his legacy as one of Australia’s leading gay activists and religious commentators. Includes Jay Michaelson’s reflection, “A Gay Pilgrim’s Progress.”  

Inspired by the pioneering work of Jewish feminists, Andrew Ramer draws from traditional midrashim and homoerotic love poems from medieval Spain to craft stories that anchor queer lives in the three-thousand-year-old history of the Jewish people. Includes a forward by Rabbi Jay Michaelson.

Imagining the Jewish God (2016)

This book attempts to give voice to the diverse imaginings of the Jewish God, and offers these collected essays and poems as a living text meant to provoke a substantive and nourishing dialogue. The contributors to this volume are committed to this form of textual reasoning. Includes Dr. Michaelson’s essay “The Repersonalization of God: Monism and Theological Polymorphism in Zoharic and Hasidic Imagination.”

This wide-ranging anthology takes a close look at the breadth of human sexuality from a Jewish perspective. Features Jay Michaelson’s essay on “Queering Tshuvah.”

Eleven prominent authorities on climate change consider the legal, policy, and philosophical issues presented by geoengineering. The book asks: When, if ever, are decisions to embark on potentially risky climate modification projects justified? And who should authorize such projects and by what moral and legal right? Includes Jay Michaelson’s article, “Geoengineering and Climate Management: From Marginality to Inevitability.”

A diverse group of authors journey into the fringes of human consciousness, tackling psychic and paranormal phenomena, lucid dreaming, synchronistic encounters, and more. Collected from the online magazine Reality Sandwich, and featuring Jay’s essay on Buddhist absorption states, “The Jhanas.”

Queer Religion provides a systematic and detailed overview of the challenges and issues that the intersections of religion, same-sex desire, and gender variance have generated, both now and in the past. It focuses upon the development of these areas of overlap through modern religious history, LGBT liberation movements, and the emergence of queer theory. It features Dr. Michaelson’s scholarly essay “Queering Kabbalistic Gender Dimorphism.”

The first anthology of its kind, with poets representing several countries (the United States, Singapore, Korea, Australia, the United Kingdom, India, Malaysia, Japan and elsewhere), Collective Brightness gathers over 100 established and emerging contemporary LGBTIQ poets writing from and about various faiths, religions and spiritual traditions. Includes poetry by Jay Michaelson.

Includes Jay’s memoir-essay, “Loneliness and the Sanctuary of Spirit.”

Making Prayer Real is a no-holds-barred look at why so many of us find synagogue services and prayer at best difficult, and at worst, meaningless and boring—and how to make it more satisfying. Includes an essay and interview with Jay Michaelson.

Torah Queeries brings together some of the world’s leading rabbis, scholars, and writers to interpret the Torah through a “bent lens”. With commentaries on the fifty-four weekly Torah portions and six major Jewish holidays, the concise yet substantive writings collected here open up stimulating new insights and highlight previously neglected perspectives. Featuring three commentaries by Jay Michaelson.

Seeking to deepen the Jewish conversation about sexuality, The Passionate Torah brings together brilliant thinkers in an attempt to bridge the gap between the sacred and the sexual. Includes Jay’s essay “On the Religious Significance of Homosexuality, or Queering God, Torah, and Israel.”

Featuring work from 50 gay poets, readers will find herein a mix of established poets and exciting new voices, including Carl Phillips, Rane Arroyo, David Bergman, Timothy Liu, Jay Michaelson, Brad Gooch, Reginald Shepard, Jeff Mann, Steve Fellner, Jee Leong Koh, Steven Cordova, Jericho Brown, and many others.

Edited by Nathan Abrams, and featuring the essay “Boundaries and the Boundless: Homosexuality as Liminality” by Jay Michaelson

Edited by Daniel Pinchback and Ken Jordan; features the essay “Ayahuasca and Kabbalah” by Jay Michaelson.

Edited by Christine DiThomas, this volume features two visual gallery sections replete with diverse and engaging imagery by over sixty world-class artists, and a comprehensive section of writings and transcripts on the notion of end times. Featuring the poem “for the apocalypse will be infinitely silent” by Jay Michaelson.

Edited by Rabbi N. Rose, Jo Ellen Green Kaiser, and Margie Klein, Righteous Indignation gathers the voices of leading progressive Jewish social justice activists for the first time in one groundbreaking volume. Featuring “The Significance of Sex: Social Order & Post-Mythic Religion” by Jay Michaelson.

A finalist for Best LGBT Anthology for the Lambda Literary Awards, Charmed Lives offers readers a collection of over thirty short works of fiction and personal essays as an alternative to the stories that society often tells about gay men. Includes “The Verse” by Jay Michaelson.