MERISSA NATHAN GERSON is a writer a speaker, and a spiritual consultant. Her work focuses on grief and grieving, inherited trauma, sex and intimacy, and how these themes relate to religion, disability, and identity.
She was the intergenerational trauma consultant to Amazon's hit show, Transparent, and has writing featured in The New York Times, Playboy Magazine, The Atlantic, Elle.com, Tablet Magazine, Lilith Magazine, and beyond. After releasing a 2018 ELI Talk on consent and Talmud, she founded www.KenMeansYes.org to address the need for consent education in Jewish spaces.
Merissa lives, writes and works in Mt. Airy, Philadelphia where she is training to be a rabbi with the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College.
Courtesy of a selfie by Merissa Nathan Gerson. Boom.
EDUCATION
Master’s in Jewish Studies, Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, California, 2013
Master’s in Fine Arts in Writing and Poetics, Naropa University - Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, Boulder, Colorado, 2008
Bachelor of the Arts, American Culture & Women and Gender Studies, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, Missouri, 2004
CERTIFICATIONS
Certified prejudice reduction leader.
Certified safe sex educator and rape prevention worker.
Certified yoga teacher and mindfulness educator.