“The Secret Is Not a Secret tells ten heretical tales of desire, framed in the ten luminous emanations, where the lines separating truth and heresy are blurred and inverted. Jay Michaelson has given us a work that sparkles with light while living in the shadows of the darkness that accompanies all light. It is a gift to all of us who struggle with the sacred while dwelling in spaces where the sacred refuses go.”—Shaul Magid, Professor of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College, and author of Piety and Rebellion: Essays in Hasidism and The Necessity of Exile

“This newest addition to the well Queer Yiddishkeit warms my heart and mind. Rabbi Michaelson's ten short stories are like a collaboration between queerness, Kabbalah, mysticism, rebellion, and a deeply Queer Judaism. This book might be fiction, but its awe-inspiring messages are real.”—Rabbi Abby C. Stein, author of Becoming Eve: My Journey from Ultra-Orthadox Rabbi to Transgender Woman

“Sacred and profane, erudite and engaging, queer and questioning, Jay Michaelson’s The Secret That Is Not a Secret challenges Jewish traditions and imagines its own sort of transcendence. These remarkable stories cleave to God, the flesh, and what it means to live in a world full of hidden secrets.”—Jonathan Papernick, author of The Ascent of Eli Israel, I Am My Beloveds, and Gallery of the Disappeared Men